These Apps May Not Be Essential in the Era of Windows 11

Microsoft has released the latest generation of Windows 11, and while we are amazed at how much the system interface has changed, we also have to feel the impact of the wave of the times.

Windows has followed the trend by introducing the more advanced WinUI and trying to improve the system features and change the application ecosystem. In the new era of the Internet, even a big ship like Windows has to turn around, not to mention all the software it carries.

Looking back, many of the software that were once popular have slowly faded out of history with the previous wave, and these classic products are less and less mentioned. In the Win11 era, what software has ushered in the fate of the decline? Let's talk about this topic today.

Anti-virus software

As long as you use the computer for some years, you will always hear the name of some antivirus software, such as "small red umbrella", "AVG", "Avast", "Kaspersky" and so on.

However, these years, the boom of antivirus software seems to have receded, the antivirus market not only did not set off any new waves, but also seems to be dwindling. From Google trends, the popularity of antivirus software has been declining since 2012.

To this day, many users will not even install any antivirus software on their own. The reason for this may be that over the years, the security environment for personal systems has changed radically.

First of all, antivirus software ushered in the strongest competitor - Microsoft. MSE/Defender pre-installed in the system is not only convenient and free, its business capabilities have also developed to a good level. In professional antivirus reviews such as AVTEST, the performance has been among the top for many years.

In the era of Win11, Defender has already become pre-installed on the system. Microsoft is planning to make Defender a cross-platform product to further increase its strength. The software is a highly technical product, who can understand the code of Windows better than Microsoft? Other antivirus software wants to compete with Microsoft, the difficulty is not generally large.

The second, the security of the operating system itself has been greatly improved. Windows 9X and even XP era, the code can easily modify the operating system kernel, and after Vista, due to the user layer and the kernel isolation of the architecture, malicious code wants to make it much more difficult to do good. To Win11, it is the default enable virtualization isolated kernel, and the use of TPM chip to carry out hardware-level encryption, antivirus can play a role, has long been less significant than before.

In addition, the mobile Internet does not bring a new market for antivirus. Whether it is iOS or Android, there is a strict installation package management mechanism, from the principle that they do not need to use any anti-soft, Apple is prohibited to call themselves anti-soft products on the App Store, iOS from the mechanism to eliminate most of the unknown code running opportunities, can run with the code of the vulnerability (such as jailbreaking), but also by no means anti-soft can block. The role of anti-software in the mobile platform is to identify whether an App is a phishing counterfeit or not, a feature that many Android systems come with. In the emerging market is not profitable, no wonder the business of antivirus is becoming increasingly difficult to do.

There is no doubt that antivirus software has gone down the drain. Perhaps in some use environments, such as identifying phishing sites, using older systems still useful, but in the new use environment represented by Win11, it has long been less useful than before. The decline of anti-software may be a bad thing for security vendors, but objectively it also shows that the user environment is becoming more and more secure over the years, and we should be happy about that.

Self-developed kernel browser

I wonder if people still pay attention to what kind of browser they use? At least in the past, this was an issue worth exploring. Many veteran Internet users are also veteran browser players, but in recent years there have been fewer and fewer products worth playing with -- more and more browsers are switching from home-grown kernels to Chrome with a different look.

Windows once made IE the de facto standard for Web development compatibility, but in Windows 11, even the system's own Edge browser uses the Chromium kernel. Browsers are a huge undertaking, and many of the best engineers in the world have worked hard to develop browser kernels that are now untouched. Why are self-developed browsers going down the drain and everyone is looking to Chromium? This is inseparable from the background of the times and Google's business strategy.

In the era of mobile Internet, mobile platforms account for most of the traffic, and Android is the main carrier of mobile Internet traffic; the WebView used in Android is the same source as Chromium, which makes a lot of web pages tend to be optimized for Chromium.

In other words, Chromium compatibility has become the de facto industry standard, and browsers with their own engines are struggling more and more than those using the Chromium kernel. Chromium is an open-source project, and the years of development and maintenance by the open-source community have made it extremely mature -- especially when compared to newer projects like Edge, where costs are low and problems are few. At the same time, Chromium's own product is very powerful. It supports extensions and promotes multithreading, and its performance and stability are both impressive.

It is understandable that browsers such as Opera and Edge switched to Chromium because of the unattractive nature of their self-developed engines.

Nowadays, the only browsers that people are still familiar with and that insist on using their own engines are Firefox and Safari. Microsoft used to make IE the desktop web standard with Windows, and Google used Chromium for Android, but with the release of Win11, will Microsoft be able to make a difference in the mobile market and take back the web standard? We'll see.

Disk organizer

When it comes to the necessary installation software, the optimization tools that can organize the disk are definitely among them. After all, back then, if you didn't defragment your disk every once in a while, your computer would lag and affect normal use.

Now that Win11 has arrived, disk organization seems to have waved goodbye to the user, a large part of the user, has not installed this type of software on the computer, why? This is closely related to the development of hardware and software.

Let's start with the hardware level. From the Win10 era, SSDs have gradually replaced HDDs and become the mainstream system carrier. In the HDD era, data is stored in the sectors of the disk, the small data generated by the system operation will be scattered across the disk, the physical location of these data is not continuous, but in the actual use of the scenario requires continuous reading, which makes the HDD head between the various sectors tired of running. This is where the optimization tools and even the system's own disk finishing function are especially important, which can rearrange small data in contiguous sectors and significantly improve reading efficiency.

SSDs do not have the hassle and need for this, as they do not have disks and sectors, nor mechanical removable heads, and data is read directly from the NAND to the operating system, making the disk organization process designed for HDDs meaningless for SSDs. Thanks to the different hardware base, SSDs are hundreds of times more efficient at reading small files than HDDs, making for a dramatically different experience.

On the software side, the data algorithms that SSD hosts can carry are more complex than those of HDDs, making it possible to automate and optimize much of the data. For example, SSD masters often support balanced wear algorithms that write data as evenly as possible to each Block, ensuring that the NAND blocks age evenly; SSD masters support garbage collection GC and Trim, which can automatically transfer old data before new data is written and remove useless data in a timely manner... ... These algorithms are done automatically without human intervention.

Microsoft has been optimizing SSDs since Win7, introducing the new WinFS system and supporting features such as Trim; in Win10 and now Win11, Microsoft has made the operating system's I/O algorithm more compatible with SSDs, so SSDs are essential to get the best system experience. In the Win11 era, SSDs have become mainstream and people no longer need to manually run disk organizers.

Nowadays, when people mention system optimization, they tend to associate it with software junk file cleaning, and there is less need for disk defragmentation. The decline of such tools has also witnessed the evolution of hardware development.

RSS readers

A few years ago, RSS readers were very popular, as long as a website supported RSS and you subscribed to it, it would be pushed to you as soon as the website updated its content. With RSS readers, you could subscribe to many sites at once, syndicate their content, and read everything you were interested in without having to run around. This was so convenient that RSS was considered by some to be the future of Internet reading -- instead of going to all kinds of sites, you could just subscribe to RSS feeds!

However, such a convenient method has now become a cold skill. In Win11, the system certainly comes with a widget that pushes information and aggregates news from various sources, but RSS is no longer a familiar name.

The decline of RSS readers may lie in the barriers to entry and the failure to find a viable business model.

For many people, finding a website's RSS feed and adding it to the RSS reader is a huge undertaking; secondly, the content of RSS is incomplete, some websites do not provide RSS, some websites only provide article headers to RSS, and some elements such as audio and video embedded in web pages, RSS may not be able to crawl; there is also the lack of interactive elements of RSS, pushing things to you basically This is not very consistent with the spirit of Web 2.0, where everyone is a content producer.

Second, people have never found a way to use RSS readers to make a steady profit -- even Google can't do it. When Google announced in 2013 that it was shutting down its most famous and best RSS reader, Google Reader, it seemed to signal the future of RSS, whose core function was subscription, but in a pure RSS reader, the reader was the channel, the RSS was the content, and the reader had no control over the traffic generated by RSS.

The prevalence of social media today has also brought a huge impact on RSS readers. After all, if you follow a blogger or subscribe to a public website, it is similar to subscribing to RSS, which has a stronger social aspect, which can bring a constant flow of traffic under the control of the operator. In this way, it seems logical that RSS is being turned away from the general public.

However, although RSS is niche, it will not be completely eliminated for the foreseeable future. After all, RSS as a standard is actually quite in line with the open spirit of the Internet, and does not require any cost burden, you can use. In addition, it is known that Facebook's friends' news is based on RSS subscriptions to push, and if more ways of applying RSS can be discovered in the future, RSS may also return to people's eyes in more positions.

Summary

As the bridgehead of Microsoft in the new era, Win11 has ushered in a huge change. As a strong support for Microsoft's ecology, Windows software has also been iterating for a long time, and while new software has emerged, there are also many classic software gradually fallen. The tide of mobile Internet is fiercer than ever before, can Win11 continue the glory of its predecessors? We'll see.