The future of Cyanogen and Chromecast updates don our best of the web biz this week

Every week, the tech-minded and culture-focused team at Newmind shares many interesting articles internally. Every so often, we like to share that value with you. Let the faves begin!

Cyanogen partners with Microsoft to integrate Bing, other MS services

A while back, Cyanogen announced they’d be teaming up with Microsoft for mobile development, and this article looks at the pros and cons of that deal—while it will be bringing MS Office to those phones, it also leaves Google Play features entirely out of the picture and greatly hinder most apps that current Cyanogen users depend on.

Chrome starts pushing Java off the web by disabling plugins

With the recent release of Chrome 42, we see Google pulling support from older plugins like Java and Silverlight. For the time being, there’s an option to reactivate the API that enables those plugins, but this gesture definitely illustrates Google’s interest to move away from 90s and early 00s web applications. Safari and Firefox still support these plugins natively.

Dashcast streams dashboard-style web pages to your Chromecast

Google Chrome can already send web pages to your Chromecast, but the content won’t refresh if you close the tab in your browser. This extension updates those pages for you! It’ll be a great addition to kiosks, tickers, and other static displays.

Google Will Still Support Chrome On Windows XP Until The End Of The Year

Microsoft may be done supporting Windows XP, but that hasn’t stopped many users from clinging onto the OS. Google had earlier announced that this month would be the end for their XP support, but they announced that they’d keep the lights on until the end of the year—”We want those people to have the option to use a browser that’s up-to-date and as safe as possible on an unsupported operating system.” If you’re still using Windows XP, please reevaluate that decision immediately—it’s a quick recipe to get hacked!