With Skype now a new and seemingly happy family member of Microsoft, the Internet phone service wasted no time in releasing a new update for the Windows version of its software. As announced on Skype's official blog, Skype has released new updates for both the 5.5 and 5.6 versions for Windows. The big change is that the software no longer offers any third party tools or offers from one of Microsoft's biggest rivals Google, namely Google's popular web browser tool bar. It's certainly understandable that Microsoft doesn't want to offer any of Google's products in its newly acquired software.
In addition to the removal of Google's software bundle, the new version of Skype fixes a couple of minor bugs, including fixing a memory leak in Skype's Firefox plugin and fixing an issue that was causing Skype to crash while running the developer's preview version of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system.
While Microsoft may be the new owners of Skype, for a tidy price of $8.5 billion, the company has already pledged to develop and add new features to the software for other operating systems and platforms, including the Mac OS, iOS 5 and Google's Android operating system. Microsoft will also likely bundle Skype in many of its current and upcoming projects including its Xbox 360 console and its Windows Phone mobile operating system. Skype will also most certainly be developed to work on more hardware devices such as phone headsets and more.
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