December 10, 2025

Windows Weekly 962: Peak Bloat

2 hours 43 minutes

December 2025's Patch Tuesday brought major shifts, but the real action is in Microsoft's pricing, privacy battles, and the arms race to control AI-enabled browsers. Plus, Paul recommends Tiny11 Builder for a clean install, or Win11Debloat for an existing install. Then, Rufus to create installation media without the forced Microsoft account (MSA) sign-in or hardware requirement checks. Use MSEdgeDirect to use the default web browser for stories from Widgets, web-based search results, etc. And ExplorerPatcher can fix the performance and reliability issues in File Explorer.

It's the final Patch Tuesday of 2025

Major dark mode updates (with a fix for the "flashbang" problem)

AI Agent in Settings, Click to Do, Windows Studio Effects, and Search improvements for Copilot+ PCs

Many other improvements: FSE, Share, Settings, Widgets, more

More Windows 11

New 25H2 preview build on Beta/Dev adds MCP public preview, Quick Machine Recovery auto-enabled, Unified Update Orchestration Platform, Windows MIDI services

Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 is getting a lot more expensive in mid-2026. You didn't think all those free AI updates were free, did you?

Paul has been talking about "programmatic" apps and services because he wasn't sure of a term for this type of interaction. But there is a term for this: Semantic. As in semantic web. And there you go

Microsoft one of 1,000 companies partnering on Agentic AI Foundation because you're getting agents whether they work or not

Gartner says NO to AI web browsers

The New York Times is suing Perplexity for all the obvious reasons

After a big win in the legal battle with OpenAI

Opera for Android gets a big AI update

Google Workspace Studio brings code-free agent creation to business users - automation is a solid AI use case

Xbox

Xbox Series X|S notably absent during Black Friday sales

Call of Duty won't repeat the mistakes of the past anymore since it didn't work out twice now

MS Flight Simulator 2024 is now available on PS5

Red Dead Redemption comes to mobile for the first time, free with a Netflix account

Tips & Picks

Tip and app(s) of the week: De-enshittify Windows 11

RunAs Radio this week: Incident Management and the Crowdstrike Event with Liam Westley

Brown liquor pick of the week: Old Farm Pennsylvania Straight Rye Whiskey

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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