The company has rolled out the advance notification for this month’s update cycle

Aug 8, 2014 05:30 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just released this month’s advance notification for the upcoming Update Tuesday, revealing that it’s going to ship a total of nine security updates, two of which are rated as critical.

Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer are both getting critical security updates, the company says, as it’s trying to fix remote code execution issues that would allow an attacker to run malicious code on a vulnerable computer.

The other seven updates are all flagged as important and are supposed to address vulnerabilities found in Microsoft Office, SQL Server, Server software, and .NET framework.

At the same time, the company will also introduce a new version of the well-known Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, plus a bunch of other non-security updates, most of which are very likely to be addressed to Windows users.

Last but not least, the company is also introducing the new Windows 8.1 August Update, which will bring a number of improvements to the modern platform, including Miracast support.

Also on Tuesday, Microsoft will update Internet Explorer installations to block old ActiveX controls, including outdated version of Java that could pose a threat to Windows users. All Internet Explorer versions will get this update, the company says, with the list to include in the beginning only old Java builds.

Microsoft also appears to be using a different name for Patch Tuesday, as a recent announcement rolled out by the company has referred to the monthly patch rollout as “Update Tuesday.”

Patch Tuesday was never an official name, but Microsoft itself adopted and used it with several occasions.

“Rather than waiting for months and bundling together a bunch of improvements into a larger update as we did for the Windows 8.1 Update, customers can expect that we’ll use our already existing monthly update process to deliver more frequent improvements along with the security updates normally provided as part of Update Tuesday,” the company said in a statement.

As far as Windows 8.1 August Update is concerned, there’s nothing too exciting in this pack, even though it was initially rumored that it could bring a Start menu and even options to run Metro apps on the desktop in separate windows.

Now it appears that Microsoft has switched the focus to Windows 9 entirely, so the next big OS release will bring quite a lot of changes, including the two aforementioned options, plus multiple desktops, a preview version of Cortana, and Internet Explorer 12.