Back in July, Microsoft admitted that its goal of hitting one billion Windows 10 installations just three years after the launch of its latest OS wasn't going to happen. But this figure will eventually be reached - it just won't be in 2018. It's been announced that Windows 10 is running on 400 million active devices as of today, about 14 months after its release.

That figure is 100 million more than the 300 million installations recorded on May 5. At the end of March, Windows 10 was found on 207 million active devices (any desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, Surface Hubs, HoloLens devices, etc. that have been active in the last 30 days). Despite missing the billion installs mark, it's still the fastest-growing Windows platform in Microsoft's history.

As expected, growth has slowed down slightly since the free Windows upgrade offer ended in July. After Microsoft ended the deal - and its incredibly annoying nagware - the number of new users reportedly slowed from 30 million to 16.6 million per month. The past three months are also when PC sales are usually at their slowest.

Microsoft announced the figures at the opening day of the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, where it also revealed a new security feature for its Edge browser. Called Windows Defender Application Guard, it "uses virtualization-based security technology to protect against advanced attacks coming from the Internet."

The Application Guard will be able to isolate potentially malicious code in containers to keep it away from other system processes, making it much more difficult for attacks to be carried out against your machine. Exiting Microsoft Edge will wipe any malware in the memory. It'll arrive later this year in Insider builds of Windows, and for enterprise customers who've expressed an interest early next year. Check out more in the video below.

Graph credit: VentureBeat