Windows Blog

Sure. The Insider blog tends to be pretty up-to-date: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/ They seem to be focused on performance improvements because of the MacBook Neo pressure and RAM crisis, but right now, I'm mostly excited for the right-click menu and taskbar improvements. You can already do this with third-party software, but it's not the best experience unfortunately.

Exactly. I mean they literally, in this same release[0], just turned WIN+R (Run) from a classic FAST Win32 UI into a modern slow monstrosity. Who was this for? I use WIN+R instead of the Start Menu Search/PowerToy's Alt+Space because it is INSTANT and 100% CONSISTENT. You just made my instant thing slower, great, thanks, mission accomplished! Feels wildly out of touch, to almost a comical degree. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/01/announcing-new-bu…

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/10/16/making-every-wi… Apple will follow along

I just love how Win32 has its own set of system calls as a subsystem separate from the main NT kernel. Imagine making syscalls to control X11 or wayland window/gui. These days I think MS wants you to use WinRT/UWP stuff: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/11/28/standard-c-windo…

Performance. Alex Russell, formerly of Google and now the product owner of Microsoft Edge loves to rant about it. His latest rant is how Edge has significantly improved the performance of some of its UI features by moving off React [0]. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2024/05/28/an-even-faster-microsof…

> Windows RT can't run Win32 and ARM can't run x86, at least not without significant caveats; people can't use Windows computers like that to Get Stuff Done(tm). Whilst what you say is true for Windows RT, Windows 11 on ARM64 absolutely can run x86 and x64 software [0]. Kernel mode software needs to be built for ARM64 but most user mode software should just work. For what it’s worth x86 emulation predates Apple’s Rosetta 2, and x64 emulation was made available at about the same time [1]. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/overview#support-for-exi… [1] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introducing-x64-e…

Microsoft provides a tool that allows you to see all telemetry that’s captured https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/01/24/microsoft-intro… I don’t work for microsoft anymore but I laugh at these sorts of suggestions. I don’t know much about bing but I do know a decent bit about the telemetry pipeline and the idea of an anti government meme detection is ludicrous at best.

Will they get news sources to cooperate? Apple News is great, but they don't have top content anymore. NyTimes is a specific example that I used to be able to read, but can't without paying now. It's like how streaming started out, but now it's a bunch of add on fees. Sounds like this starts with only MSN? https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/09/07/the-content-you…

Hm, I may have been wrong. [1] suggest that it was a Qt app on Linux at one point, but this source is old, and more recent ones suggest that they now use Electron. I don't actually use Spotify, so I'm not sure - perhaps not the best example. The point I wanted to make was that you can use Qt to make "sexy" modern feeling apps, if that's a priority for you, it just takes work. Personally, I think something like VLC is a better example of a high quality app, even if the UI isn't flashy, but I guess people today want shiny stuff more than good reliable stuff. [1] https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2011/03/15/10-qt-use-cases-you-didnt…

Edge Insider Channel versions offer sleeping tabs functionality. I set mine to go to sleep after 5 minutes, works great. >Using sleeping tabs on Microsoft Edge typically reduces memory usage by 32% on average. It also increases your battery life as a sleeping tab uses 37% less CPU on average than a non-sleeping tab. Although individual device performance varies depending on configuration and usage, we’ve heard from users that this decrease in resource and battery usage has improved their browsing experience. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs-beta-perf…

Worth mentioning Windows 10X -- seems like it's coming eventually. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/10/02/introducing-win…

MS and Google have already said so. Flash will be blocked from loading in every version of Chrome next month, and the next version of Chrome to ship will remove all Flash support entirely from the codebase. Chromium-based Edge will follow suit. https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removing-flash-m…

Obviously it would be of great historic interest, but as a living software, just no. Go read this: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/19/modernizing-dom-tree-mi… IE implemented DOM without using tree. No, really. Up to 2017. After reading the article, all my questions why IE was so buggy evaporated and replaced by how could IE work at all. MSVC up to 2015 also didn't create AST. Unbelievable, I know. The question is not why MSVC's C++ support was so buggy; the real question is how could MSVC implement C++ at all. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rejuvenating-the-microsoft-cc-c… After learning about IE and MSVC, I gained respect for Microsoft developers and disdain for Microsoft. Tightrope walking is amazing display of skill. Letting your employees to commute by tightrope walking for years is amazing display of stupidity.

> ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new-microsoft… says: > If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring. I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.

Edge is no longer a purely Microsoft product, it's now based on Chrome(Chromium) [0], or will be soon, I haven't followed this closely. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-…

I have found one working enterprise use case. UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such. But I agree, selling UWP apps to businesses for traditional desktop use is ridiculously difficult. > I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF. For a long time, UWP was the only way to get a working WebView (one based off of Edge instead of IE). But I think they fixed that and backported Edge to WPF a few months ago. (EDIT: they did kind of fix that - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webview-winforms… )

A couple of great resources on the improvements in the latest Windows 10 release are this blog post: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/10/24/high-dpi-scaling-imp… and this Channel 9 video: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Windows/Windows-Developer-Day-Creator…

Get the latest Windows Insider Preview (or wait for the official Creator Update; it's probably very close, the "preview" watermark is gone in Insider, so the current build looks like a release candidate). Once you have it set up, look for "Mixed Reality Portal" in the Start menu. It will guide you through the setup, starting with a check that you have compatible hardware. For a developer kit, I guess you follow the links to sign up at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/03/01/windows-mixed-r… and pray...

What functionality is missing from Edge? I don't use it, but I've been following with a lot of enthusiasm as Edge supports all kinds of 'un-Microsoft' stuff these days like WebM: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/04/18/webm-vp9-and-opus-suppo… Comparing the last version of IE, the latest Edge and, the latest Chrome: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/ie-11/edge-12/edge-15/chrome-52.… it looks like it's catching up and implementing a lot of important APIs. As far as I know, Edge is a little slow to adopt new stuff, perhaps because they're afraid of implementing something and having everyone scream "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!" at them.

> As an aside I always kind of wondered why all browsers started including developer tools by default as they are not of use to 99.9% of users. That percentage is actually pretty close to correct. For that reason and user studies of regular users Edge has already turned off their DevTools by default ( https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/11/22/balancing-user-friendli… ). Firefox is currently pursuing moving the DevTools out of the browser and will likely use a similar system to Edge / Safari for activating them. Going the extension route does have complexity drawbacks but being able to ship fixes faster, to a wider audience will be a greater benefit. Additionally as all browsers adopt WebExtensions this could mean that any Firefox panel developed as a WebExtension will be available for use within Chrome or Edge.

This looks really great. Baking in support for test automation seems like a no-brainer and a welcome step forward for web development. Are any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support? I saw this Microsoft blog [1] on Edge support of WebDriver, but it's not clear to me what approach they have taken (you still need to download a separate server for instance). Only one Safari browser instance can be running at any given time, and only one WebDriver session can be attached to the browser instance at a time. One downside to this approach is that it limits the ability to parallelize tests on a single machine for efficiency purposes. 1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing-automated-test…

I used to work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment and found what worked best for me was to run Linux via Vagrant, and use MobaXterm (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/) for ssh, as it has an X server. That's how I used to use RubyMine and Geany. EDIT: There's also interesting stuff coming soon with Ubuntu/Bash on Windows https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-o…

It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/31279980 [2]: http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-more-interope…

It's actually a UX improvement: a lead designer at Microsoft talked about how "people aren't squares" in a recent blog post [1]. I'm not sure it looks that great, but once you know the logic behind it it's a lot more interesting. [1]: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/windows-10-design-…

So do you have to make a "Microsoft account" and log in to their app store just to download something that was for previous versions a Service Pack, reachable from the web? What happens with the existing local accounts then, anybody tried? I've found only this: http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/17/… "Brandon LeBlanc: We're not releasing the ISO images to folks who don't have MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. Best way for everyone else is to update through the Windows Store."

Official press release with amusing promo video: http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/10/02/hover-bringing-a-c…

FWIW: if I go to http://sounds.beatport.com/publisher/sounds-to-sample/19417, the play buttons produce sounds. That is on an iPad, which denitely doesn't have Flash. => contact them to have them fix/adjust their site for Windows Phone 8 and help us make Flash deader (yes, there is no honor in kicking a man who is down, but sometimes it just is the best for both parties involved) http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/10/17/gett… may be a helpful link for them.

I can only speculate of course, but I'd suspect a far simpler reason, driving subscriptions. Even limited use for video editing can fill up the free 5GB tier very quickly and if iClouds rather aggressive nudges to upgrade and their success amongst the people around me are anything to go by, there is a lot of potential in getting people to subscribe for a few bucks. The scenario I envision is basically, a user just edits a few 4k files together and starts approaching the 5GB limit. Because OneDrive is also by default used for other things such as documents and even the desktop nowadays, they soon thereafter hit the 5GB limit and start being inundated with offers to upgrade to the 100GB tier. "Just 1,99 per month, nothing major, barely felt", at least that's the pitch. Maybe they acquiesce, maybe they ignore it. That's the play I'd wager. And if enough people resist, maybe in an upcoming update a full OneDrive could lead to (artificially) degraded functionality. Not in the sense of local storage being impossible, just slightly less convenient over direct OneDrive. Say what you want about the iCloud nagging (I have and will continue complaining about that as well), at least it isn't required to have free iCloud storage to locally edit ones videos with iMovie. In any case, forcing OneDrive for a video editor (arguably one of the highest storage requirement programs most people will ever use at the moment) is anti-consumer and showcases how little any commitment [0] by them…

The Windows 11 default context menu uses a newer API (IExplorerCommand) compared the older method which involved screwing around with the registry, and having everything play nice. Here's a MS blog post explaining why they want to move to IExplorerCommand: https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-context-menu-a… Frankly, this just follows all the same problems that MS has had with since after W7. Their own APIs have a lot of warts and problems, but MS has not been able or willing to follow through on the migration required to actually move to a whole new API. This has shown up in their Windows GUI frameworks, it's the exact same problem with the Control Panel vs Settings, and here it is again. I can sympathize with many of the stated goals/benefits, and I can understand the technical difficulties with transparently porting registry craziness into their new framework, and infact I applaud that their fallback is "perfect" - it is just the old context menu. I just wish there was a setting toggle to set the default.

Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare. Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely: - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-the-prompt-… Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in. I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.