Windows 10 News & Reviews

Some Sun Valley details:

New report details the possible changes coming with Windows 10's Sun Valley update - Neowin

(Courtesy of NeoWin site)

 

A moment of silence for Windows 8.1's Internet Explorer. RIP.

 

In that regard I might even like Firefox now more for touchscreens since it has smooth zoom now for touch. I just tested it and swiping seems to work again as well as the OSK popping up out it self (I remember Firefox had issues with swiping earlier on). I think I am gonna switch again back to Firefox on my tablet.

 

That’s neat to hear about Firefox. I left for a lot of those reasons. It was pretty chunky for touch usage.

 

Those changes are intriguing but there is still deafening silence from MS about how/if they are going to address the still unpredictable update process.

So first of all there is the caveat, that I work primarily on the support side of things, so I'm certain I see more of this than the average user.

However, we have a customer that is an engineering customer that has a significant deployment of dell precision laptops. They are also for all intents and purposes a virtual company that is field based and they only have a very small physical office.

Yesterday, when the users got notification that there were updates to install, the majority because the company encourages them to stay current because of their business deals a lot with government and high security customers, went ahead and installed the updates.

But because there were chipset and NIC updates as well, upon reboot they got messages that their copies of windows weren't activated.

This is NOT a new thing. What happened is that Windows anti-piracy "feature" was triggered because it determined it was running on an unlicensed machine.

So thus a flurry of support calls to their offices to deal with this.

Again , I want to emphasize this is not new. Anyone that has built their own system and/or gamers that swap out video and network cards have all experienced this.

And before you say "well they should have know better and not updated..." that simply doesn't wash as the need to be secure is paramount for the customers they work with.

TLDR: At some point it was likely a good idea that various hardware patches and drivers got bundled in with Windows updates, but now I'm of the opinion that it's become counterproductive again. And yes I know that OEM companies haven't always been the best in getting updates out, but that is a problem MS could address by making stricter requirements on their OEM partners. And realistically there are far fewer of them than there was say 15 years ago, when MS started doing this.

Again my personal opinion/rant so take as such

 

Yeah Firefox is doing something smart in that they are trying as much as possible to merge both code base and UI across all platforms.

Too bad that Chrome has become so overwhelmingly dominant in the Web app space such that it's the only browser that many smaller companies will even support/qualify.

 

And while we're at it, some Windows 10X leaks:

Windows 10X build “leaks,” providing what could be a near-final look at the single-screen version of the OS » OnMSFT.com

(Courtesy of OnMSFT site)

 

And...

Windows 10X is now Microsoft’s true answer to Chrome OS - The Verge

(Courtesy of WindowsCentral site)

 

I'm not fully buying that. I think that is where MS is going to start, but I think it's just that. Almost the reverse of what they did with Windows NT where the NT kernel became 'the kernel" for Windows.

I think they are just starting from the opposite direction this time which also has the benefits of lowering expectations, and possibly allowing them to jettison legacy items too.

 

, whatever they are doing I hope they continue doing it. Touch support was abysmal when I switched to (old) Edge at the time, its ok now (still some clumsiness in showing copy/paste options but otherwise seems to work well and GestureSign works on it in contrary to Edge Chromium, so I can use a gesture to toggle fullscreen mode ).