Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months.
In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes.
There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark.
Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local).
There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.
Talk is cheap. In actuality, it’s free.
Promises, promises, promises. I’ll believe it when I see it, though it’s refreshing to see a giant like Microsoft go so far as to admit “AI” in every single app down to the freaking text editor was a mistake. Maybe this will be a spark that wakes regular people up to the fact that “AI everywhere” was always going to be a gimmick and parlor trick designed to bleed them of their money and their common sense.
Unpopular opinion: The real problem with Windows isn’t so much the user experience (although that is also pretty miserable in Windows 11), it’s the mistaken belief that Windows can be effortlessly upgraded from one major version to another as if it’s frickin’ MacOS. No, it can’t. In fact, even those “mini-major” upgrades that Microsoft sends every 6 months can be pretty destabilising considering all the third-party OEM bloatware the average Windows PC ships with:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/18/2020255/new-windows-11-bug-breaks-samsung-pcs-blocking-access-to-c-drive
And don’t get me started about that one time my sister’s Asus Zenbook upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and lost the WiFi drivers (for those wondering, the solution was to send my sister the latest drivers via email, her downloading them on her phone, and copying them to the laptop via USB). And yes, that was with the stock Windows installation.
There is a reason Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer kept upgrades as an “at your own risk” process, aka something you had to actively seek out as a user. Because anything else is a recipe for disaster at the hands of novice users.
At this point, Microsoft has the following two choices:
– Heavily restrict its OEM licensing program, supporting only 20-30 fixed hardware configurations for new PCs and banning OEM bloatware completely
– Make money by selling Windows 10 ESUs ’till 2032
But of course, we know what will happen: They will try to have their cake and eat it too (please OEMs and compete with MacOS at the same time), and with the new Macbook Neo on store shelves, this will cost them.