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January 11
More Windows 10 Thoughts

Windows 10 has come out and I've been using it on knarvik, my home desktop computer since I got that machine, and I've had it on the Surface 3 since just after the release of Windows 10 "1511" in November.

The experiences on these machines are very different for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is just that they're different computers. Knarvik is a very fast computer with a quad-core i5 CPU, sixteen gigabytes of RAM, and a pretty good graphics processor. It's also a desktop, and nothing in it is too out of the ordinary, being "just" a normal business desktop of its time. Tampere, my Surface 3, on the other hand, is a Surface 3, which is Microsoft's own device, but it's not their high end one. It's using an Atom CPU, has 4 gigabytes of RAM and has reasonably slow eMMC storage.

On both computers, weird little interface quirks persist throughout the operating system. Sometimes, its weird errors, such as how in the old Internet Explorer application, Windows 10's new min/max/close buttons overlap with some other interface elements. Sometimes, it's just things I don't like yet.

As Microsoft starts standardizing the operating system, I can see how it's beneficial for the platform, but I don't necessarily agree with all of the decisions they're making. For example, despite being functionally similar (especially as somebody who argued that the Windows 8 start screen was more functional than the classic start menu) I question whether the standardization on really big context menus is the best. I am also still bothered by the fact that Edge has a smaller scrollbar than anything else on the system.

It's difficult to suggest that something like "context menu style" should be a configurable option, and I understand why they're big instead of small, but it's hard to accept in the context of the idea that Microsoft was supposed to be using Windows 10 to revitalize and re-prioritize the desktop. This is totally a personal thing. I even like the way it looks, but it feels like an empty promise and they're still trying to combine the desktop and tablet environments.

I am also still skeptical of the tablet environment in general. I have yet to try Windows 10 on any smaller tablets, but one of the things 10 loses in comparison to 8 is that even in "tablet mode" all applications have the title bar as well as the taskbar, which is used not as an always-available app switcher, but as a button bar for the Start button, Cortana, the app switcher, and some other system tray icons. It's a neat interface and if I were to run full-screen applications, I'd want to do it in that interface, but I do feel that it'll be an even bigger loss on small tablets where people using metro (and now UWP) applications lose out on some content space.

One of those UWP applications is Microsoft Edge, the new browser. The best I can say about Edge right now is that most of the time, it actually runs. Otherwise, it's a total pile. I want to like it, because it is clear that it's supposed to be the future of the platform, and because Internet Explorer had gotten so good over the years that I'd had hope that Edge could continue that.

Windows 10 promises to be more than just the next version of Windows. It's supposed to be an entire platform. The whole concept of the "UWP" is that it's an application for the Universal Windows Platform and as such, should be capable of running on any Windows 10 device, such as a desktop, a Surface tablet, an Xbox or a Lumia phone. It's a grand vision and it's going to take a while to get there.

The problem with the UWP programs that exist so far is that most of them are essentially tablet apps, upgraded from the old Metro platform. This isn't exactly a problem, but it has set a bad precedent for the concept that this is the future of the platform. In addition, many of these apps, such as the UWP versions of Microsoft Office are gimped on bigger computers, which is a really big vote of confidence for the platform as a means to get real work done.

One of the problems with the ever-present taskbar is that even in tablet mode, if you are using an application such as OneNote, even with the Surface Pen (on the desktop version, but there's a very good chance this happens in the UWP version as well) there's a good chance that you'll mistakenly switch to the next app, activate something on that ever-present taskbar, or just that yourh'e missing out on some room.

There are a few neat aspects to the UWP platform though, for example, the Settings app on Windows 10 can be scaled down:

It'll be interesting to watch UWP as a concept and the ecosystem of UWP applications develop over the next few years.

I like Edge as a successor to the old "Universal" version of Internet Explorer, but I also don't like it. I'm using it on my Surface 3, where it has no problems showing a few web pages at a time and the CPU is powerful enough to handle casual browsing. The biggest problem with it is that I have had poor luck with its handling of large numbers of tabs, both in terms of staying running when you're on a powerful desktop (something with like sixteen gigabytes of RAM where you expect your browser tabs to stay loaded) and in terms of actually handling the tabs.

In an ideal world, Edge would adopt something similar to what Safari has on the desktop, so that users on screens of all sizes can get to a quick overview of all tabs open on their devices. Universal Internet Explorer had a clever solution in the scrollable tab preview bar that would appear at the bottom of the window. Internet Explorer 8 through 11 on Windows 7 and newer will show a scrollable list of open tabs in the taskbar icon, for Internet Explorer, which Edge also can't do. Edge also doesn't recognize scrolling tabs with a mouse wheel or trackpad. It also doesn't allow you to drag the tab bar on a touchscreen.

Almost every other desktop browser lets you scroll through the tab bar, with the exception of Google Chrome, whose solution is to make tabs un-clickably small. This is hitting on a different issue with the design of web browsers, however. My first experiences with both wide-screen displays and with tabbed web browsing was with OmniWeb, whose tabs sit in a drawer that has its own scrollbar off to the left of the main window. The modern equivalent to OmniWeb (really, the spiritual successor to the classic Opera) may just be Vivaldi, which functionally works fine and even has side-tabs, but does not look like it belongs.

But, it's Windows 10, and so nothing looks like it belongs.

On the Surface, I've had weird little issues all over the place that are new with Windows 10. For example, the system will randomly forget about the keyboard. Sometimes it comes right back (after having offered to switch to tablet mode) and sometimes you'll need to detach and reattach the keyboard. This behavior isn't new to the Surface, but I hadn't seen it at all on my Surface 3 running Windows 8.

Windows 10 also changed the sleep behavior of Windows 10 – this is actually a lot better, it now comes out of sleep a lot faster, although I haven't measured if this is at the expense of battery life. Take it for what you will that my confidence in the Surface 3's battery is low enough that I've been carrying a small charger for a few months, and have been shopping for bigger ones, but I don't think this is specifically a Windows 10 issue.

Small graphical errors (such as the one I noted above) are things I hadn't seen in Windows before. It has always looked weird, just because in both Windows 8 and 10, applications are a mish-mash of different styles, but it hasn't specifically looked broken before.

The other thing I've heard a lot about, and potentially seen, is errors getting new updates. Windows 10 seems to hold off on fetching updates. I don't know if this is something it does under normal circumstances, but on both of my dad's computers as well as on my Surface 3, I've seen it simply stalls getting updates. In late December, neither of my dad's computers had fetched the 1511/10586 build yet (he upgraded almost immediately when 10240 was available) and the one of the systems produced errors every time we tried to update it. It turns out that it handles falling asleep very poorly and the next morning I discovered that my dad got up early and sat at that computer, wiggling the mouse every few minutes to get it to update. (I suspect that computer has other problems and I'm going to be bringing him a fresh hard disk before long.)

There's also the problem that prevents Windows 10 from being the OS I use on systems like eisbrecher and potentially superslab, which is that their graphics configurations cause problems for Windows 10. I know that that not only is the graphics on Eisbrecher unsupported, but that it works poorly. I haven't tested Windows 10 on superslab yet, I'm waiting to either buy or clear a hard disk to install it on. I don't know what will happen with my licensed applications such as Office and Visio 2013, Lightroom 5, and Acronis TrueImage Home 2014. Some of those applications might not be necessary any longer, but I do keep that system around and configured the way it is for some specific tasks.

I think that when it comes time to get some newer hardware, Windows 10 will have matured, and hardware support for computers that Windows 10 ships with will be much better.

Ultimately, I find Windows 10 to be perfectly usable. It's not as though this version makes any applications I use less stable, or as though I'm in a 2008/2009-like situation where suddenly "the other platform" is looking very attractive as a switching target. It has its problems, but the rapid update nature should fix some of them. Most of the problems I have with it on my Surface aren't with Windows 10 itself, but with IE and Edge, continued problems with display scaling, and returns of some of the annoying (but ultimately benign) things that were wrong with the original Surface RT and its detachable keyboards.

I don't love it yet though, and Microsoft's newly updated ideas for what a hybridized tablet and desktop environment should be like don't immediately click with me. Windows 8 felt like a very good tablet OS experience on top of a very good desktop OS. Windows 10 still feels as though it makes more compromises than either of those environments ever did for the sake of pleasing Windows XP and 7 users with the return of the start menu. In the ultimate of ironies, it appears that the new license agreement for Windows 10 makes it untenable for many of the people who are still intentionally using Windows XP and 7, for privacy reasons.

It'll be interesting to see how the next few years go for Windows 10. Quick iteration should mean that we see a lot of the rough edges ironed out without necessarily seeing massive sweeping changes that impact the whole thing enough to make users not want to change. I'm fine with the privacy implications of Windows, and in fact think that there's neater things Microsoft could be doing for people.

Hopefully the next major build contains noticeable improvements. It'll be interesting to see when Microsoft switches over from fixing the reversions in functionality from Windows 7 and 8 to actually building out new features and tools that make Windows unique and compelling. I don't think it's a problem that the best praise for Windows 10 I can muster is the fact that it won't be the way it is forever. That, coupled with the fact that it's realistically perfectly fine as an operating system is actually pretty high praise, and if Microsoft can keep up the pace of big upgrades, using Windows 10 over the long term will be not just passable, but exciting.

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