I have been running the technical previews since the very start and I have to say I am quite surprised at the July 29th release date. Even today's builds are riddled with problems. They have a lot of work to do if they really think it will be consumer ready by the end of July.
Looks like you and I hit a nerve here on HN. You are right though. Microsoft will be shipping Windows 10 with an incomplete version of their new Edge browser with the promise of adding critical features such as extensions in the future. Basically Windows 10 won't really be feature complete RTM for another 6 months. Even if Microsoft want to pretend it is ready now.
Edit: To clarify the "hit a nerve" bit, when I wrote this my post and agildehaus's were both down voted.
In some ways yes it is the same. However Photos isn't exactly the most important piece of software that comes with your OS.
Microsoft are trying to change how people think of their web browser. Edge is very important yet they are launching it without one of the biggest features needed in a modern browser, extension support.
But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions?
In 2013, this article[1] gave numbers of anywhere from 9% to 22% of users blocking ads, which requires an extension AFAIK. So, "yes". Even if those numbers are exaggerated due to skewed measurements, I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than 1%.
Edge supports Flash already, so if that's all that 90% of people use, it won't be a problem. And it's typically categorized as a "plug-in" rather than an extension, so I wouldn't lump it in with the extension functionality.
Not sure if it has Silverlight, but since we aren't streaming the 2008 Olympics and Netflix doesn't need it anymore I'm not terribly worried.
Just to clarify. MS said users of win 7 & 8 will be able to upgrade for free to win 10 within a year.
I believe I read somewhere that this will be MS's last release #. It will be a rolling release from here on out. I have not seen details on how they monetize that unless they switch to Apple's HW model.
Microsoft has stated that most of the money they make from Windows is from selling licenses to hardware partners. Of course, they are also starting to move into an Apple-like hardware model (though of course they still allow third parties to make hardware).
I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. As someone that always builds his own comoputers I jumped on the $29.99 Windows 7 deal which they offered the first 6 months and $39.99 for Windows 8 which was good for the first three months (Off the top of my head not needed to be accurate for arguement sake)
It's free for a year to upgrade and than back to business as usual.
They sell computers and mobile phones of their own design tailored for their own OS. The only difference is that they allow third party hardware and Apple doesn't.
> I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
I agree.
> After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way.
This doesn't seem to be consistent with their stated goals and the direction they've been moving in. The idea is that Windows 10 is the last numbered version of Windows, after that it will be evergreen. What upgrades are there to sell?
This is their chosen strategy though, that as of Windows 10 there will no longer be full major Windows versions. Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes.
From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.
Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes.
I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list.
While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be mediocre-to-disastrous from the user's point of view so far. For business users, it's also painful from an internal support point of view, for much the same reasons. And as you mentioned, for an OS or other platform software, anyone developing other software that runs on top of it also faces problems.
About the only thing this kind of constantly updating deployment model has been good for is getting security and stability patches out faster. This is beneficial, but that benefit is tempered by the "just ship junk and patch it later" philosophy that has become widespread at the same time. Many of those patches simply shouldn't ever have been necessary in the first place, but new releases are now routinely of such poor quality that many people just don't bother, and advice to wait until SP1 or the equivalent is common.
If I were Microsoft, I think I'd want my new flagship OS to be the stable, reliable, trustworthy antidote to Apple's broken-within-a-week operating systems[1], not something with the same reputation for constantly tweaking things as Chrome/Firefox, on-line SaaS apps, and the like.
[1] For legal reasons, I would like to point out that not all Apple operating systems break within a week. In fact, the fastest I have seen a mainstream Apple device break in practice was approximately an hour after purchase, when iOS updated on a mobile device almost immediately, leaving the device so much worse than what the purchaser had previously tried out and thought they were buying that they took it straight back to the shop and demanded a full refund.
Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now. Big Win10 feature changes will likely come in a service pack form or similar, with security fixes and minor updates using the same model they always have.
A business will typically test and verify updates before pushing then out to their employees.
Businesses which allow its users to perform updates directly from Microsoft already face the issues you describe. (Many updates can and have caused issues. Especially the occasional broken patch that gets rolled back shortly after release).
I can certainly see this being an issue for support companies. On the other hand, they will likely still have some form of versioning to base their support on. "Sir, please do XXX. You should see something saying Windows 10 Service Pack and then a number. Can you please tell me what that number is?"
Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now.
Sure, but someone still has to test each update as it applies to each critical system or widely used standard PC configuration before giving the OK to roll it out across the organisation. If MS moved to releasing non-essential updates in an ad-hoc fashion, it seems inevitable that the result would be either a scheduling and resource management headache for corporate IT departments or (perhaps more likely) a general policy of not deploying non-essential updates at all by default in large organisations because the hassle of keeping up isn't justified. Corporate IT have enough to worry about already without someone potentially moving the goalposts on a daily basis.
I still don't see how what you are describing is any more or less of a headache than supporting Windows XP a decade after the first release.. it's still rolling updates, just with less intensive UI changes over that period.
The same goes for companies supporting Windows 7 today... they're using their own base, with cherry picked updates. It seems to me, that this would be easier to manage, than keeping up with rolling from xp/7/8/8.x etc.
I would be surprised if they would make such a gamble. The last thing they can afford is another PR disaster with Windows 10.
Right now, there is very little incentive for a user to move on from Windows 7 on an existing machine, particularly if it is not touch enabled. Now imagine if they hear that Windows 10 is riddled with bugs and doesn't work.
I prefer Win 8.1 to 7 any day. I spend 99.9% of my time in desktop mode and it's fine. I prefer it!
EDIT: I don't have many/any ongoing issues with bugs, and I even use Visual Studio CTP/RC on a day to day basis, without any major issues.
Microsoft do software _really_ well. The crap they have to get right on an ongoing basis is nothing compared to Google and Facebook, we should give them some credit.
It may not be perfect at this very moment, but it will get more polished as time goes on. It has to.
The carrot they're dangling is a free upgrade, so think I might take this gamble. I'm not a penny pincher, but even so I cringe at the thought of paying for operating system upgrades.
This opportunity won't last forever, so I'll start with laptops and work my way up.
But I strongly suspect after a year Microsoft will extend the upgrade indefinitely. The whole year limit only exists to accelerate Windows 10 upgrades (to add urgency to it).
It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to end the free upgrade program after that point. They've already sacrificed most of the private licence revenue by the majority of the people buying them already upgrading, so the remaining trickle after the year won't be significant.
But I might be wrong. They did end the Windows 8 $25 upgrade after a year for real. So we'll have to wait and see.
But why is a free upgrade a good thing? What do I get by upgrading?
To a power user you get lots of nice things. Hyper-V is fantastic from Windows 8. Explorer is also faster and locks a lot less files and folders (the "you can't delete a folder that contained pictures" bug in windows 7).
But to a common user, there is nothing better in windows 10, other than the fact that they need to relearn how to use windows. From a UI point of view, the only additions are multiple desktops, which is at best a featurette, and moving the search bar from within the start menu to the task bar, which isn't exactly a revolution. If you don't have touch enabled on your machine, which would be the common case for windows 7, upgrading to windows 10 is only going to be a hassle.
The original iPhone was feature complete, in that the features it shipped with were complete.
Whether it had all the features it could have done is another question. However that misses the point - the goal was to set the bar for a fully touch-screen interface, not compete on feature lists.
And it was earth shattering. That one product launch was the catalyst for a huge amount of change – our entire computing landscape has been shaken up, previous incumbents are dead or dying, new industries have been created and billions of dollars of value has been created and destroyed.
The current Win10 builds are not even close to having the polish iPhone 1 had. There's all sorts of inconsistencies and screwed up stuff. Hell, just clicking on search settings doesn't even work (in true JS style even; it just does nothing, no error, no response).
OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Metro app fiasco, more or less. And console windows are now resizable. Font rendering is blurry in half the OS. And most settings are messed up and unusable until you manage to get into the "legacy" settings dialog. And uh... That's it?" Yeah they added a weak attempt at some new window management, but nothing super usable.
Anything is better than Win8, but Win7 users are not going to enjoy it. They'll probably prefer the old shell, with the new kernel extensions.
Anybody who thinks Windows 7 is better than Windows 8.1 needs to get a new monitor or their eyes checked. Also if you update to the latest Windows 10 build, released this weekend, it fixes the search/start menu launch stuff. I am running 8.1 and Windows 10 in a virtual plus several users are already running 10. Blurry fonts are the app makers problem, just like Apple.
Uh blurry apps include all the Metro stuff, IE/Sparta, etc. It's because MS is abandoning pixel snapping in lieu of "more accurate" subpixel positioning. This approach only works well on high DPI or large fonts. It sucks compared to normal ClearType at smaller (<13 pt) sizes.
Users are gonna be hard pressed to list the advantages of 20 over 7. Console windows suck less. Start menu is back. Task manager is better. Lots of under-the-hood stuff, sure. But day to day? I've been using Win10 for months and can't think of anything. (Virtual desktops, maybe... Their implementation seems clunky compared to others I've used.)
Unless you're into metro apps and like the junk ridden store, what's the killer app? What's the huge win in upgrading?
I stopped buying games by EA and Ubisoft about 5 years ago for this very reason - shipping incomplete & buggy software with the mentality "we'll patch it later". In EA's case, those patches didn't even materialize a lot of the time.
I take it from your comment that they're still up to their old tricks... I'll continue my boycott of EA and Ubi
I used to love gaming on my PC, and today I have far more disposable income I'd be willing to spend for top quality games. Sadly, I haven't actually bought (or pirated) a AAA title on PC for probably a decade now. The last few I had were great fun until they crashed or otherwise fundamentally failed at just the wrong moment, at which point all that enjoyment would instantly evaporate and just leave me in a bad mood instead. And every AAA game I'd bought in the last year or two before I gave up was like that. Throw in almost ubiquitous DRM/anti-cheating software doing unknown and potentially very bad things to my PC behind my back these days, and I'm very sad to say that PC gaming just isn't attractive to me any more.
That reminds me of the win8 release. I got it after preorder on release day, installed it immediately, hit update and got something about 350MB of updates. WTF, on release day???
After 2 weeks I switched back to Win7 (which was a lot of work, because I didn't think of making a backup before, because I didn't believe what a pice of sh*t it could be).
The RTM pressing is usually sent out a couple months before the "release date" ... Even then, XP was probably one of the worst at release, and wasn't really okay until SP1, and good until SP2, but people forget that. Vista was pretty bad too.
The only version of Windows in my mind that worked really good out of the box was Windows 2000 (not ME), and even that had a conflict with some piece of software (cd burning program iirc)... Also, they removed the in-memory database between the final RC and release, which irked me to no end.
I didn't really start using Windows 8 until 8.1, I touched a few machines (that didn't have touchscreens) with windows 8 early on and it sucked, server 2008 over RDP was worse... 8.1 with classicshell isn't bad.
I'm a Mac user so I don't care too much. However, a lot of how Windows 10 will be perceived is from the online perception created. Most people in the world don't care about the little bugs, features, etc. They simply want to know if it's worth getting. If Windows 10 is reasonably good and tons of people upgrade from XP, for example, this will be a huge win for Microsoft and the entire community. If "reviewers" complain that Cortana can't read your mind and people start comparing her to Clippy, it will generate bad buzz that's not really justified.
9 out of 10 computers run Windows. Let's try to make it a version that's from 2015.
Unless MS changes their free upgrade policy to be every version of Windows since XP instead of 7 nobody using Vista / XP will upgrade because its expensive.
Though the market share of XP has been dropping. The only real users left are those who don't know what an OS is and only uses it to check AOL in ie6 and businesses who are too stupid to upgrade their horribly dated software.
I have to say, in general, that Microsoft's "messaging" about how the free upgrade will work has been riddled with bad communications. It is like the XBone incident all over again.
Instead of simply just spelling out with a very straight forward table what will be eligible they kept releasing vague and confusing press releases.
I've read articles which have claimed (amongst other things):
- Windows XP+ will be eligible (untrue).
- Pirated copies of Windows will be eligible (untrue?).
- Everyone can upgrade but there is a subscription fee (untrue).
- Windows 8 and 8.1 gets the free upgrade only (untrue).
And many others. Microsoft could trivially have let people know exactly what to expect a year ago when they announced this program. It is a good program, I mean free stuff, but the messaging on it was just awful.
PS - I still, to this day, don't feel like I have a complete overview of what is and is not included.
Pirated copies of windows will get to upgrade, but they will still be illegitimate. I think it's a security and support issue. It's just cheaper and safer to have the pirates running the latest version of the software.
As someone who is still on XP after having tried all the newer Windows versions (and forced to use some), I don't think it's worth relearning everything and finding out that a lot of the functionality that you used to rely on is now either completely missing or terribly dumbed-down. All the little irritations add up.
We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as things like Chromebooks have shown, but even for not-so-average users like me who do mostly embedded work with some desktop application stuff, it does what I need without getting in the way.
I'd sooner switch completely to Linux, which I've been working with on my servers, than "upgrade"...
I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding.
I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a computer running Windows XP, I always offer and implore the owner (assuming they are not dependent on some software that has no Linux surrogate) to let me throw Lubuntu 14.04 on the thing. I do it for free, and offer up to three hours of tutoring also for free, because Windows XP is literally cancer. Its a tumor you don't know is there until it goes malignant and kills you by having some unpublished never to be patched exploit used to wreck your PC and steal all your personal information or lock you out. Its more unsafe than unprotected sex in a sleazy strip club.
Feature wise, Lubuntu matches pretty much perfectly, and even people still using XP often have Android phones, so the Lubuntu software center makes a lot more sense to people than have Play Store experience. Its not like anyone using these computers needs performance out of them - if they were trying to run a business or do anything intensive enough to require proprietary Windows only software they would have certainly updated the machine once in the last decade. They almost always are exclusively doing word processing and email, often not even web browsing because these are systems stuck with IE8 at best. And Lubutu does both of those things much better than XP ever did with auto-updating Firefox / Libreoffice and one click system upgrades every two years for LTS releases.
So yeah, switch to Linux, please. Your OS is hugely insecure and nobody is ever going to fix it.
Stupid users manage to infect themselves no matter what OS they're running. If you do IT you will see the worst of it.
XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings.
The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to install new software anyway.
In fact I'd say that malware is increasingly going to target features found only in newer OSs... when the WMF exploit (remember that?) was going around, I was still using 98SE, which was completely unaffected by the exploit code since it used NT-specific features and attackers were targeting those OSs at the time. A lot of the rootkit-y stuff won't even run on 9x because of that.
UAC can be set to always automatically elevate without any prompt even in Win10 (disabling UAC completely would kill Metro apps). I prefer the "Always Prompt" configuration myself and it is unfortunate it was ignored when Win8's task manager was designed for example. Win9x was not affected by the WMF SetAbortProc escape problem at all unless you are printing (I think the escapes were simply ignored). Linux is better on older machines because it gets security updates and has ASLR and other exploit mitigations etc (though not all are useful without NX) and it happened to be free.
Windows updater did a good job automatically updating SP2 to 3. I've found a few SP2 (and a few SP1) machines that had Windows Updater disabled... but the other thing is that hardware hit a sort of plateau point around the Athlon 64 x2 era where the hardware got "fast enough" to make you not want to throw the monitor out the window at how slow it is. Not application load time slow, mouse lag, app freezing and churning and graphical glitches from paging on too little memory.
That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are.
I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.
That's funny, I think the rise of SNI for https everywhere will be the final nail for most XP/IE-old users... At this point even IE9 is going away relatively quickly.
I agree about performance.. a fast machine around when the Core-2's came out is still pretty decent today with sufficient ram, which a lot of them even had.
Well, you should. I am a Mac user too, but Mac OS is getting worse and worse... I am NOT going to switch to Windows 10 for now, but I am thinking about it more and more.
I just want to know when the next version of the Surface Pro is coming out!!
Other than that, I hope that one day Microsoft will do something to allow Unix folks to be more comfortable on Windows because I honestly don't like anything about OS X and I'm looking forward to a time when Unix lovers will flock to some other brand of hardware and OS. Anything but Apple.
Load up a current 8.1 with classic shell (old menu), clover (explorer replacement), conemu (terminal replacement) and git extensions (which include gnu32 tools, bash, ssh etc) ... you can set bash to your default terminal in conemu even.
Works pretty well, if you need more, have a virtual or real linux machine running in the background and ssh to it for shell related bits. Or go farther into the rabbit hole with cygwin, but I don't find that I need that much myself, I have in the past though.
I don't care much about the next Microsoft OS which is coming out. I am irritable that the new Pro is not out yet.
If someone had told me 2 years ago that I wouldn't give a damn about MSFT software and would care about MSFT H/W i would have wondered what they were smoking.
The "AeroGlass" theme was beautiful and my hardware is fast enough - sure some low end mobile hardware can't handle it.
Will Win10 RTM still requires a Microsoft Outlook/Live/Passport/Hotmail-Account? The non-obvious small almost hidden "offline" profile option during Windows install wizard is not okay. It should be an equal option.
And for OneDrive and Cortana there should be an option to disable them and remove them from the interface in all Win10 editions, not just an option in the Enterprise edition.
It seems to me that Microsoft still doesn't care about a larger sizeable margin of the user base at all. Well I don't care that much about Win10, my beloved Win7 is supported til 2022.
I feel the marginalization of traditional (local) accounts is a mistake.
Microsoft is, in my opinion, squandering an opportunity to be the major industry player to disintermediate today's "cloud" and give control back to individuals, families, and friends. Because they think of managing local accounts from a 15-year old point of view clouded by overly-complicated Windows Domains, they are unwilling to conceive an interface for managing your family's accounts yourself in a secure manner. But it would be possible, and Microsoft should be the one major player saying: "We're going to provide you the tools to manage your information securely for yourself. Unlike Google and Apple, we don't want your information. It's yours and we value your privacy!"
I agree. I'd love to see Microsoft continue to push for users to be in control of their own data. I try not to use any cloud sync services, but I use some Windows Store apps, so I end up having to use a Microsoft account for that reason.
I have no clue on OneDrive, but Cortana can be disabled. The UI can be shrink a lot, but the button remains to provide "basic" local search and similar. In fact Cortana is disabled by default, or it was on the build that added it.
As to the Live Account thing, as another poster said there is a hidden button to bypass it, but they intentionally make it hard to find to try and force people into using a Live Account (and things like OneDrive and the Store integrate with a Live Account also, so without one functionality will break).
> Will Win10 RTM still requires a Microsoft Outlook/Live/Passport/Hotmail-Account? The non-obvious small almost hidden "offline" profile option during Windows install wizard is not okay. It should be an equal option.
It almost certainly will not. Even in Windows 8.1, I have had to disconnect from the Internet before creating the first user so Microsoft wouldn't fuss about it.
In 10 and 8.1 I chose "create an account" and then at the bottom there was a local user option.
It still is obviously a dark pattern, but you shouldnt have to disconnect from the internet.
Maybe they try to emulate Apple again. Like how they have released Yosemite with so many deficiencies, one of which, the wifi problem still haunts my Mac after seven months.
Undoubtedly, but the issue is that they only have 2 months to take care of any bugs in their recent code. If the tech preview builds are anything to go by, the stuff that hasn't been released yet is going to need a lot of testing and fixing.
I don't think it's insurmountable, but they definitely have their work cut out for them.
> Undoubtedly, but the issue is that they only have 2 months to take care of any bugs in their recent code
Parent is suggesting that what you think is "recent code" isn't recent at all (if you mean the tech previews). The leaked internal builds are more recent, but only relatively so.Therefore you can't extrapolate the number of current bugs remaining from tech previews.
Right, I got that. The tech previews are "old" code, that is, they've gone through testing internally and have been deemed ready for release to the public for further testing. It's reasonable to assume that anything newer hasn't been tested to that point yet, so they still have a lot of work to do on the things we haven't seen yet.
It's also possible that this whole thing is a psyops campaign and Microsoft has been sending out purposely buggy releases while sitting on a build that works amazingly so that they can appear to have released an excellent product under a major time crunch. Unlikely, but fun to think about.
> It's reasonable to assume that anything newer hasn't been tested to that point yet, so they still have a lot of work to do on the things we haven't seen yet.
I disagree on that part - I do not think that is reasonable. If I read correctly, your assumption is that pipeline for everything is: Develop > Test internally > polish > public testing > fix.
It's also reasonable to assume that not everything needs to be tested by the public, and only those deemed to require public testing were included in public previews.
There a lot of reasons to release 'old' code, especially on a large codebase. It's not that they intentionally send out "buggy releases while sitting on a build that works", but gating is complicated business.
Leaked internal builds are our best clues. Those leaked builds are not nightly builds either (there is some QA before it gets there) and then there is some informed speculation because we didn't get any updates for weeks on end.
Several BSODs, glitches with the virtual desktops, inconsistent fonts and layouts, multiple application (explorer) crashes, wifi connectivity problems, failures returning from sleep and standby, dozens of UI inconsistencies.
That doesn't sound at all like what I've been experiencing on Windows 10 TP. I've found it remarkably stable - it's now my main OS on my gaming rig and I use it daily. Outside of the occasional game incompatibility (usually fixed by patches for recent games), it's been the most stable version of Windows I've used in a long time.
TP is the more polished version. Weekly builds are worse, but I think that's to be expected and I wouldn't be worried.
Only weird thing is the browser - I haven't seen a version that could be considered even beta-ready. No way they are going to release something better than IE in just two months.
Windows 8 had tons of UI inconsistencies. You would move from a metro style control panel to an old, non-resizable grey winform with tabs. Windows 10 didn't really improve or worsen that.
Yeah, for a couple months, they broke video for both VMware and VirtualBox. That is, 3D and 2D had severe issues. Couldn't auto resize, couldn't get the right resolution (just the standard presets), couldn't use 3D accel. It was only fixed in 10074. That's a long time to break a huge feature and it really worries me. VMware is probably the largest single piece of hardware used.
I've not had any BSODs, but the UI in general is poor and glitchy.
I was not expecting that quick of a release. In the last month, I have encountered enough bugs that I was expecting at least fall. To pick two that sort of highlight the problems:
Unable to set static IP. Appeared to Work in GUI but not actually set.
Touchpad being available every other reboot. Device simply not detected.
It's the "lean startup" mantra often accepted in the startup world of "Ship early, ship often", but not the software world. Kind of ironic in my opinion.
"Ship early, ship often" Is fine for some neat, but ultimately not that important, software or service I'm trying out. It's slightly more problematic for the core software they want me to base everything else I do on.
This makes me especially reticent to redeem the 'free upgrade' offer. I don't expect my machines to be bricked on update, but I'd rather play it safe until an acceptable level of stability is reached (per online response).
