Ask Paul: July 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here is a blessedly shorter than usual Ask Paul to end this short week and get the weekend started a bit early.

File Explorer bug

staganyi asks:

Sorry if this was asked/discussed before, but ever since upgrading to w11 22h2 build 22621.169, windows explorer is always reverting to the “group by – date modified” view. Even if I change it, it comes back. I’ve tried a few tricks from the past but nothing sticks. I prefer not to use the group by view. Anyone else encountering this?

I have not experienced this, but I’m on build 22621.105 everywhere. Which means that there is some difference between where I’m at (the Beta channel) and where you’re at (the Release Preview channel, it appears). Oddly, there is a newer build available to PCs enrolled in the Beta channel, but I’m not seeing it for some reason. But regardless, the Release Channel build was, until two days ago, on a higher build number than was the Beta channel, but the latter is now up to 22621.290.

I guess we can chalk this up to a pre-release bug, but it’s still concerning. I’m curious if anyone else is seeing this?

Why not Firefox?

SherlockHolmes asks:

I was surprised to read about your switch to Brave instead of Firefox. I remember that you switched happily to Firefox from Edge not long ago. What are the reasons for you to switch again? For me Firefox is the only browser that acts exactly the way I like my browser to act. That said, I dont mind the little features Firefox doesnt has over Chrome browsers.

I love the idea of Firefox, of course, but it has a few issues that always drive me away. Some are very much “me” specific: it’s much harder (for me), for example, to find images that you can’t download directly from a website, which is something I have to do each week. For example, there’s a thumbnail image for each Windows Weekly episode that I can’t get to directly from the page, but when I go into the Sources view Developer Tools in any Chromium-based browser, it’s very easy to get to.

I could probably work around that. But in my continual testing of various browsers, it’s very clear that Firefox performs the worst of the lot, both the app itself and the page renderer. And I don’t like various UIs in Firefox, especially how it handles downloads (also a problem in Edge) and Find in page.

(One interesting exception: I really like and still sometimes use Firefox on the iPad.)

Brave just works exactly as I want it to. It offers the best performance, built-in tracking and ad blocking that actually works without the need for multiple extensions, a minimalist UI, and all those little things that bug me about Firefox just work as expected.

I guess I’d also add that Firefox pretty much explicitly ignores PWAs now, which I don’t understand. To be fair, this isn’t a feature I “need” a lot—the ability to install a web app and run it as a standalone app in Windows—but I feel that this is the future of apps and I don’t want to support or use a browser that doesn’t offer this functionality. All of the Chromium-based browsers, including Brave, do.

Yes, a lot of this is just personal preference. But the performance issue is real and impacts everyone. As I argued a few years back, Mozilla is making a big mistake by trying to go it alone on the web renderer front. I feel that the real value in web browsers is in the user experience, and that standardizing on the renderer all developers are actually targeting (Chromium’s Blink) is the correct approach. Even Microsoft, which is one of the few companies with the resources to go their own way, did this. But Mozilla is too small to succeed at this, and you can see that they’re failing in their monthly usage numbers.

I understand anyone wanting to support Mozilla and Firefox. I want to. Their heart is in the right place, mostly. But the world is moving on, for better or worse. It’s too bad.

EdgeOS: sasquatch or coelacanth?

anoldamigauser asks:

What is the likelihood that Microsoft will build an EdgeOS? I know they have the ability, but do you think there is any desire to do something like that. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense, both for consumers and enterprise customers … but that and $2.50 would buy a cup of coffee or half a gallon of gas.

To be clear, there is no evidence at all that Microsoft is working on an EdgeOS.

But as Mary Jo Foley noted on this last week’s Windows Weekly, she asked Microsoft about this and they replied with, “we have nothing to share,” a line that inspired that episode’s title. It’s an interesting response because it is not a denial. That said, there are good reasons to answer like that even if they are absolutely not working on or even considering an EdgeOS because it will cause confusion for rival platform makers like Google. So there’s that.

Whatever. Microsoft has long wanted a viable Chrome OS competitor.

Windows RT is perhaps the first example, though of course it more explicitly targeted the iPad, which that team saw as a major threat.

Five years ago, Microsoft was getting ready to release what was then called Windows Cloud. Terry Myerson told me that his team had agreed that was a terrible name and that they were looking at alternatives; they eventually settled on Windows 10 S. Most people associate Windows 10 S with UWP apps and its initial education push, and thus with low-end PCs, but Myerson always had bigger aspirations. He wanted 10 S on higher-end PCs, which is why it launched on the Surface Laptop. And UWP apps wouldn’t stand alone: Windows 10 S could also run web apps, of course. The combination of web apps and mobile apps (which is what UWP apps were/are) should remind everyone of Chrome OS. It was an obvious Chromebook competitor.

Windows 10 S failed because UWP apps failed, and because web apps didn’t mature fast enough to make up the difference, I guess. But it wasn’t just individuals. It also failed with the educational institutions and businesses that Microsoft very much wanted to court with that software. For businesses, I’m sure it was all about app compatibility. But with education, Microsoft simply didn’t offer management tools that were as simple as Google’s. Chrome OS is simple enough to manage that many schools can get by without dedicated IT staff.

Windows 10X was the next push in that direction, and I feel like Microsoft had even loftier plans for this release: had the container-based Win32 compatibility technology actually worked, I suspect 10X would have become Windows over time, much like NT had become Windows with Windows XP. This would have been the next platform shift. But that technology didn’t work and Microsoft instead bolted the simpler 10X user interface onto Windows 10 and called it Windows 11. And here we are.

The push to make Windows simpler, for Microsoft, I think, is about making its client platform less of a legacy hairball so that they can focus more time, energy, and money on the things that matter to them. Would EdgeOS fulfill this need? I’m not sure. If it ran just web apps, no, it would just be another thing. If it ran web apps and UWP apps, it would just be 10 S. It doesn’t really move the needle.

But I still feel like this is a possibility. In part because the passage of time often solves the problems of the past. For example, if Windows 365 was ever good enough that mainstream users could use it to run the random Win32/desktop app(s) they need, the client platform could be a lot simpler, and EdgeOS would be a viable alternative. (But will cloud-streamed apps ever work for mainstream users? I don’t know.)

I also think about Windows 11 on ARM and wonder what this really buys Microsoft or the ecosystem. If the WOA transition is incredibly successful, and we’re suddenly all running on this platform, what did we really get? PCs that are thinner, lighter, and quieter, and have better battery life, I guess. But they’re still PCs, and we’re still running the same big and complex Windows we’ve been running for years. WOA is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problems with the platform. Unless of course S mode suddenly becomes viable again because web apps mature, Windows 365 makes sense, etc. etc.

The problem for EdgeOS is that it’s just a Microsoft take on a Google thing, similar to what Microsoft Edge is today. So what’s the hook? Why would a school or a business choose that over Chrome OS? Because they trust Microsoft more, perhaps. Because Microsoft has more capable management capabilities for businesses and enterprises, maybe. I don’t know. If it works, do they start piling on features like they do today with Edge and Teams and kind of ruin it for everyone? Where does this end? How does Microsoft make sense of having two client platforms that target the same markets and sometimes overlap?

Put simply, I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re thinking or planning, and I don’t really have any opinions about the right way forward. I know what they’ve done, and what the results were. But that’s about it. I guess we’re about as confused as each other.