From the Editor’s Desk: A Mind is a Terrible Thing ⭐

The current version of the Windows 11 Field Guide is over 1180 pages long. It’s too long, and it’s not even complete in the sense that are topics I never got to and new topics to cover with each passing season. So a goal for the 25H2 edition of this book is to make it more concise, more task or action oriented. More how-to with less superfluous writing.

This has proven difficult.

The problem is me. Which isn’t the same thing as me being at fault. This is no one’s fault. I just have this condition called ADHD. Sometimes it’s like a super power. And sometimes it just gets in the way. I can’t control it. But right now, it’s getting in the way. When I’m like this, I feel broken and lost.

This is how my brain works. Or doesn’t work, I guess.

A week ago, I set out to write a chapter on passkeys. Since I wrote about this for the book last year, Microsoft added third-party passkey support to Windows 11, so it felt like a meaningful update.

I can’t explain this, but I typically write new chapters for the 25H2 edition of the book without referring to anything I wrote previously. So that was my first mistake. But I plotted out a basic explanation of passkeys and then planned two main sections for the chapter, for the in-box passkey management functionality, which is limited, and what I initially called a third-party passkey integration. And then I started writing them.

I kept getting distracted.

The in-box passkey functionality is borderline pointless, as those passkeys are not portable, they’re what Microsoft calls device-bound passkeys, meaning they’re stuck on that one PC and can’t be used elsewhere. I feel very strongly that passkeys need to be portable, that’s what makes them universally useful, and that no one should use the in-box passkey functionality in Windows 11 for the most part. But I also need to document this functionality in the book, right? And hopefully do so in the shortest possible way.

The third-party passkey integration is more useful because you’re using a compatible password manager to store passkeys, and because those password managers are available elsewhere, on phones and tablets, other PCs, Macs, and elsewhere, the passkeys you store in them are portable. But the compatibility is limited to 1Password and Bitwarden right now. And, as it turns out, the Microsoft Password Manager (MPM) that’s built in to Microsoft Edge.

I feel very strongly that no one should use the password manager built in to an OS or web browser, and that everyone should use a third-party password manager instead. So that’s a problem, too. As is the fact that MPM is not technically a third-party password/passkey manager but is instead a Microsoft product. And so I needed a different term, as third-party was not going to cut it. So I started referring to these things as external passkey managers.

But I kept getting distracted.

As I wrote this new chapter, as I repeatedly created, accessed, and managed passkeys using these two...