Ask Paul: December 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday and Happy Holidays! With 2020 finally winding down, here’s a great set of reader questions to get you in the holiday spirit.

Text zoom on Edge mobile

jwpear asks:

Any idea if Microsoft will ever support Safari-style text resizing in Edge for iOS? The Edge app on iOS has yet to support the text resizing capability that Apple added to Safari a while back. I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that Edge was built on the same rendering engine as Safari. So I’m puzzled why Microsoft hasn’t added this extremely useful feature for those of us with aging eyes that have lost the ability to focus on things up close. Microsoft has generally been pretty good about supporting accessibility.

I wish there was an award I could bestow on you for this question because every once in a while someone asks me a question that I was literally just struggling with recently and it’s like you’re reading my mind. And that’s the case here: The other night, I was reading up on some programming topic using Edge mobile (on an iPad in this case) and the text was hard-coded to be too small for me to easily read. And so I looked through Edge settings for the obvious setting, which doesn’t exist. And then I Googled it to see what was up.

As most probably know, both Android and iOS/iPad support separate scaling settings for UI elements and text, and in both cases, apps can be written to be compatible with the latter. So if you were to choose a large font size, perhaps, that font size would be used within the apps that choose to use this feature. Alternatively, of course, any app can use its own font size configuration scheme and/or a way to zoom just text. And from what I can tell, Edge does neither.

And so, yes, in this one case I actually used Safari to read this site. I was not happy about this.

To actually answer your question, I don’t know whether Microsoft plans to support this functionality. But I know some people on the Edge team and I will ask.

Has Windows 10X RTMed?

ggolcher asks:

There has been reports by Neowin and Windows Central that the current Insider builds in the Dev channel are for the upcoming Windows 10X (with Microsoft being pretty deceptive to Insiders in its communications), and that Windows 10X has actually RTMed! Have you heard anything from your side? I was surprised not to read anything about this on your site recently and you guys usually have the best information.

Not directly, but Mary Jo mentioned something about this to me recently, that Windows 10X would RTM in December and be released in early 2021, and so that those reports seem to corroborate (and expand on) that.

And while I’m not sure how I feel about Zac’s report that the initial release of Windows 10X will be for commercial (business/education/government) customers only, followed by a Win32-compatible version that will also head out to consumers, I guess that makes sense given that there’s been no external testing at all.

I still don’t quite understand the positioning of a Windows 10X that can run Windows desktop applications at all. That’s even more limited than Windows 10 on ARM, and sounds a lot like Windows RT but with a new UI.

I guess we’ll see.

Password management

ChrisG101 asks:

Password Managers … What do you use nowadays? I have been a LastPass user for a long time and while it’s nice to see so many features for free, it worries me that I should really sign up for the premium plan but if I am going to do that should I consider something else?

I used LastPass years ago, but I just started using the Google Chrome password manager at some point, in part because it synced with Android and is used there as the app/system password autofill manager too. But when Microsoft released the first new Edge previews, I switched to that, after importing my Chrome passwords. This system works pretty well: Most of my passwords are already available on mobile because I was using Chrome previously, and all of my passwords work on the web on both desktop and mobile. (I use Edge on mobile too.)

Going forward, with Microsoft bringing Edge password sync into Microsoft Authenticator, I’ll be able to use my Edge-based passwords (which I guess we should think of as “Microsoft account-based passwords”) with mobile apps on Android/iOS. I’ve been testing this since the preview release this past week, and while it’s kind of bare-boned right now (the app can’t generate complex passwords for you, doesn’t work with commercial Microsoft accounts, and doesn’t have any in-app password creation or management capabilities), I suspect it will get there.

Am I recommending you switch from LastPass to Microsoft Authenticator? No, not yet. But I feel like this app will eventually be a no-brainer, assuming you trust Microsoft (which I do).

File path length

ChrisG101 also asks:

Appreciate this is pretty focused but this is starting to be the biggest issue for me with Windows in general. Coupled with the more prevalent use of OneDrive/SharePoint as part of O365. OSX has never suffered this problem. It’s nice MSFT are fixing specific apps but this issue is long overdue being addressed at the OS level. Will this only happen when NTFS is ever replaced?

I had to look this up, because I was curious if ReFS, which Microsoft created in the Windows 8 timeframe as an erstwhile replacement for NTFS, solved this issue. But it appears to have the same filename and path length limitations as NTFS: 255 Unicode characters for filenames and ~32,000 Unicode characters for the path. ReFS obviously has other advantages over NTFS, but whatever.

I suspect the issue is backward compatibility and just general compatibility across the different file system types (FAT32, exFAT, UDFS, etc.) that Windows supports. The Windows API, for example—what most people think of as “Win32”—long supported a path length of only 260 characters. But starting with Windows 10 version 1607, developers can opt-in to the longer 32,000-ish character length.

I think this is all just part of the double-edged sword that is backward compatibility in Windows. There are just so many applications that stuck at the 260-character limit.

Stadia

sabertooth920 asks:

Have you had any second-thoughts on the viability of Stadia? It seems like Google has fixed a lot of the issues that plagued the service, earlier.

I’ll be writing about Stadia soon as part of my Living with Game Streaming series. But the short version is that it seems to work pretty well, aside from some controller latency issues that can be problematic in action (and, I assume, multiplayer) games. I’ve tried this in several different configurations (wired, wirelessly, different endpoints) but the one thing I’ve not experimented with yet is what Google says is the configuration that will give you the best results: Wirelessly via a Chromecast Ultra. I will be testing that soon, and that will be part of my write-up.

Overall, I’m surprised by how well Stadia games look and work though. It seems to be in pretty good shape.

Fitness+

naven87 asks:

Now that Apple’s Fitness+ is released any thoughts? Particularly from your wife?

No, not yet, sorry. I don’t have an Apple Watch to test this, and that’s (almost) a requirement. But I still think Fitness+ is a great idea, and it appears that what they’ve released is already pretty decent. I will see if evaluating Fitness+ on iPhone/iPad makes sense, but I suspect the Apple Watch experience (especially via Apple TV) is what puts this over the top.

Phones with physical keyboards

bschnatt asks:

Have you ever used a phone with a horizontal slider (physical) keyboard (or a portrait one)? Your thoughts on whether you think they could make a comeback?

I don’t see this ever happening. (I also don’t think flip-style phones make any sense here in 2020, beyond some niche use-cases, similar to vinyl LPs.) But yes, I did use several portrait-mode phones with hardware keyboards, like the Palm Treo 700w, Moto Q, Samsung Blackjack, and probably others. And one horizontal keyboard, the original Motorola Droid. Like many in 2007, my experience with these handsets told me that Apple’s notion of a virtual keyboard made no sense at all. But actually using the iPhone cured me (and others) of that misconception. We’re at the point now where virtual keyboards work so well that going back to a hardware keyboard, at least an integrated one, doesn’t make sense.

Working from home

bschnatt also asks:

I’ve always dreamed of being able to work from home (most of my commutes have been a nightmare). I know you’ve been working from home for a while. Have you ever had your work efficiency questioned or known someone who had? I’m wondering how you can assuage such concerns without letting an employer install intrusive spying software on your PC.

I haven’t, no. But then there are very clear metrics for measuring my output, and it’s easy enough for my employer to compare the volume of my writing, in article count or word count, year-to-year. The one thing I told my current company’s owner when I signed on was that I couldn’t guarantee any particular level of success, only that I’d show up every single day and write and publish articles. In my case, at least, there is a very clear and consistent record.

But I’ve also been working from home for over 25 years, and I’ve certainly learned a few things, including how to manage my schedule. Related to that, I also believe that working from home isn’t for everyone, assuming it’s even possible. And there are those who might want to, but wouldn’t do well. And those who don’t want to, but maybe are forced to (as in this year, because of the pandemic.)

Given the reality of 2020, many of us at least have some body of work over time that we can point to and say, look, we have some level of success in getting work done while not in the office. And on the employer side, hopefully, there is likewise an understanding that in many cases, working from home can be advantageous in many ways too. I kind of like Google’s approach for the post-pandemic world, where they will offer most employees a hybrid schedule in which they work from home most often but need to come into an office from time-to-time. That seems sustainable to me, at least for many people.

Hopefully, your workplace won’t get bogged down with meaningless measurements—time spent in certain apps, time spent in front of a screen—but will instead measure your output and success. But every place and every manager is different.

Ice cream

bschnatt also asks:

The most important question: Favorite ice cream flavor? I’m partial to salted caramel, myself, but mint chocolate chip is pretty damn close…

I actually don’t like ice cream all that much, and I never seek it out. I don’t dislike it per se, I just don’t care for it. I really don’t eat too many dessert-type foods.

As my friend Joe once jokingly observed, “you don’t like ice cream and are thus un-American…”

Facebook

Vladimir asks:

HI Paul, what do you think is the goal of the facebook ad campaign? I don’t see any human beeing cheering for facebook or even siding with facebook on this matter. So, I wonder, who are they targeting and what do they expect to achieve?

So, this is an interesting thing to me. I’m very much on your side here: Facebook is a horrible, horrible company that no one should trust, and it’s tracking activities are every bit as bad as what Google does. The notion that Facebook is somehow standing up for small businesses is, to me, ludicrous.

But it’s important to remember—for me, too–that not everyone feels this way. There are people who basically live on Facebook every, and while many of them are spreading misinformation willfully or not, it’s a real point of social contract and, sadly, where they get news. And there is no doubt many small businesses that rely on Facebook, just as they do on Google, to reach their customers. It’s like politics: You’re on some side of the fence you cannot believe what folks on the other side believe, it just doesn’t seem possible. And yet there we all are, believing what we believe and glaring over the fence, menacingly.

Looked at objectively, though, it’s hard to think that Facebook can in any way win in the court of public opinion given Apple’s reputation with consumers and, more important, it’s a clear-cut stance on privacy. Apple is a company that values user privacy so much that it has repeatedly refused to help law enforcement break into iPhones that were used by suspected criminals and terrorists because doing so is a slippery slope and could lead to law enforcement or governments doing so with normal people. So when Apple says that it wants to keep people safe from Facebook and other trackers, it’s believable. And it makes Facebook look bad because most people probably don’t think of Facebook as this belligerent monster that is tracking everyone’s activities and selling that data to advertisers.

I think that explains why Facebook is standing up to Apple in this very public way. The problem is that, in doing so, it is also forcing normal people to confront this reality that they never even knew about. And faced with what each side is doing, Facebook is ultimately just helping Apple here, because it just comes off looking bad. Because it is bad, in my opinion. And there is something very hypocritical about a company, Facebook, using newspapers, the businesses it helped destroy, to deliver this message. Facebook can go f$%k itself for all I care.

Anyone else remember Games for Windows LIVE?

Daninbusiness asks:

A bit of a throwback question. Just wondering if there’s ever been an official explanation why Microsoft’s release of Halo 2 for PC in 2007 was arbitrarily restricted to Windows Vista only?

Yeah, it was all about selling Windows Vista, which Microsoft knew would get off to a slow start because of sluggish performance and high system requirements. Halo 2 could easily have run on Windows XP, would almost certainly have run better on Windows XP, but Microsoft was still all about feeding the Windows beast at that time. And that meant making Windows Vista a success no matter what.

They’ve more than made up for it with the various cross-platform re-releases since then. But when I think back to that time, I still don’t get what Microsoft were thinking with that move.

They have, but it took many, many years—Microsoft ignored PC gaming again from about 2008 until a year or two ago—and the decline of Windows to make that happen. Like so much that’s happened in the wake of the mobile explosion of that same year, 2007, the year of the first iPhone, it took serious decline for Microsoft to wake up and get it right. But yeah, like you, I’m just glad we arrived here eventually.

Game streaming on Xbox One

Kurt_Jordan asks:

Do you have any thoughts or insights on if cloud streaming will come to the old Xbox One family? In theory, games in the future will need newer hardware. Could this help keep the older hardware relevant longer and increase the Game Pass subscriber count that Microsoft truly wants?

I cannot imagine Microsoft not doing this: Selling Game Pass subscriptions is so much more important in the long run than selling consoles, and making Game Streaming available to as many clients as possible makes sense. It’s weird that it’s only on Android now.

Free vs. paid Internet

erich82 asks:

As a result of the ongoing anti-trust cases, do you foresee a paid-for internet the likes of which Jaron Lanier advocates? Also, if companies can no longer offer free or cheap cloud storage, do you think we’ll go back to something like how it was in the 90’s when we were more concerned with privacy, and stored our own files on our own devices?

I’m not sure exactly where I fall on this one. For those unfamiliar, Jason Lanier is perhaps most famous for advocating that users should get paid for their personal data. (Check out this page.) I like that idea because it’s an explicit contract, whereas the situation today is that companies like Google and Facebook are silently using and selling our data to advertisers in return for services that they claim are “free.” And most people simply don’t understand the ramifications of this theft. But the issue, I guess, is that these same people would very happily choose to be paid for this data usage if given the option. So I don’t know.

Someone above asked me about Facebook and its ludicrous defense of stealing personal data to benefit small businesses. On that note, the first step should be to stop user tracking and the resultant theft of personal data, not just on the web but in mobile apps/platforms as well. Advertising seems like a model that should still work, but I feel like Google, especially, and then Facebook, got greedy and kept expanding their share of the revenues over time. And it’s gotten to the point where ads aren’t just intrusive—like when you see an ad for an item you recently searched for on Google or whatever—but they’re also too much. Far too many of the sites I visit via Google News or some other aggregator pummels us with ads that appear over and over again on top of the content we’re trying to read. This needs to be stopped and that will require regulation.

Of course, we can’t put the genie back in the genie bottle, and I don’t see us collectively going back to the pre-Internet way of doing things. But in racing forward so quickly, we’ve spent too little time making sure that the Internet has evolved to the benefit of us all. Right now, it serves only a few masters. It needs to serve all of us, much like our government is supposed to.

Some of the antitrust cases you allude to could be the first steps towards correcting this problem: The cases against Google and Facebook, in particular, largely focus on their gatekeeper roles on the web and social, just as Apple’s cases focus largely on its role as a gatekeeper to 50+ percent of the mobile market (in the U.S.). Expecting any government to get it all right is a stretch, but I’m particularly interested to see what the EU and its activist European Commission are doing to rein in Big Tech. I feel like we’re finally moving in the right direction overall.

Random aside: That has to be Jaron Lanier in the Together Mode photo at the top of this article, right?