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 ...

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