Windows 10 Anniversary Update: The Road To Redstone
by Brett Howse on August 2, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
It’s already been a year since Microsoft launched Windows 10, and we have had a couple of updates since release. The biggest update yet though is the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which was codenamed Redstone throughout its development. It’s the first major branch from the launch codebase, which was codenamed Threshold. With it, Microsoft has added a lot of new features, polished some of the interface , and overall provided a nice update to those on Windows 10.
The Road to Redstone
Windows 10 had a pretty strong launch, although the company did stumble a bit through some controversy over the last year: especially in the area of the collection of data from the operating system. Windows 10 was a big change in policy for Microsoft, with the goal of being able to improve the experience however there was a period of time where the answers from the Redmond company were vague at best. Much of that has been answered now, and although the answers won’t appease everyone the end result of anonymous telemetry data can certainly be seen with this update. With this update, we see fixes for many user interface issues, as well as the constant squashing of bugs. There was also plenty of deserved controversy around the underhanded Get Windows 10 dialogs on older versions of the Operating System. Confusing would be an understatement, and the dialogs got progressively more deceitful over the year, until only recently a large outcry resulted in the company accepting that they had gone to far and toned them back.
Despite the controversy, Windows 10 has been pretty successful over the last year. The last update from Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi on June 29th was that there were over 350 million devices running Windows 10 now, which is a pretty healthy number considering the decline in the PC market. Windows 10 is also a big part of the Xbox One, and it also includes IoT and Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft had set a target of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by mid-2018, and although they have admitted they likely won’t hit that goal now with the practical exit of the phone market, they still could hit that mark later in their 2018 fiscal year.
Part of that initial uptake in Windows 10 was due to the already mentioned free Windows 10 Update for all computers running Windows 7 or later. This was the first time ever that Microsoft has taken the tactic of eliminating the upgrade fee, but they had a couple of reasons to do so. In enabling their users to move to Windows 10, it would expand the reach of their built-in services, including OneDrive, Bing, and the Windows Store. The other motivating factor was that Microsoft was pretty eager to avoid another mess that they had with Windows XP, where a big chunk of their user base was stuck on an outdated version of the operating system. For the users, it meant a lot of money in support, as well as long term legacy teams back at Microsoft. Windows 7 was certainly set up to be the same, with a solid framework and stable platform, and we will see how they make out when Windows 7 starts to run into the end of its long term support window. Already they’ve seen some large corporations make the move to Windows 10, with many more actively piloting it now, so perhaps the XP mess might have been avoided.
But enough about the past. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update brings a lot of welcome changes to Windows 10, and many of them have been actively adjusted based on almost real-time feedback from what is most certainly Microsoft’s most successful software beta program yet. The Windows Insider Program has been a huge success for the company, with millions of active users providing feedback on changes, implementations, and bugs. The program has received over 70,000,000 pieces of feedback this year alone, and was a driving factor on many of the changes in this update.
Let’s dig into what’s new.
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Penti - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Centennial is still Win32.Gigaplex - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
UWP is still based on top of Win32 as well.Penti - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Yeah in large parts, any how Centennial is still using the Win32 VS CRT and all and not Windows Runtime with it's own C++ runtime and framework aka UWP/UWA/Store-app/Modern/Metro/WinRT. As the binaries aren't converted but rather packed into an AppX package. Nothing would work without Win32. You can't even use Windows Runtime to build a Windows Runtime (UWP) app as the development tools won't move to it.API's (some of them) previously only available to Store apps have been made available to Windows/Win32 applications like the inking API so I don't think freezing out Win32 apps by moving new features to WinRT/UWP and to UWP apps only would work or be desirable either. Would only cause fragmentation and vendors would start to replace deprecated or stalled API's with their own stuff which might just make it more difficult to develop for the platform with more stuff you need to support, but probably not as difficult as porting to UWP but still frustrate users and developers.
Achaios - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Still on windows 7 for my main PC. My old laptop still runs Windows XP.Can't see myself ever upgrading to Windows 10, except when a DX11 game absolutely requires Windows 10 (and DX 11) to make 60 FPS. Even so, I'd return back to the Windows 7 partition after gaming on Windows 10.
Michael Bay - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
I can kinda sorta understand this 7 attachment, but why would you need the fossil?SteelRing - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
There is nothing I need to do that cant be done in Win7, or even WinXP for that matter. Not having that b1tch Cortana in the background spying on you the whole time is a huge relief.smilingcrow - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
XP? Yikes, you can keep that 32 bit over-rated POS and yes there was a 64 bit version which was hardly supported.Achaios - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
My 2003 laptop can't run anything else. Specs below:CPU: Intel Pentium 4@3.06 GHz with HT (1 core two threads)- GPU: NVIDIA Geforce4 460 Go AGP 64 MB DDR RAM - MOBO: Intel 845 PE chipset based - RAM: 2GB DDR RAM@333 MHz -
http://i.imgur.com/Y9oQ6xW.jpg?1
This laptop is all I need to work. It can run Firefox with Ad Blocker, MS Office, and GOM Player and it comes with a 16 inch screen too.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
Your reasoning is perfectly sensible. If your laptop works for you with its given OS and hardware, then you should continue to use it in a way that suits your needs.The point of computer technology from its inception was to assist people in accomplishing tasks more efficiently. To that end, the computer should kowtow to the needs of the person using it by fitting a variety of requirements for mobility, interface, and functionality. I think we've lost sight of a lot of that since the industry has grown in size and gained something of a life of its own. Windows 10 seems something of an outgrowth of computers being mistreated as devices that serves the company making the software they runs rather than supporting the needs of the end user. In the end, Windows 10's master is Microsoft rather than the system owner. The justifications Microsoft will offer are numerous (telemetry gathering, system security, ease of use, following the trend of closed-system modern phones, etc) and other tech companies are just as guilty of lacing services they offer with self-serving capabilities (thanks for being the industry leader on that one Google/Alphabet) that simply don't benefit the end user. What you end up with is a mutually-destructive relationship where end users aren't happy and companies offer polarizing, unsatisfactory products in an attempt to incorporate their own needs into things that are supposed to be all about the customers they serve.
sadsteve - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Well, I was borderline with my install of Windows 10 but there are just too many negatives vs positives with this release so I regressed my system back to Windows 8.1. I"ll stick with 8.1 till end of support. I just want to operate my machine my way, not Microsoft's way.I did like the idea of the Linux subsystem but that would have been the only plus. As it is, I can continue using MSYS2 for my 'Bash'ing on my Windows box.
And speaking of Bash, I've had Mint Linux on my Vista era laptop for ~9 months and it seems to do everything I need for my daily computing needs (no gaming or Photoshop are done on the laptop). There's even a device driver from Brothers for my multifunction printer.