12 ms·

Alt+tab has been thoroughly broken on Windows 10 20H2 for over two months now. It randomly switches between the second and third window. No fix in customer faci

by qz2 6y ago

Alt+tab has been thoroughly broken on Windows 10 20H2 for over two months now. It randomly switches between the second and third window. No fix in customer facing versions yet either. They are slow and incompetent.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
This may explain it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-role-in-cloud-focused-reorganization-1522335763 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-ro... > The company is breaking Windows in pieces. The platform technology, on which Microsoft’s partners build their own devices, apps and services, will now fall under Scott Guthrie, who runs the Azure business. Mr. Guthrie’s unit, called Cloud + AI Platform, will also include the company’s mixed-reality business, including Microsoft’s Hololens device, as well as its artificial-intelligence business. Maybe someone with insider knowledge will comment, but it looks like Windows is far from being a priority for Microsoft.
- dmix 6y ago
  Man I still can’t believe Azure is number 2 behind Amazon for cloud computing. When they first started their marketing push to developers years ago, which I remember was very aggressive and full of evangelism marketing which I disliked, I kind of blew them off as some mid tier or old school oddity. But it really shows you how powerful their enterprise sales machine is and the legacy reach of existing programming languages/frameworks. It’s always easy to underestimate Microsoft I guess. Ditto with Oracle and the like. From our view down in the startup world. That said. Alt-tab not working is an embarrassment though. And I hope they really haven’t let their OS QA slip this badly in favour of some growth area or whatever.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    They're including managed services like office 365 in that number though. Might be fair because aws includes their services as well, but I'm pretty sure aws main income is from ec2, while azure is business tooling like active directory, office etc
    - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
      And they seem to be pushing customers very hard on moving from on-prem to cloud for Office and email stuff. I don't know if they're subsidising the cloud services for now, or what.
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        It's really obvious that Azure has much lower adoption than AWS. For example, I evaluated their new Front Door combo accelerator / CDN product recently. One page listed their customers, and there were about a half dozen total. Out of curiosity, I scanned the top 1000 domains and found none using it. I got the impression that I was one of the few people even evaluating it, let alone using it in production. Despite just kicking the tyres on the thing, I found about half a dozen bugs or missing critical features. That's just shocking to me. For comparison, CloudFront -- the most direct competitor -- is far ahead in features and is used by far more customers. It also works out of the box. All of the other Azure services other than plain virtual machines give me the same impression of being a first adopter and one of only a handful of customers.
        PretzelPirate 6y ago
        Those customers are probably using it in some of their services. I’ve worked with a number of enterprise companies who are moving to the cloud and most of them have never considered something like front door to route their traffic. I’ve brought Front Door into their architecture for the services I was working on, but even if they decide it’s a great thing for the entire company to use, it will take them over a year to get security to approve it, and then multiple years to get it rolled out to all of their products. With Azure’s core customer base being major enterprises, it’s not surprising that you had a hard time finding evidence.
  - plif 6y ago
    Microsoft is also mostly purely tech. Amazon and Google (Alphabet) are more pervasive and threatening to other industries. For that reason, I'm not surprised. I've seen the decision come down to not wanting to give money to the other two many times. MS is in a great position there.
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    They still have a big .NET following and they make it easier to use Azure via their toolsets. I feel like it was mildly obvious that they'd do okay.
  - ManBlanket 6y ago
    The comparison of cloud platforms truly is heavily distorted at a startup. Most companies aren't comparing AWS and MS in a vacuum when presented with the decision. How much of the world's software runs on dotnet? Windows, Office, and Active Directory command their own predominant shares, not to mention other tools like CRM. MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Suppose the CTO for an insurance claims company is presented with the decision of migrating a legacy platform which already runs on a fat stack of MS products. They don't even need a salesperson to convince them Azure is the obvious first choice, because to them it's just another cannon on the battleship. In my experience the tribal evangelism for AWS is... intense... and they've somehow convinced people to proselytize unpaid on their behalf. Having worked with both I'll occasionally mention Azure if only to revel at the spicy takes. Honestly though, I worked at that claims company I mentioned. Likewise the startup I work at today threw their hats in with AWS. Both were respectively good decisions, both bad in their own right. As ever, try to do everything and something is going to give.
    - toast0 6y ago
      > MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Microsoft earned thst reputation with a lot of development and organizational practices that they've since abandoned. It may take people a while to notice, but today's Microsoft is not prioritizing stable software interfaces and backwards compatability. It took a lot of testing to ensure existing software and hardware continued to work with new operating systems, and they're not doing as much testing anymore.
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        Microsoft had some of the best documentation in the world. People really don't understand how valuable that is, and how important. Microsoft in 2020 certainly doesn't understand. They produce vast reams of auto-generated "documentation" where the only text is the function names with spaces added between the words.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - recursive 6y ago
    Alt-Tab isn't broken for everyone. It's working on all three of the windows machines I regularly use.
    - dboreham 6y ago
      Alt-tab is working for me. Meanwhile, the bug first seen in prerelease versions of the new shell on NT3.51 in 1995, where the taskbar won't hide, is still present in the latest Win10 insider preview.
      - vntok 6y ago
        Sounds like a feature, not a bug!
- thekyle 6y ago
  I may be wrong but I don't believe Microsoft even has a dedicated Windows division any more.
  - radicaldreamer 6y ago
    Well that and they got rid of their QA and test engineers so nothing is caught before it's sent out... you just can't rely on free beta testers for everything.
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      > You just can't rely on free beta testers for everything. Linux distros seem to manage pretty well...? Or is this "it's only bad if Microsoft do it"?
      - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
        If I'm paying for it, which I do hell no. O also use Linux but I don't ost for it, and it's hobbyist / power user os and I can actually fix things there unlike windows.
      - ehvatum 6y ago
        That’s an interesting point. Which for-profit Linux distro is using you as an unpaid beta tester for their closed-source code?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - gralx 6y ago
        Fair point. But 90% of Linux submissions are corporate, last I checked. Corporations (usually) do a lot of internal testing before submitting, and then maintainers have to review submissions. This is long before the public ("beta testers") has to deal with any bugs. And that's only the kernel. Distributions and their package maintainers have their own quality controls, as do cross-distribution upstream developers. Public bug trackers (beta testers) are a complement to these. The division of labour in quality control of Linux systems is fine, diverse, and of variable effectiveness before beta testers come into the picture.
tubs 6y ago
Oh god I thought I was the only one who had noticed this... it drives me mad every single day.
- jasdine817 6y ago
  Sure it's not including Edge tabs in the alt tab screen? You can turn that off.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Me2. I tried three keyboards before concluding that wasn't the problem.
withinrafael 6y ago
Yep. For those that are seeking a temporary remedy, open Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer, create/modify REG_DWORD value named AltTabSettings and set its value to 1. Restart your PC (restarting the Shell alone is possible but will currently introduce more bugs).
- tubs 6y ago
  Thank you! This is honestly the best winterveil gift I have received this year, very much appreciated! When you say "temporary" remedy, is that implying there will be a real fix that obsoletes this, or this workaround will stop working at some point?
  - withinrafael 6y ago
    It's fixed in the next major release so hopefully we can restore the value back to 0 when it's pushed out in Q1 2021.
    - tubs 6y ago
      Awesome, thanks for the fix, and the super quick replies, have a great season. :-)
millzlane 6y ago
I rely heavily on alt+tab. I haven't noticed this. Can you explain a bit more?
- cheschire 6y ago
  It does exactly as described. Sometimes it will shift to the second window as intended. Often it will skip to the third window open instead, requiring one to continue cycling back to the second window.
  - nkrisc 6y ago
    You can Alt+Shift+Tab to go in reverse direction.
    - gralx 6y ago
      Or just release Tab while keeping Alt depressed and navigate the thumbnails with the arrow keys.
- bzb6 6y ago
  I think it only happens if you use Edge
  - millzlane 6y ago
    Oh okay, I use FF. This must be why. I alt+tabbed 100+times and didn't experience the issue. Didn't edge tabs now recently show in alt+tab? I wonder if it's because they are surfing between two tabs and alt tab is showing the last tab they clicked on rather than the last window they had up. FF uses CTRL+Tab to cycle through tabs like alt tab.
franga2000 6y ago
Same here, along with Win+Tab (the "exploded" window view) crashing the shell. Every time I have to boot into Windows, I'm even more disappointed by what has happened to what was once a great OS.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Ubuntu user here and very occasional Windows user too. Is the problem only with the GUI (same as liking or not Gnome Shell or having it crash) or is the problem with the "real" OS under the GUI? Example 1 for the GUI: it drives me crazy that I can't resize the dialogs to edit the properties of a scheduled task. They were probably designed for 800x600 screens and they were a bad design back then (a text area please and join the lines.) Example 2 for the core: a process keeps track of its parent but if the patent exits the process doesn't update the reference so you can end up with a reused process id in the child process data table. I run into that a couple of weeks ago.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    I don't relly develop for Windows, so most of my problems are related to OS GUIs and bundled software. Like how for some reason, most of the bundled UWP programs stopped working on my laptop after an update or how Windows 10 still supports two audio "channels" (default and communication) which many apps respect but the output device switcher only switches the default one and not the communication one and these options aren't even available in the "new" (it's been like 5 years at this point!!) settings app so you have to use the old "control panel" one which has now been removed from the menu and sometimes even search and the only way to get to it is to search for something related ans when it opens switch the tab to what you need even though this is not some obscure feature but something that every mainstream communication program uses and most users eventually run into and everyone constantly bitches about yet there is still no fix or even acknowledgement from MSFT because they fired all their testers/QC and care less about their paying customers than even the meanest of OSS maintainers. </rant> Regarding the more technical side, while I'm entirely unqualified to comment on kernels and low-level APIs, I actually like some NT/Windows design choices quite a lot more than Linux. Network transparency (\\shares) is a big one and in general the way external filesystems are handled (mounting makes no sense for desktop use - especially the way udisks or whatever does it). And while the way programs are stored and installed on Linux is a neat idea in theory, it all breaks the moment one app doesn't follow the standard and it imposes far too many restrictions that Windows doesn't suffer from. Edit: sorry for the rant, I'm stupidly tired and have had a few drinks. Happy holidays!

by qz2 6y ago

FartyMcFarter 6y ago

This may explain it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-role-in-cloud-focused-reorganization-1522335763 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-ro... > The company is breaking Windows in pieces. The platform technology, on which Microsoft’s partners build their own devices, apps and services, will now fall under Scott Guthrie, who runs the Azure business. Mr. Guthrie’s unit, called Cloud + AI Platform, will also include the company’s mixed-reality business, including Microsoft’s Hololens device, as well as its artificial-intelligence business. Maybe someone with insider knowledge will comment, but it looks like Windows is far from being a priority for Microsoft.

dmix 6y ago
Man I still can’t believe Azure is number 2 behind Amazon for cloud computing. When they first started their marketing push to developers years ago, which I remember was very aggressive and full of evangelism marketing which I disliked, I kind of blew them off as some mid tier or old school oddity. But it really shows you how powerful their enterprise sales machine is and the legacy reach of existing programming languages/frameworks. It’s always easy to underestimate Microsoft I guess. Ditto with Oracle and the like. From our view down in the startup world. That said. Alt-tab not working is an embarrassment though. And I hope they really haven’t let their OS QA slip this badly in favour of some growth area or whatever.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  They're including managed services like office 365 in that number though. Might be fair because aws includes their services as well, but I'm pretty sure aws main income is from ec2, while azure is business tooling like active directory, office etc
  - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    And they seem to be pushing customers very hard on moving from on-prem to cloud for Office and email stuff. I don't know if they're subsidising the cloud services for now, or what.
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      It's really obvious that Azure has much lower adoption than AWS. For example, I evaluated their new Front Door combo accelerator / CDN product recently. One page listed their customers, and there were about a half dozen total. Out of curiosity, I scanned the top 1000 domains and found none using it. I got the impression that I was one of the few people even evaluating it, let alone using it in production. Despite just kicking the tyres on the thing, I found about half a dozen bugs or missing critical features. That's just shocking to me. For comparison, CloudFront -- the most direct competitor -- is far ahead in features and is used by far more customers. It also works out of the box. All of the other Azure services other than plain virtual machines give me the same impression of being a first adopter and one of only a handful of customers.
      - PretzelPirate 6y ago
        Those customers are probably using it in some of their services. I’ve worked with a number of enterprise companies who are moving to the cloud and most of them have never considered something like front door to route their traffic. I’ve brought Front Door into their architecture for the services I was working on, but even if they decide it’s a great thing for the entire company to use, it will take them over a year to get security to approve it, and then multiple years to get it rolled out to all of their products. With Azure’s core customer base being major enterprises, it’s not surprising that you had a hard time finding evidence.
- plif 6y ago
  Microsoft is also mostly purely tech. Amazon and Google (Alphabet) are more pervasive and threatening to other industries. For that reason, I'm not surprised. I've seen the decision come down to not wanting to give money to the other two many times. MS is in a great position there.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  They still have a big .NET following and they make it easier to use Azure via their toolsets. I feel like it was mildly obvious that they'd do okay.
- ManBlanket 6y ago
  The comparison of cloud platforms truly is heavily distorted at a startup. Most companies aren't comparing AWS and MS in a vacuum when presented with the decision. How much of the world's software runs on dotnet? Windows, Office, and Active Directory command their own predominant shares, not to mention other tools like CRM. MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Suppose the CTO for an insurance claims company is presented with the decision of migrating a legacy platform which already runs on a fat stack of MS products. They don't even need a salesperson to convince them Azure is the obvious first choice, because to them it's just another cannon on the battleship. In my experience the tribal evangelism for AWS is... intense... and they've somehow convinced people to proselytize unpaid on their behalf. Having worked with both I'll occasionally mention Azure if only to revel at the spicy takes. Honestly though, I worked at that claims company I mentioned. Likewise the startup I work at today threw their hats in with AWS. Both were respectively good decisions, both bad in their own right. As ever, try to do everything and something is going to give.
  - toast0 6y ago
    > MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Microsoft earned thst reputation with a lot of development and organizational practices that they've since abandoned. It may take people a while to notice, but today's Microsoft is not prioritizing stable software interfaces and backwards compatability. It took a lot of testing to ensure existing software and hardware continued to work with new operating systems, and they're not doing as much testing anymore.
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      Microsoft had some of the best documentation in the world. People really don't understand how valuable that is, and how important. Microsoft in 2020 certainly doesn't understand. They produce vast reams of auto-generated "documentation" where the only text is the function names with spaces added between the words.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- recursive 6y ago
  Alt-Tab isn't broken for everyone. It's working on all three of the windows machines I regularly use.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Alt-tab is working for me. Meanwhile, the bug first seen in prerelease versions of the new shell on NT3.51 in 1995, where the taskbar won't hide, is still present in the latest Win10 insider preview.
    - vntok 6y ago
      Sounds like a feature, not a bug!
thekyle 6y ago
I may be wrong but I don't believe Microsoft even has a dedicated Windows division any more.
- radicaldreamer 6y ago
  Well that and they got rid of their QA and test engineers so nothing is caught before it's sent out... you just can't rely on free beta testers for everything.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    > You just can't rely on free beta testers for everything. Linux distros seem to manage pretty well...? Or is this "it's only bad if Microsoft do it"?
    - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
      If I'm paying for it, which I do hell no. O also use Linux but I don't ost for it, and it's hobbyist / power user os and I can actually fix things there unlike windows.
    - ehvatum 6y ago
      That’s an interesting point. Which for-profit Linux distro is using you as an unpaid beta tester for their closed-source code?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - gralx 6y ago
      Fair point. But 90% of Linux submissions are corporate, last I checked. Corporations (usually) do a lot of internal testing before submitting, and then maintainers have to review submissions. This is long before the public ("beta testers") has to deal with any bugs. And that's only the kernel. Distributions and their package maintainers have their own quality controls, as do cross-distribution upstream developers. Public bug trackers (beta testers) are a complement to these. The division of labour in quality control of Linux systems is fine, diverse, and of variable effectiveness before beta testers come into the picture.

tubs 6y ago

Oh god I thought I was the only one who had noticed this... it drives me mad every single day.

jasdine817 6y ago
Sure it's not including Edge tabs in the alt tab screen? You can turn that off.
sandworm101 6y ago
Me2. I tried three keyboards before concluding that wasn't the problem.

withinrafael 6y ago

Yep. For those that are seeking a temporary remedy, open Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer, create/modify REG_DWORD value named AltTabSettings and set its value to 1. Restart your PC (restarting the Shell alone is possible but will currently introduce more bugs).

tubs 6y ago
Thank you! This is honestly the best winterveil gift I have received this year, very much appreciated! When you say "temporary" remedy, is that implying there will be a real fix that obsoletes this, or this workaround will stop working at some point?
- withinrafael 6y ago
  It's fixed in the next major release so hopefully we can restore the value back to 0 when it's pushed out in Q1 2021.
  - tubs 6y ago
    Awesome, thanks for the fix, and the super quick replies, have a great season. :-)

millzlane 6y ago

I rely heavily on alt+tab. I haven't noticed this. Can you explain a bit more?

cheschire 6y ago
It does exactly as described. Sometimes it will shift to the second window as intended. Often it will skip to the third window open instead, requiring one to continue cycling back to the second window.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  You can Alt+Shift+Tab to go in reverse direction.
  - gralx 6y ago
    Or just release Tab while keeping Alt depressed and navigate the thumbnails with the arrow keys.
bzb6 6y ago
I think it only happens if you use Edge
- millzlane 6y ago
  Oh okay, I use FF. This must be why. I alt+tabbed 100+times and didn't experience the issue. Didn't edge tabs now recently show in alt+tab? I wonder if it's because they are surfing between two tabs and alt tab is showing the last tab they clicked on rather than the last window they had up. FF uses CTRL+Tab to cycle through tabs like alt tab.

franga2000 6y ago

Same here, along with Win+Tab (the "exploded" window view) crashing the shell. Every time I have to boot into Windows, I'm even more disappointed by what has happened to what was once a great OS.

pmontra 6y ago
Ubuntu user here and very occasional Windows user too. Is the problem only with the GUI (same as liking or not Gnome Shell or having it crash) or is the problem with the "real" OS under the GUI? Example 1 for the GUI: it drives me crazy that I can't resize the dialogs to edit the properties of a scheduled task. They were probably designed for 800x600 screens and they were a bad design back then (a text area please and join the lines.) Example 2 for the core: a process keeps track of its parent but if the patent exits the process doesn't update the reference so you can end up with a reused process id in the child process data table. I run into that a couple of weeks ago.
- franga2000 6y ago
  I don't relly develop for Windows, so most of my problems are related to OS GUIs and bundled software. Like how for some reason, most of the bundled UWP programs stopped working on my laptop after an update or how Windows 10 still supports two audio "channels" (default and communication) which many apps respect but the output device switcher only switches the default one and not the communication one and these options aren't even available in the "new" (it's been like 5 years at this point!!) settings app so you have to use the old "control panel" one which has now been removed from the menu and sometimes even search and the only way to get to it is to search for something related ans when it opens switch the tab to what you need even though this is not some obscure feature but something that every mainstream communication program uses and most users eventually run into and everyone constantly bitches about yet there is still no fix or even acknowledgement from MSFT because they fired all their testers/QC and care less about their paying customers than even the meanest of OSS maintainers. </rant> Regarding the more technical side, while I'm entirely unqualified to comment on kernels and low-level APIs, I actually like some NT/Windows design choices quite a lot more than Linux. Network transparency (\\shares) is a big one and in general the way external filesystems are handled (mounting makes no sense for desktop use - especially the way udisks or whatever does it). And while the way programs are stored and installed on Linux is a neat idea in theory, it all breaks the moment one app doesn't follow the standard and it imposes far too many restrictions that Windows doesn't suffer from. Edit: sorry for the rant, I'm stupidly tired and have had a few drinks. Happy holidays!