5 ms·

Looks like you and I hit a nerve here on HN. You are right though. Microsoft will be shipping Windows 10 with an incomplete version of their new Edge browser wi

Looks like you and I hit a nerve here on HN. You are right though. Microsoft will be shipping Windows 10 with an incomplete version of their new Edge browser with the promise of adding critical features such as extensions in the future. Basically Windows 10 won't really be feature complete RTM for another 6 months. Even if Microsoft want to pretend it is ready now. Edit: To clarify the "hit a nerve" bit, when I wrote this my post and agildehaus's were both down voted.

ulfw 11y ago
Sounds exactly like OS X 10.10 Yosemite to me, where the promised Photos app (which really is nothing special) arrived many months later.
- baldfat 11y ago
  But the answer is going to be that Apple Updates are free. Which is going to be the same reply for Windows 10 for the next year.
  - radiorental 11y ago
    Just to clarify. MS said users of win 7 & 8 will be able to upgrade for free to win 10 within a year. I believe I read somewhere that this will be MS's last release #. It will be a rolling release from here on out. I have not seen details on how they monetize that unless they switch to Apple's HW model.
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      Microsoft has stated that most of the money they make from Windows is from selling licenses to hardware partners. Of course, they are also starting to move into an Apple-like hardware model (though of course they still allow third parties to make hardware).
      - baldfat 11y ago
        I don't see the Hardware Model at all. I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free. After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. As someone that always builds his own comoputers I jumped on the $29.99 Windows 7 deal which they offered the first 6 months and $39.99 for Windows 8 which was good for the first three months (Off the top of my head not needed to be accurate for arguement sake) It's free for a year to upgrade and than back to business as usual.
        joshuapants 11y ago
        > I don't see the Hardware Model at all. They sell computers and mobile phones of their own design tailored for their own OS. The only difference is that they allow third party hardware and Apple doesn't. > I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free. I agree. > After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. This doesn't seem to be consistent with their stated goals and the direction they've been moving in. The idea is that Windows 10 is the last numbered version of Windows, after that it will be evergreen. What upgrades are there to sell?
- kozukumi 11y ago
  In some ways yes it is the same. However Photos isn't exactly the most important piece of software that comes with your OS. Microsoft are trying to change how people think of their web browser. Edge is very important yet they are launching it without one of the biggest features needed in a modern browser, extension support.
  - veidr 11y ago
    Certainly, browser extensions are important to some people. But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions?
    - acheron 11y ago
      But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions? In 2013, this article[1] gave numbers of anywhere from 9% to 22% of users blocking ads, which requires an extension AFAIK. So, "yes". Even if those numbers are exaggerated due to skewed measurements, I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than 1%. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad-blocking-is-on-the-rise/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad...
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      If you include Flash and Silverlight? Uhh yes. Likely over 90% of browser users use one or more extension.
      - wlesieutre 11y ago
        Edge supports Flash already, so if that's all that 90% of people use, it won't be a problem. And it's typically categorized as a "plug-in" rather than an extension, so I wouldn't lump it in with the extension functionality. Not sure if it has Silverlight, but since we aren't streaming the 2008 Olympics and Netflix doesn't need it anymore I'm not terribly worried.
  - themartorana 11y ago
cm2187 11y ago
I would be surprised if they would make such a gamble. The last thing they can afford is another PR disaster with Windows 10. Right now, there is very little incentive for a user to move on from Windows 7 on an existing machine, particularly if it is not touch enabled. Now imagine if they hear that Windows 10 is riddled with bugs and doesn't work.
- pp19dd 11y ago
  It may not be perfect at this very moment, but it will get more polished as time goes on. It has to. The carrot they're dangling is a free upgrade, so think I might take this gamble. I'm not a penny pincher, but even so I cringe at the thought of paying for operating system upgrades. This opportunity won't last forever, so I'll start with laptops and work my way up.
  - porker 11y ago
    I'll take the free upgrade too, but if there's a 12 month window to upgrade I'll take it in month 11...
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      You should. But I strongly suspect after a year Microsoft will extend the upgrade indefinitely. The whole year limit only exists to accelerate Windows 10 upgrades (to add urgency to it). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to end the free upgrade program after that point. They've already sacrificed most of the private licence revenue by the majority of the people buying them already upgrading, so the remaining trickle after the year won't be significant. But I might be wrong. They did end the Windows 8 $25 upgrade after a year for real. So we'll have to wait and see.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    But why is a free upgrade a good thing? What do I get by upgrading? To a power user you get lots of nice things. Hyper-V is fantastic from Windows 8. Explorer is also faster and locks a lot less files and folders (the "you can't delete a folder that contained pictures" bug in windows 7). But to a common user, there is nothing better in windows 10, other than the fact that they need to relearn how to use windows. From a UI point of view, the only additions are multiple desktops, which is at best a featurette, and moving the search bar from within the start menu to the task bar, which isn't exactly a revolution. If you don't have touch enabled on your machine, which would be the common case for windows 7, upgrading to windows 10 is only going to be a hassle.
ninjaoxygen 11y ago
This is their chosen strategy though, that as of Windows 10 there will no longer be full major Windows versions. Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list. While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be mediocre-to-disastrous from the user's point of view so far. For business users, it's also painful from an internal support point of view, for much the same reasons. And as you mentioned, for an OS or other platform software, anyone developing other software that runs on top of it also faces problems. About the only thing this kind of constantly updating deployment model has been good for is getting security and stability patches out faster. This is beneficial, but that benefit is tempered by the "just ship junk and patch it later" philosophy that has become widespread at the same time. Many of those patches simply shouldn't ever have been necessary in the first place, but new releases are now routinely of such poor quality that many people just don't bother, and advice to wait until SP1 or the equivalent is common. If I were Microsoft, I think I'd want my new flagship OS to be the stable, reliable, trustworthy antidote to Apple's broken-within-a-week operating systems[1], not something with the same reputation for constantly tweaking things as Chrome/Firefox, on-line SaaS apps, and the like. [1] For legal reasons, I would like to point out that not all Apple operating systems break within a week. In fact, the fastest I have seen a mainstream Apple device break in practice was approximately an hour after purchase, when iOS updated on a mobile device almost immediately, leaving the device so much worse than what the purchaser had previously tried out and thought they were buying that they took it straight back to the shop and demanded a full refund.
  - lholden 11y ago
usernick 11y ago
Are we calling extensions a "critical feature" of browsers now? They're certainly commonplace and expected but "critical"? Hardly.
wernercd 11y ago
iPhone shipped feature-incomplete yet people were screaming from the rafters about how awesome it was. Earth Shattering. MAGICAL! Gotta love the double standards...
- mattkevan 11y ago
  No, not really. The original iPhone was feature complete, in that the features it shipped with were complete. Whether it had all the features it could have done is another question. However that misses the point - the goal was to set the bar for a fully touch-screen interface, not compete on feature lists. And it was earth shattering. That one product launch was the catalyst for a huge amount of change – our entire computing landscape has been shaken up, previous incumbents are dead or dying, new industries have been created and billions of dollars of value has been created and destroyed.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  The current Win10 builds are not even close to having the polish iPhone 1 had. There's all sorts of inconsistencies and screwed up stuff. Hell, just clicking on search settings doesn't even work (in true JS style even; it just does nothing, no error, no response). OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Metro app fiasco, more or less. And console windows are now resizable. Font rendering is blurry in half the OS. And most settings are messed up and unusable until you manage to get into the "legacy" settings dialog. And uh... That's it?" Yeah they added a weak attempt at some new window management, but nothing super usable. Anything is better than Win8, but Win7 users are not going to enjoy it. They'll probably prefer the old shell, with the new kernel extensions.
  - ladzoppelin 11y ago
    Anybody who thinks Windows 7 is better than Windows 8.1 needs to get a new monitor or their eyes checked. Also if you update to the latest Windows 10 build, released this weekend, it fixes the search/start menu launch stuff. I am running 8.1 and Windows 10 in a virtual plus several users are already running 10. Blurry fonts are the app makers problem, just like Apple.

ulfw 11y ago

Sounds exactly like OS X 10.10 Yosemite to me, where the promised Photos app (which really is nothing special) arrived many months later.

baldfat 11y ago
But the answer is going to be that Apple Updates are free. Which is going to be the same reply for Windows 10 for the next year.
- radiorental 11y ago
  Just to clarify. MS said users of win 7 & 8 will be able to upgrade for free to win 10 within a year. I believe I read somewhere that this will be MS's last release #. It will be a rolling release from here on out. I have not seen details on how they monetize that unless they switch to Apple's HW model.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Microsoft has stated that most of the money they make from Windows is from selling licenses to hardware partners. Of course, they are also starting to move into an Apple-like hardware model (though of course they still allow third parties to make hardware).
    - baldfat 11y ago
      I don't see the Hardware Model at all. I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free. After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. As someone that always builds his own comoputers I jumped on the $29.99 Windows 7 deal which they offered the first 6 months and $39.99 for Windows 8 which was good for the first three months (Off the top of my head not needed to be accurate for arguement sake) It's free for a year to upgrade and than back to business as usual.
      - joshuapants 11y ago
        > I don't see the Hardware Model at all. They sell computers and mobile phones of their own design tailored for their own OS. The only difference is that they allow third party hardware and Apple doesn't. > I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free. I agree. > After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. This doesn't seem to be consistent with their stated goals and the direction they've been moving in. The idea is that Windows 10 is the last numbered version of Windows, after that it will be evergreen. What upgrades are there to sell?
kozukumi 11y ago
In some ways yes it is the same. However Photos isn't exactly the most important piece of software that comes with your OS. Microsoft are trying to change how people think of their web browser. Edge is very important yet they are launching it without one of the biggest features needed in a modern browser, extension support.
- veidr 11y ago
  Certainly, browser extensions are important to some people. But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions?
  - acheron 11y ago
    But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions? In 2013, this article[1] gave numbers of anywhere from 9% to 22% of users blocking ads, which requires an extension AFAIK. So, "yes". Even if those numbers are exaggerated due to skewed measurements, I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than 1%. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad-blocking-is-on-the-rise/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad...
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    If you include Flash and Silverlight? Uhh yes. Likely over 90% of browser users use one or more extension.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Edge supports Flash already, so if that's all that 90% of people use, it won't be a problem. And it's typically categorized as a "plug-in" rather than an extension, so I wouldn't lump it in with the extension functionality. Not sure if it has Silverlight, but since we aren't streaming the 2008 Olympics and Netflix doesn't need it anymore I'm not terribly worried.
- themartorana 11y ago

cm2187 11y ago

I would be surprised if they would make such a gamble. The last thing they can afford is another PR disaster with Windows 10. Right now, there is very little incentive for a user to move on from Windows 7 on an existing machine, particularly if it is not touch enabled. Now imagine if they hear that Windows 10 is riddled with bugs and doesn't work.

pp19dd 11y ago
It may not be perfect at this very moment, but it will get more polished as time goes on. It has to. The carrot they're dangling is a free upgrade, so think I might take this gamble. I'm not a penny pincher, but even so I cringe at the thought of paying for operating system upgrades. This opportunity won't last forever, so I'll start with laptops and work my way up.
- porker 11y ago
  I'll take the free upgrade too, but if there's a 12 month window to upgrade I'll take it in month 11...
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    You should. But I strongly suspect after a year Microsoft will extend the upgrade indefinitely. The whole year limit only exists to accelerate Windows 10 upgrades (to add urgency to it). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to end the free upgrade program after that point. They've already sacrificed most of the private licence revenue by the majority of the people buying them already upgrading, so the remaining trickle after the year won't be significant. But I might be wrong. They did end the Windows 8 $25 upgrade after a year for real. So we'll have to wait and see.
- cm2187 11y ago
  But why is a free upgrade a good thing? What do I get by upgrading? To a power user you get lots of nice things. Hyper-V is fantastic from Windows 8. Explorer is also faster and locks a lot less files and folders (the "you can't delete a folder that contained pictures" bug in windows 7). But to a common user, there is nothing better in windows 10, other than the fact that they need to relearn how to use windows. From a UI point of view, the only additions are multiple desktops, which is at best a featurette, and moving the search bar from within the start menu to the task bar, which isn't exactly a revolution. If you don't have touch enabled on your machine, which would be the common case for windows 7, upgrading to windows 10 is only going to be a hassle.

ninjaoxygen 11y ago

This is their chosen strategy though, that as of Windows 10 there will no longer be full major Windows versions. Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.

Silhouette 11y ago
Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list. While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be mediocre-to-disastrous from the user's point of view so far. For business users, it's also painful from an internal support point of view, for much the same reasons. And as you mentioned, for an OS or other platform software, anyone developing other software that runs on top of it also faces problems. About the only thing this kind of constantly updating deployment model has been good for is getting security and stability patches out faster. This is beneficial, but that benefit is tempered by the "just ship junk and patch it later" philosophy that has become widespread at the same time. Many of those patches simply shouldn't ever have been necessary in the first place, but new releases are now routinely of such poor quality that many people just don't bother, and advice to wait until SP1 or the equivalent is common. If I were Microsoft, I think I'd want my new flagship OS to be the stable, reliable, trustworthy antidote to Apple's broken-within-a-week operating systems[1], not something with the same reputation for constantly tweaking things as Chrome/Firefox, on-line SaaS apps, and the like. [1] For legal reasons, I would like to point out that not all Apple operating systems break within a week. In fact, the fastest I have seen a mainstream Apple device break in practice was approximately an hour after purchase, when iOS updated on a mobile device almost immediately, leaving the device so much worse than what the purchaser had previously tried out and thought they were buying that they took it straight back to the shop and demanded a full refund.
- lholden 11y ago

usernick 11y ago

Are we calling extensions a "critical feature" of browsers now? They're certainly commonplace and expected but "critical"? Hardly.

wernercd 11y ago

iPhone shipped feature-incomplete yet people were screaming from the rafters about how awesome it was. Earth Shattering. MAGICAL! Gotta love the double standards...

mattkevan 11y ago
No, not really. The original iPhone was feature complete, in that the features it shipped with were complete. Whether it had all the features it could have done is another question. However that misses the point - the goal was to set the bar for a fully touch-screen interface, not compete on feature lists. And it was earth shattering. That one product launch was the catalyst for a huge amount of change – our entire computing landscape has been shaken up, previous incumbents are dead or dying, new industries have been created and billions of dollars of value has been created and destroyed.
MichaelGG 11y ago
The current Win10 builds are not even close to having the polish iPhone 1 had. There's all sorts of inconsistencies and screwed up stuff. Hell, just clicking on search settings doesn't even work (in true JS style even; it just does nothing, no error, no response). OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Metro app fiasco, more or less. And console windows are now resizable. Font rendering is blurry in half the OS. And most settings are messed up and unusable until you manage to get into the "legacy" settings dialog. And uh... That's it?" Yeah they added a weak attempt at some new window management, but nothing super usable. Anything is better than Win8, but Win7 users are not going to enjoy it. They'll probably prefer the old shell, with the new kernel extensions.
- ladzoppelin 11y ago
  Anybody who thinks Windows 7 is better than Windows 8.1 needs to get a new monitor or their eyes checked. Also if you update to the latest Windows 10 build, released this weekend, it fixes the search/start menu launch stuff. I am running 8.1 and Windows 10 in a virtual plus several users are already running 10. Blurry fonts are the app makers problem, just like Apple.