Windows 10 has finally settled into a groove. We are just over two years from the initial release of Windows 10. Part of the promise of Windows 10 was Windows as a service, or in other words, continual updates to Windows rather than monolithic version releases every couple of years. However, the haphazard schedule of feature updates was not pleasing to one stable customer of Microsoft’s. Businesses don’t love surprises, and they need time to plan ahead, and test, in order to deliver the vision that Microsoft has envisioned for Windows 10 going forward, so 2017 is the first year we get to see the new spring and fall updates, first with the Creators Update on April 11, 2017, and now the Fall Creators Update which became widely available on October 17, 2017.

The biannual release schedule still might be too aggressive for a lot of enterprises, but it’s a balancing act for Microsoft to keep the features coming for consumers, security updates coming for enterprise, and of course, keeping Windows 10 fresh in the eyes of everyone. Hopefully this new schedule works out though, since it’s nice to see fewer, smaller updates, rather than annual massive updates which may cause even more challenges.

Windows 10 Version History
Version	Version Number	Release Date
Windows 10 Original Release	1507	July 29, 2015
November Update	1511	November 10, 2015
Anniversary Update	1607	August 2, 2016
Creators Update	1703	April 5, 2017
Fall Creators Update	1709	October 17, 2017

And a smaller update is arguably what we’ve had for both of the 2017 releases for Windows, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. That’s not to take away from the many small changes and fixes under the hood, but more a fact that Windows 10 is solid, and stable, and updates only need to further smooth out some of the rough spots, and add a few new ideas for people to utilize. Windows 10 is now well known, with an official monthly active user base of over 500 million devices. It’s a solid number, despite being well under initial targets at launch.

With the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft has added quite a few new features, including some that missed out on the April update. They’ve taken the first step towards an improved OS and app design language since Windows 10 first launched, they’ve added more accessibility, more security, and finally added one of the top feature requests since Windows 10 launched. Let’s dig into the changes.

Fluent Design

First announced at the Build 2017 developer’s conference, Fluent Design is the first major overhaul of the Windows 10 design and theme since Windows 10 washed away the remnants of Windows 8 back in 2015. Overall, the original design of Windows 10 has served it well, and it has been made clear after using it for the last several years that lessons were certainly learned from Windows 8, and those lessons were applied to Windows 10 to make a much more coherent and usable design language. But, as with anything, there’s always room for improvement, and the Redmond company is hoping that Fluent Design not only improves on the original, but keeps the UI and theming fresh.

Windows 10 runs on many different devices. The scalability of it is somewhat amazing, and after years of wanting to consolidate it’s OS efforts across device categories, it seems to have finally happened with Windows 10. But that brings some challenges as well, and as hardware has continued to evolve, we’ve started to see many different usage scenarios that traditional mouse and keyboard input would never work on. Touch, of course, is the most obvious and pervasive of these, and falls into the 2D category of input methods, along with keyboard and mouse, stylus, and more of the input methods we are used to. But we now live in a world with virtual reality, and augmented reality, both which live in the 3D space. There’s also 0D devices, such as the recently announced Cortana powered Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker and similar devices such as the Amazon Echo. IoT is becoming pervasive, and appears to be the next growth target in computing.

Fluent Design targets more than just 2D with five basic concepts: light, depth, motion, material, and scale. It may seems like a simple idea, but the key Fluent Design is that it will work well across different device types, but still be very useful on the traditional PC where Windows 10 still has its largest audience.

The move from Windows 7 to Windows 8 was pretty jarring, and the design language was very much flat and blocky. Windows 10 had already added some of the depth back in, but with Fluent Design they have also brought the essence of Windows 7 Aero back, along with new elements as well.

It’s tough to discuss Fluent Design without seeing it, because it’s not just a static idea. All of the elements tie in together to make the experience easier to navigate, more coherent, and more immersive. Check out this video that Microsoft created for their Dev Day:

Light is one of the key elements for selection, and this is doubly the case when you’re thinking of VR and AR technology, where a light gaze can be your pointer. Subtle highlights in lists give a stronger sense of where you are, and what you’re selecting.

Depth plays a big part too, and in the video you can see how going forward and backward in apps gives the feeling of going into an app or image, and then back out, connecting the experience of movement with where you are. This also plays into the motion, where you’ll see parallax scrolling and more.

Material selection is the transparency effects that will likely remind most people of Aero, but it is much more than just blurring. Instead of just background colors and blur, they will be doing multiple layers with Gaussian blur, exclusion blend, color and tint overlays, and tiled noise texture. The acrylic material can bring additional layering and depth to the app as well, but material is also able to be tied into scale, where if an app is in a windowed mode, it can have some blurring, but in a full-screen view, the blurring is eliminated to create focus on the one app.

Scale is likely the most underrated of them all, but Windows 10 is designed to work on everything from IoT to PC to Xbox to Surface Hub, so scale is critical to creating an app which will work across all of those form factors.

It’s hard to deny that Fluent Design is both form and function. There are design elements that are going to improve usability, but those same design elements also just look great. As we move forward, hopefully we’ll start to see more and more of this appear inside of Windows 10 and in the apps we use.

That’s really the only downside to Fluent Design right now though. There’s some of it sprinkled inside of Windows 10, and there’s work to be done to bring it more prominently to the forefront. The Action Center, for instance, has some elements of Fluent Design, but hovering over one of the notifications doesn’t bring any lighting effects to let you know you’re able to select it. Only some of the built-in apps have support right now. This will come over time, and likely even more slowly for third party apps, but it’s not here yet, at least not to its full extent.

OneDrive Files on Demand

I’ll admit, I’m a heavy user of OneDrive. It was a tough pill to swallow when Windows 10 launched and removed the support for OneDrive placeholders that arrived with Windows 8.1. Placeholders allowed you to see your entire OneDrive collection, even if it wasn’t downloaded to your PC, and then if you needed a file, you could double click it to download and open. It’s a simple concept, but the original implementation had some issues. Some of the issues were end-user related, such as people not understanding a file they had access to at home might not be available to them on an airplane, and some of them were app issues with the extended delays that might occur when waiting to download a file.

With the new Files on Demand, hopefully that is all fixed. First off, there’s a new setting in the OneDrive app in the system tray that enables and disables this functionality.

If you really prefer to just have everything downloaded, you can keep the original Windows 10 method where only folders you explicitly say to sync are downloaded. If you want Files on Demand, you have to check the box.

Once checked, files in OneDrive will gain a new status icon to display if they are online or downloaded. As I quickly found out though, it’s a bit confusing, in that OneDrive will still only display folders that you have told it to display in the Select Folders settings. So even if you have 10,000 files in your music folder, you won’t see them unless you first ensure that folder is synced. The difference is now it won’t download the file until you access it.

If you open a file, Windows 10 will automatically download it for you, and then open it. Depending on the size of the file, and your network speed, this could cause some delay, but the space savings will be significant, especially if you have a smaller SSD.

Microsoft has created a settings page for Automatic File Downloads, where you can unblock apps from automatically downloading files. For reasons that don’t seem to make any sense, this setting is under the Privacy section of Settings, and it doesn’t appear to be fleshed out yet, since you can’t block apps here, only unblock them. The wording does make it seem like Microsoft is going to open this up to other online file providers as well, which should be good news for many.

Also, in what is almost certainly a bid to improve performance, if you open a photo, for instance, and it has to be downloaded first, Windows 10 will also automatically download the photo before and after, so that if you move to the next file, it’s already available. This is a good idea for performance, but you may end up downloading lots of files you didn’t need.

Overall, first impressions of Files on Demand is positive. It can be a bit confusing to set up, since unlike Windows 8.1, you have to still tell it which folders you want to see, but the performance is solid, and it is very easy to distinguish between files that are already downloaded and those that are not. You still get a thumbnail for images that aren’t downloaded as well.

Storage Sense

In addition to freeing up space by being able to access your OneDrive files only when you need them, Microsoft has improved Storage Sense in an effort to automatically help clean up files you likely no longer require.

One of the most useful ones, at least for me, will be to delete files in Downloads that haven’t changed in 30 days. That folder tends to accumulate a lot of cruft that doesn’t need to be kept.

In addition, it can automatically empty your recycle bin, temp files, and previous versions of Windows, which are kept for a period of time in case you need to or want to roll back to the last version.

Storage Sense is a small idea, but should be very helpful. It even keeps track of how much space it’s cleaned up for you.

One obvious improvement here would be to integrate this with OneDrive as well, to give the option to clean up space from OneDrive files you haven’t accessed in a while now that Files on Demand can fetch them back quickly. Hopefully this comes in a future update.

Interaction Updates: Accessibility and more

The Fall Creators Update also brings some interesting new developments in the interaction with Windows itself. There’s now the ability to control Windows 10 with your eyes, using Eye Control beta, a much improved screen reader, and improved dictation support, all in an effort to make Windows more accessible.

Eye Control

If anyone has had a chance to try out a system with the Tobii Eye Tracker, it’s a very interesting camera system that can accurately track your eyes, displaying exactly where you are looking. This has been leveraged on gaming PCs as not only a way to allow faster interactions, but for training as well, since you can review your footage and see where you were looking during the game. Microsoft has added this technology support into Windows to allow people with disabilities to operate an onscreen mouse, keyboard, and text-to-speech, using their eyes.

Narrator

For visually impaired people, Narrator has been improved using Microsoft Cognitive Services, meaning the Narrator program can generate image descriptions for images that are not accompanied by text.

Dictation

Dictation has also been improved with modern speech recognition services, which are cloud based, much like digital personal assistants, and the accuracy of the speech recognition should be improved quite a bit.

Color Filters

Color vision deficiency, or color blindness, is a condition that affects many people. With the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft has added the ability to apply filters to Windows to improve the experience of using a computer for people that suffer from this condition. They’ve added five filters to cover the various types of color blindness.

Swipe Keyboard

Even though Windows 10 Mobile always had a great swipe keyboard, the desktop OS was always saddled with a hunt and peck touch based keyboard. With the Fall Creators Update, you can now choose the swipe keyboard when in touch mode by pressing the keyboard icon in the top left of the touch keyboard. The new Swipe keyboard is practically identical to the Windows 10 Mobile one, and that’s not a bad thing. It has word prediction as well. It does have a drawback in that it is size constrained, so it’s a bit odd looking on a larger display, but should be an improvement over the original keyboard to anyone that prefers a swipe style, which should be everyone by this point.

Emoji Picker

If you love Emoji, there’s a new Emoji picker as well, which can be accessed with Win + Period or Semicolon.

However, it’s currently only available to people with their region set to the USA, which is unfortunately an incredibly common problem for users outside of the USA, such as myself. Even though Microsoft is a global company, then tend to region restrict random things for no apparent reason, and this is one of them.

Find My Pen

Pen interaction has been a feature that Microsoft has promoted for some time, however losing your pen can be a bit of a pain. To help with lost pens, Windows 10 will now track your pen based on where it was used with your PC last. Pens don’t have built-in GPS, unlike phones, or other devices, so this is the best compromise available. With the cost of a digital pen being what it is, even helping once will make this feature worth it.

Edge Updates

It wouldn’t be an update to Windows 10 without some new features and fixes in the Edge browser, and with the Fall Creators Update, Edge now gets bumped to EdgeHTML 16. It’s a bit disappointing that Edge is still tied to the operating system update schedule, but with the biannual release schedule now locked in, it’s a better situation. As a new browser, Edge launched with Windows 10 in a state that was somewhat sparse, to say the least, but has gotten successively better with every update.

Some of the reasons Edge gets tied to Windows itself is that Edge tends to take advantage of new features coming to the OS, which they would not be able to test and implement outside of the current Windows Insider Program. For example, Edge has already gained some support of Fluent Design, with some acrylic on the tab bar. It’s subtle, but looks nice.

There’s still a lot of features that existed in Internet Explorer that have yet to make their way over to Edge, but they are slowly checking all the boxes. With the FCU, you can finally pin a website to the taskbar, and it gets the webpage icon, as it should. The only missing feature here is a way to customize it opening in a new window, or in a tab in the currently open window, since it’s locked into the latter only. That might not always be what a user would want, especially when heavily using web apps like mail.

One very nice feature that has arrived is the ability to annotate PDFs and e-books right in Edge. Edge is the default PDF viewer in Windows 10, and the ability to now sign and mark up PDFs right in the browser will be welcome to many. There’s always third-party utilities for this, but it’s nice to have the feature built-in. You can of course mark up with Windows Ink as well.

As part of the push to accessibility, Edge will now tap into the Windows Narrator to read websites aloud, just by right clicking the page and choosing “Read aloud”. This works for e-books and PDFs as well, and because it uses the built-in tools, you can easily adjust the voices or add new ones if necessary. You can quickly adjust the speed, or pause the reading, right in the browser window.

For those that miss the ability to browse in full screen, Edge 16 adds that feature back, which can be accessed with F11.

Another small change is the ability to edit the URLs for favorites. Yay.

One nice new feature is the ability to manage website permissions, right from the address bar. Clicking on the TLS lock, or the i icon if the site doesn’t have TLS, and you can see and adjust what permissions, such as webcam, location, or notifications, that the site has access to based on your previous responses. You can also view all website permissions under advanced settings.

One thing you still can’t do is actually view the site certificate. The information provided by Edge is very basic, with no option to open the certificate in the more advanced Windows certificate tools to check the trust chain, and more. This seems like an obvious requirement, but is still lacking.

Edge 16 has also added preview support for Service Workers, which are the prelude to Progressive Web Apps on Windows. Going to about:flags allows you to enable this to test PWAs on Edge, in preparation for full support coming in the next update.

For me, Edge is still my go-to browser mostly because of the fantastic job it does rendering text, especially on high DPI displays, but several years on, it’s still missing some very basic functionality, such as the ability to copy the link of an image, but the dev tools have continued to improve with every release. For some tasks, I still have to fall back to Chrome, but you can pretty comfortably use Edge as your daily browser now, which certainly wasn’t the case when it first launched. I look forward to seeing more feature updates coming, with the knowledge that they are chasing a moving target.

Windows Mixed Reality

One of the headline features of the Fall Creators Update is Windows Mixed Reality, which is the umbrella term Microsoft uses to describe any of their Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) features. Windows has a strong case for VR/AR, since the best experiences are going to require the brute compute power of a PC, and Microsoft was one of the pioneers of AR with HoloLens, but it has to be said, this market is completely in flux right now. VR hasn’t taken off as quickly as many would have hoped, although AR has made some inroads in the smartphone market.

As Microsoft often does, they’ve turned Mixed Reality into a platform, and that has had some immediate benefits. There’s now several VR headsets available from the major PC OEMs, hitting a couple of price points. Most of the headsets have resolutions of 2880x1440, with 90 Hz LCD panels, with the exception of the Samsung HMD Odyssey which is a 2880x1600 AMOLED headset. The headsets all include motion controllers as well.

With the power of a PC behind it, a Windows Mixed Reality headset should be able to offer some great experiences, but the biggest issue is the lack of use cases. Gaming is the obvious one, but VR gaming hasn’t really taken off yet despite the launch of the HTC and Oculus VR headsets.

AR does have some interesting use cases, and unlike VR doesn’t necessarily require a headset. Using the webcam on a device will allow the system to project images on the screen which appear to be in the real world, and this ties into the work done in Windows to support 3D animations and creations over the last couple of updates.

Overall, Windows Mixed Reality still needs to prove itself. The tech is still new, and we’ve yet to see any amazing experiences which necessitate the purchase and use of a head-mounted display. VR is amazing to use, but limited in usefulness, and AR is somewhat in its infancy. The idea of standardizing all of this is a good one, and having a consistent platform should help drive adoption, but the tech is simply too immature in the market to predict if this will be the next big thing in Windows, or just another small feature.

Bundled App Updates

Many of the built-in apps have gotten some subtle updates, but unlike Edge, most of the apps are less tied to Windows feature updates itself, so frequent updates are more the norm here. But with the Fall Creators Update, many of the built-in apps have started to support features like Fluent Design to give a nice refresh of the look and feel. A couple of apps have had more significant things done though.

Groove

The biggest news for Groove Music is that Microsoft is officially killing its streaming music service, Groove Music Pass. People who subscribe are being prompted to switch to Spotify, which Microsoft has partnered with. The two companies have worked together to allow Groove users to migrate all of their playlists over to Spotify until January.

For Groove Music Pass subscribers, this isn’t great news, since Groove did offer features not found in Spotify, such as the ability to watch music videos, the ability to mix your own music into playlists, and the ability to stream music uploaded to OneDrive even if it didn’t exist in the Groove subscription catalog.

Groove will continue to function as the built-in media player, and you’ll still be able to stream music uploaded to OneDrive, but the subscription music will be gone by the end of 2017, as will the ability to download mp3 files of purchased music, so if you’ve bought music off this service, go get it now.

Photos App

The Photos App gets a lot of new functionality, and is one of the biggest updates of the entire Fall Creators Update. You can now use the Photos app to create movies from your photos, or edit videos. You can add filters, text, and 3D effects to the videos as well. Photos will be adding the support for full 3D Objects soon too, allowing you to make stories from your photos. The process is very simple, and it can automatically add music to the videos as well. This really is a nice update.

Microsoft Store

Bearing a new name, and a new icon, the Windows Store is now the Microsoft Store. There’s small tweaks to the layout, but overall the use of the app is pretty much the same as before. This is also losing the ability to buy music though, as part of the Groove changes, so be sure to backup any music you’ve purchased from this service.

The app situation in the store is improving, although slowly. One of the biggest improvements to the store is the Desktop App Converter, which lets developers package existing Win32 apps into the store, and this has helped with several apps. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Apple would be brining iTunes to the Windows Store, through the Desktop Converter, which should be welcome news to many. The nice part of iTunes through the Store is that it will be isolated from the rest of the system.

They still have an uphill battle here, but any time they make it easier, it does help with adoption.

My People

Originally announced for the last update, but cut before release, is the My People functionality. This lets you pin your most used contacts to the task bar, over by the system tray. The goal is to make it easier to interact and share with them. You can drag and drop files onto their icon to share them, and launch their profile to view all interactions.

Bringing back the days of MSN messenger, emoji from pinned contacts will appear above their icon, giving a more intimate connection, or a more annoying connection, depending on the person you’ve pinned to the taskbar.

The idea behind My People is pretty solid, with an emphasis on people-first. Since the update came out a few weeks ago, I’ve not used it as much as I expected, but that may change as more apps integrate with the functionality.

Cortana

Cortana has gotten quite a bit of attention with this update, but not in Windows itself. Cortana has become the link between your Windows PC and your non-Windows based smartphone. This lets you work across devices, with the ability to continue emails on your PC that you started on your phone, and get and send SMS messages from your PC. It works fairly well, although it’s going to take some shifts in workflow to really start to take advantage of it, at least in my experience.

Cortana on the PC hasn’t been completely forgotten though. You can now issue voice commands to shut down, restart, or put your computer to sleep.

Performance Slider

First introduced on the new Surface Pro, Windows 10 now includes the ability to choose a power mode right on the task bar, to allow for better performance, or battery life.

Gaming Updates

Microsoft knows that gaming is still a big part of the PC experience, and also that gaming is one of the strongest markets for the PC, so they always dedicate some effort to improving gaming on the PC with each update.

Game Mode

Game Mode was added a while back, which grants exclusive, or priority access, to hardware resources for games that have it enabled. The idea is to provide a more consistent experience for the user, without any work required. Game Mode can now be toggled easily for each game right in the Game Bar interface.

GPU Monitor

For those that love more information, you can now monitor the GPU usage right in task manager, and it provides a surprising amount of detail including video decode, encode, and memory usage. It’s a feature that, when you think about it, is long overdue.

Mixer Updates

For those that want to perform game streaming, Microsoft’s Mixer service has been updated to provide better load times, and when broadcasting, you can now see audio stream sources.

TruePlay Anti-Cheating

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update also comes with a new anit-cheating API built right into Windows, called TruePlay. Cheating in online games can be a big problem, and often require the developer to put invasive code on the machine, which has its own host of security and privacy concerns. TruePlay is an API available for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games which allow limited interaction between games and the game monitoring system.

This is likely going to be controversial, but TruePlay is an opt-in system for the end user, and TruePlay is not a “block on launch” experience, which means it’s not an all or nothing. You can opt out of TruePlay, and the game can still function, if the developer allows it.

A game with TruePlay runs in a protected process, which inhibits many common cheating attacks. In addition, Windows will monitor the gaming process for behaviours and manipulations that indicate cheating, and alerts will be generated for the game to notify it of this. Privacy is going to be a big concern here, and data is only shared with developers of the game after “processing has deteremined cheating is likely to have occurred” to quote MSDN.

Being opt-in by the user is the right play here, since this can be invasive, but for UWP games it should be a better situation than the developer writing their own anti-cheating code, which could easily have far more privacy and security concerns than a system built into Windows.

Security Updates

Security is a never-ending battle, and each update Microsoft continues to add more features to help prevent malicious attacks. They have several new features that are worth going over for the Fall Creators Update.

Windows Defender Exploit Guard

The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit has been replaced with Windows Defender Exploit Guard features, and the EMET is no longer supported on Windows 10 v1709. Windows Defender Exploit Guard is a new set of Host Intrusion Prevention features which can be used to reduce the attack surface of Windows 10. It’s designed for an enterprise environment, and completely customizable through Group Policy.

It offers four general feature sets, which are exploit protection, attack surface reduction rules, network protection, and controlled folder access. For a full rundown on all of these new features, be sure to check out docs.microsoft.com which has all of the details and proper settings.

Windows Defender Application Guard

Application Guard is designed for Microsoft Edge to isolate untrusted sites, which are going to be a huge concern for any IT department. Internet Explorer did have some features to help in these scenarios, but Application Guard takes it to a whole new level by actually opening untrusted sites in an isolated Hyper-V enabled container, completely cut off from the host operating system. Any malicious code on the site would not be able to access the host OS, at least not easily, which offers a significant amount of protection over just blocking scripts and flash. The ability to do this through policy, and have only allowed trusted sites to run out of the container, is very powerful and is a strong reason to consider Edge for the enterprise.

Ransomware Protection

One specific feature to call out in Exploit Guard is the controlled folder access, which is a mitigation for ransomware. Ransomware has become a huge problem, and having malicious software encrypt your hard drive can put a damper on anyone’s day. Controlled folder access works by locking down folders to only authorized apps have access to the files. Luckily, controlled folder access is available to all in Windows 10, without needing any Group Policy to set it up.

You can enable controlled folder access right in the Security Center for Windows 10, and customize which folders you want it enabled for.

The idea behind controlled folders is pretty simple. Folders can’t get encrypted if the process doesn’t have access to them. Sometimes simple is the best.

Closing Thoughts

The new pattern of a spring and fall (or fall and spring, depending on your location) update for Windows 10 has worked well for 2017. The Creators Update added some new features, and several under the hood changes, but also missed out on a couple of features that were originally promised to hit the early update. Luckily, there’s another update six months later to target, so missed features aren’t missed for too long.

After a relatively tame Creators Update, there’s a lot of great new features in the Fall Creators Update, including the much-missed OneDrive Files On-Demand, which, for me, could have been the entire update. It’s great to finally have access to all of OneDrive, even if you don’t have enough disk space to store everything, which is often the case when SSDs are generally too small for bulk file storage. After a couple of weeks, the new Files On-Demand feature has been flawless, without apps randomly crashing as they wait for files to be downloaded, which wasn’t the case back in Windows 8.1.

Mixed Reality was a major selling point from Microsoft, but it’s still too early to know if this is going to take off in any meaningful way. The hardware is still expensive, although there’s a lot more options now with Mixed Reality, and the benefits are difficult to justify outside of a few select use cases. The AR portion of Mixed Reality might have more of an impact, with the Mixed Reality Viewer where you can project 3D objects into live space. Microsoft has gone pretty heavily into 3D animation, and VR/AR, but the jury is still out on it.

The people-first experiences are where Microsoft can really shine, and the My People has the potential to be a very nice tool. It needs more app integrations to really take off, but early use has been promising.

Photos has also suddenly become very powerful, with the ability to create and edit videos right in Photos itself. Originally this was announced as a separate app, but rolling it into Photos seems like a smart way to get it noticed, and hopefully used, since it does some cool effects without a lot of work.

The new security features are very strong, and should help drive adoption of Windows 10 in the enterprise. But even for the home user, or small business, controlled folder access is a great feature to protect your most important data.

Windows itself looks better than ever, and Fluent Design has been a nice refresh of the look of Windows 10. The lighting effects and acrylic give a nice touch to apps that leverage it. We’re still not at the point where all of Windows, or its apps, have fully embraced Fluent Design, but the initial apps and settings that support it really do look great.

Edge has continued to improve, and this update’s addition of PDF annotation is a very welcome change. Edge was difficult to recommend as a daily browser for a long time, but feature improvements have helped a lot, and it’s now generally good enough for most tasks. There’s still some features not available in Edge that were in IE, or Chrome, but the list gets shorter with every update.

Overall, the Fall Creators Update has been a very nice feature update, building off the Creators Update earlier in the year. The naming convention still needs a lot of work, but that’s not a huge concern. The rollout for the Fall Creators Update has been quicker as well, so Microsoft must be getting more confident in their update process. If your machine hasn’t gotten the update yet, head on over to Microsoft.com to download it and check it out.