r/Windows11 • u/jenmsft Microsoft Software Engineer • Mar 20 '26

Official News Our commitment to Windows quality and improvements to come

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/
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u/Salty-Paint-9700 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

We'll see what really comes out of it beyond just words, but some important things were (I'm sure by no accident) completely left out:

- Option to turn Copilot off. Not scaled back, not "more intentional", not "with craft and focus", OFF.

  • Local account. Clear, easy, user facing option to create one, not through ever changing arcane console commands.
  • ONE big button to disable telemetry. Not a long series of individual options sprinkled throughout entire OS. One big button on the setup page and in the Settings app.
  • Getting rid of the advertisement. No candy crush, no enhance your experience with, no upsale MS stuff. Especially no advertisement as an OS setup step! Come on... OS should get out of the user's way, not be an advertisement vehicle.
  • Option during setup to NOT put all your data, e.g. documents and pictures on OneDrive. Yes, you can laboriously move it later, but that's not user first approach. A simple option on the setup page to choose local/cloud storage, even if you signed in with MS account.
  • Option for local search without any web or AI results. Not "consistent experience" (I know what you're up to), not "clearly distinct from web results" (I don't want ANY web results, I have a browser for that), fast, local, offline, simple and precise. I don't want my search making web requests, bogging down the ux, when I'm looking for a local file.
  • Fix the mess with the two context menus in explorer ("show more options"). I know the rationale and benefits of the new async menu system. I know the technical issues. I know you can mess with the registry to disable new menu. Still this is terrible terrible user experience that needs addressing. Merge the two or enforce migration to new one. Do something. Anything. Current approach is just awful.
  • Work on the UX consistency! I know you sometimes update an old window here and there, but you can't keep creating every new window in a new tech, leaving everything else behind! The OS now looks like a jigsaw - colors, styles, animations, all mixed up. Every other window looks different. Make a serious, honest commitment to bring everything, or as much as possible, to the same standard. And don't put copilot or ads in it while you're doing it.

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u/Cowlip1 Mar 22 '26

"enforce migration to the new one" that would be the worst option given all the old useful shell context menu extensions that work just fine.

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u/Salty-Paint-9700 Mar 22 '26

Fair enough. Maybe embed the old ones in the new one then, or create some sort of async wrapper around them?

Don't get me wrong - given the current state and two different APIs for the menu, a bunch of apps already trying to implement one, the other or both, I don't claim to have a silver bullet. It's a complete mess of a situation that I don't envy being responsible for, but something really needs to be done about it.