It is pretty bad. It's specifically Enterprise that is effected, and if they're pushing these kinds of bugs on Enterprise customers then they really don't have the QA they need. Think about how much they care about what they push on standard customers.

It's genuinely bad, even if entire universe isn't affected. Shows sloppiness. Headline is too kind for implying this could be "some kind of design upgrade", instead of FUBAR.

This is the way.

The right click context menu for me has been unusable in certain circumstances for me for the past year or so. It's happened on multiple devices, including corporate issued dell and Lenovo machines. The menu options just stop responding to clicking. After getting fed up with this and all the other crap I didn't ask for, I finally just ripped the bandaid off, ditched dual booting, am now on full single boot Linux mint.

And, it's so fucking refreshing. I finally feel like the machines I built and own are mine again.

Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I'm pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You'd just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That's what I always do when Explorer's ears inexplicably catch fire and I'm either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there's something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it's just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

Even Microsoft (probably) isn't that stupid or desperate yet. What seems much more likely to me is that they will keep introducing AI features and more invasive ads gradually and making them opt-in or removable with the intention of making them mandatory later on.

I 100% believe that Microsoft fully understands that a lot of people aren't happy with most of these changes, but profit must grow and they are elbow-deep in their AI gamble so they must keep pushing just slowly enough to avoid most users and businesses feeling like looking for alternatives is worth the effort. They are treading a fine line and are sometimes pushing too hard, but that in itself can be a solid negotiation tactic to manipulate people into accepting bad deals and my guess is that it's fully intentional.

Technicians are baffled how, even with an astounding 90% hallucination rate, this still was more reliable than windows search.

It's less the vibe coding and more: this is what happens when you have the developers do all the QA and fire the actual QA staff.

They've been screwing up the Windows updates since Windows 10, vibe coding wasn't a thing at that point.

It's a combination of vibe coding and absolutely no QA testing, because they fired a fuck ton of QA people 10 years ago. Microsoft is making it's users beta test their fucking software through telemetry bug reporting. And we fucking pay for that privilege.

In a way they are. Their QA was sent overseas and at some point was cut down to basically skeleton crew.

Every engineer at MSFT was recently ordered to use AI.

The bulk of where MSFT makes money is not from its OS but from selling your data and being a cloud provider. They don't really care about the user experience anymore and that has very clearly shown to be their lowest priority for a few years on now.

A lot of what the other comments have said is right, but also add that to on top of all the layoffs theyve had and they keep telling their devs to double their efforts. Its been in so many meetings that at this point a single engineer should be able to do the work of the whole company...

the shareholders keep demanding doubling pace from their engineers but they just wont listen smh

They should just fire all the engineers already theyre clearly slacking off /s

Surely ME was worse than Vista?

Because the rigour and quality of work that is needed to do good software to get to market is insanely higher than the one required for keeping the money machine alive once you are a monopoly. So as you hire more and more to get your hands in as many pies as possible, have fewer and fewer experienced staff to train the new hires, and do questionable hires in leadership positions, the culture invariably shifts to doing less and less effort, or putting effort in the wrong place, and there you have it.

Now in Microsoft's case, the quality was never that high to begin with (but the scummy practices made up for that), and the pockets are deep aplenty, so I think we are in for quite the shitshow (it can, and it will, get even worse).

Because all of them have AI shares.

Because line go up

Because everyone left at the company is as bad as he is or worse?

probably saved some cash there from replacing human coders with an llm, by the looks of it.

vintage 🤌

It's Microsoft, same thing.