Windows 10 Anniversary Update: The Road To Redstone
by Brett Howse on August 2, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
New Features And Built-In App Updates
Dark Mode
The Anniversary Update also adds another feature to personalize the experience: Dark Mode. As the name suggests, Dark Mode changes the default color scheme to black. The built-in apps also set their color scheme based on this setting, including mail, the store, and more.
This is certainly a nice feature for personalization, but it’s also a smart idea with recent launches of PCs and tablets with OLED displays. Lenovo showed off their own theme for Windows 10 at CES, for use with their OLED laptops, which eliminates a lot of the bright white display aspects that desktops and laptops have become accustomed to.
Other apps, such as Edge, also include a dark mode but the toggle is in the app settings, so you can customize this the way you prefer.
Mail App
The built-in Mail app hasn’t changed much visually since it was launched, but it’s continued to gain features which were very much missing when the OS first shipped. For instance, the mail client originally shipped with Conversation View as the only way to see your mail. About a month after Windows 10 shipped, an update arrived which allowed you to set the view to the more traditional view of chronological order.
With the Anniversary Update, Microsoft has finally fixed another missing feature which was a huge inconvenience for many people (myself included) which is you can finally send mail as another address. The Windows 8.1 mail client supports this, Microsoft’s Outlook.com supports this, but until this update, the Windows 10 mail client was missing this. You could of course put multiple accounts into it, but if you’ve consolidated to one, you can now use a drop-down selection on the send address to pick any addresses configured.
OneDrive
The OneDrive experience changed dramatically with Windows 10. Windows 8.1 featured the ability to see all of your files in OneDrive, and only download those that you wanted to access. Windows 10 ditched that and went with a per-folder sync when OneDrive was configured. With the limited storage on many devices, this wasn’t always ideal. To compound matters, there was no app for OneDrive when the OS launched.
At least one of these issues is now gone, and while not tied to the Anniversary Update, there is now an app to access OneDrive. It does give access, and you can download files that you need, although it’s a traditional file-save dialog rather than just download it and keep the file in sync within the OneDrive folder like in Windows 8.1.
There were reports of placeholders coming back to Windows 10, but at least so far, there hasn’t been any official word of this feature coming back. Until a new solution is found, OneDrive is not be the integrated experience it was in Windows 8.1.
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powerarmour - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Indeed, and likewise nor is it fair to say 'Chrome is a battery hog' when plainly isn't on a Chromebook.BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
@powerarmour: "Indeed, and likewise nor is it fair to say 'Chrome is a battery hog' when plainly isn't on a Chromebook."Agreed. It's similar to how Safari is a much different program on MAC OS than it is anywhere else. It almost deserves a different name. Chrome is much different on a Chromebook than Windows. Certainly battery life issue are not the same for every platform and they are working to improve it. For instance, Android for a long time made use of Android browser rather than Chrome by default. While Chrome was a more fully featured browser, it also sucked far more energy to do its job. Now, the difference has depreciated to the point that Chrome is the default browser in newer Nexus devices. That said, android chrome still isn't the equal of the Windows and Linux versions and only the Windows version can be compared to Edge (which was the original topic of discussion here).
Murloc - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
chromebooks are hardly relevant for most users, and the discussion is clearly about windows laptops since it's being compared to edge.nikon133 - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
Also works better with touch, imho. I mostly use Chrome on my desktop and (docked) laptop... but on Surface, it is basically 100% Edge.faizoff - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
As everyone have answered @retrospooty, I have an unbranded 10.1 tablet that has 2 GB RAM with an Intel Atom CPU Z3735F BayTrail-T 1.33GHz. So Edge works great on that but the only thing stopping me from using it was adblock.Even on my desktop Chrome is a memory hog where I find each tab takes about 150-250 mb of RAM and surprisingly recently rediscovered Firefox takes a total of 350 MB with at least 10 tabs open.
So yeah Edge is the fastest among them all in terms of initial load plus browsing but the ads.. the ads kill my experience.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - link
As I said in the article, Edge renders text better than other browsers, especially on a high DPI device like Surface Pro 4 / Surface Book.Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
That's a huge plus too... and that's AFTER the upgrades Google made to Chrome a while back in terms of text rendering. Couple years back Chrome's text rendering at ANY resolution was really mediocre.Socius - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
Edge has the smoothest scrolling of any browser. It's also surprisingly fast, with ad-block enabled. The only downside to it is that there is no 100% popup block feature or addon.Lerianis - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link
Edge is great if you block ads.... especially VIDEO ads that even MSN loves to put 3-5 video ads ON THE SAME PAGE and slow Edge to a crawl.I finally did that in my hosts file for a short period and only rescinded that when websites started going to that blocking you from using their websites if you have adblock enabled.
andrejg - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
I use Edge almost all the time, unless there is app or site, that doesn't support Edge. i found very few that I use besides some pages from bank, that use also external certification via smartcard... or so... Really, i just use Edge as it was installed and only few times i was forced to use IE for compatibility reasons... I have found Fox and Chrome to add only complitations for normal use unless there is something special, that needs that particular browser.