ARC1020, post: 16033, member: 262 said:
As others have mentioned, Microsoft shouldn't have removed codecs from Windows Media Player just to save a bit on licencing. VLC player is a useful piece of software, however Windows Media Player should be able to play the most popular content straight out of the box. Video in Windows Media Player always seemed to look better without any tweaking as well, which is obviously better for average users.
The mitigations used in EMET should become part of the OS and have the ability to update Application Configurations and Certificate Trust Configurations through Windows Update. Particularly in the case of Certificate Pinning (at least the built in ones such as Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), it would mean people wouldn't have to manually check root certificate thumbprints and serial numbers every time a website's certificate expires or is changed. But obviously they should still leave the ability for users to pin certificates themselves if they want to. And I'm not sure exactly how they would handle the swap over period in a smooth way.
Windows Firewall could do with revamping so you don't need to be a CCNA to configure it properly. As it is it's pretty poor for outbound control, and software can dial out with no notification to the user. Whether it's legitimate software, PUP's or malicious software, it's pretty much free to do what it wants. Even if that includes connecting to command-and-control domains.
They should stop insisting users run a Microsoft Account in order to use built-in Store Apps. There's no reason why Mail, Skype, Onedrive, etc. couldn't run on a local account and just let the user sign in with a username and password on an individual basis, with the option of saving username and passwords in Credential Manager.
They should stop making (service pack) updates available only through Windows Store. Allow users to download the update to hard drive if they want to, so they're not forced to download the same 4GB file for every single computer or have to re-download it every time they decide to wipe a computer and do a clean install.
Someone else mentioned better troubleshooting. I tend to agree as even the built-in troubleshooter could be implemented better. As an example, I installed Win 8.1 on a HP laptop and according to Device Manager there was an unknown device (with absolutely no indication what the device was). By going to Control Panel > Devices and Printers (then right-click > Troubleshooting), it not only identified what the device was (something that parks the hard drive if the laptop is dropped to prevent damage), but also gave a direct link to the HP page where the software could be installed from. So why couldn't it have launched this troubleshooter automatically when it recognised there was a problem, instead of just displaying an little yellow triangle in an area where the average person don't look anyway?
The ability to print-to-file should be standard. Lets face it XPS is (and always has been) a dead format, so allowing people to print to ISO standardised formats such as PDF and TIFF would be more useful. Hopefully it will become more commonly used in the business world and lead to the reduction of people needlessly printing absolutely everything on paper.
Internet Explorer should come with a user customisable 'Opera style' Speed Dial homepage. And whilst they're at it make the RSS feed icon visible again without having to open the 'Command Bar' to see it. Oh, and stop prompting users whether they want to view online video content in full screen mode, when they've just pressed a button to make it full screen in the first place (or at least don't link the 'remember this setting' to browsing history, which gets deleted).
Find a way to make it easy to boot in safe mode again.
Try to find a way to make Windows search good again, like it was when they used to use Master File Table. As it is, 8.1 is even slower than 8.0.
Users should be able to 'pin' a bare essentials version of the Task Manager Performance tab (CPU Utilisation, RAM Usage, Disk read/write and Network upload/download to the right-hand side of the desktop background (where the Windows sidebar gadgets used to be).
Ability for the user to change the colour of the 'Unicorn Vomit' Start Screen tiles.
Give the option to allow Taskbar toolbars to show not just in the primary monitor Taskbar, but also on other monitor taskbars as well.
A built-in screen capture tool that captures/saves as video would be handy and it wouldn't even take much as the hard work has already been done in Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture.
A built-in file synchronising tool along the lines of SyncBack would also be handy. However giving that Microsoft abandoned SyncToy 2.1 in 2009 and seem to be trying to push everyone to the 'Cloud', I guess that's out of the question.
And finally, if it wasn't for companies complaining to some competition and monopolies commission, having a decent image and video editor built-in would be good, along with a flexible batch renaming tool. Lets face it MS Paint is pretty limited. But then whilst we're in La La land, Microsoft should just throw in MS Office as standard too. :)
ETA: Oh and automatic content-aware fill, so whenever it detects a picture of Justin Beiber, it automatically replaces him with Kaley Cuoco.
