I don't like 8.1's layout, or all the extra junk it comes packed with, but it's working better for me than it's predecessors for my uses.
XP was a nightmare. My comp spent more time in the shop than at home. Felt like I had my old Windows 95 or 98 back. They spent more time getting fixed than not too.
It's not really a new engine though. It's a fork of Trident. Or, to put it another way, a continuation of Trident.
Which is all fine, nothing inherently wrong with Trident. But it's definitely neither new nor free of legacy cruft (unlike Mozilla's Servo - genuinely new, built from scratch in Rust and looking pretty cool (though early days)).
I thought 8.1 brought back the Start button. But I spent so long waiting for 8.1 in place of the abomination that was 8, and it all seemed too little too late so I bailed ages ago.
And yes, while Edge is not completely new, it is stripped of all legacy cruft - that was kinda the point of them doing it. IE11 is still there in Windows 10 if you want to use it, and it still uses the old Trident engine too.
Indeed, but it is at the end of the day an alternative browser. I can't help but feel that the number of people who run out and upgrade to Windows 10 just because "I want to use Edge" is maybe a bit limited...
I wouldn't have even thought there was something like this, or to look for it. I just thought I was more or less stuck with whatever they threw at me. :)
Well, I think the point was more a rebrand to distance themselves from the damaged IE brand. Which was explicitly stated as the point in that leaked memo I can no longer find.
There's definitely some old windows code still kicking around in there. I just manually installed my printer driver, when I clicked Have Disk it /still/ Fucking defaults to A:/
Man, you need to try harder at trolling. Linux still has drivers, i.e. a program that provides a software interface to your hardware. Whether you have them as pre-compiled binaries that you install or source code you compile into the kernel or into a module, you still have them :/
Yeah, when stuff's not supported it's fucking horrible. Though I've not encountered that for a *long* time. I think pretty much everything remotely mainstream is covered by the kernel these days (with the exception of trackpads, which are like the new wifi cards).
bastard by name