Last week, Microsoft launched a new build within the RS_PRERELEASE branch, Build 21286. This new compilation, little by little, is shaping what will be Sun Valley , the future of Windows 10. Among many other novelties that this brought compilation we find a new panel of gadgets for the desktop integrated into the Windows taskbar.
At the moment, this new dashboard is only available to a few Insider users residing in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and India. Other users will still have to wait longer before they can test it, even if they have the latest Insider Dev build of the operating system installed. However, thanks to users who have been able to test it, we can learn a little about how this new panel works, which will arrive as one of Sun Valley’s novelties . And, from what we can see, it will have the most unnecessary features. Bad started.
Emojis on the news, was it really necessary?
As part of this dynamic content that the Windows 10 panel is going to offer us, we find a news section. This gadget will work, surely, through the Microsoft News app for Windows, and it will show us the headlines of the most relevant news so that we can always be up to date. We can customize our news sources, as well as our tastes and interests to see what interests us the most. So far so good.
When we click on a news item, as you might expect, that news will open directly in Edge. The normal thing is to find buttons that allow us to choose if a news we like , and we want to see more like it, or if we do not like something. Thanks to this, we will improve the algorithm and each time we will see much more concrete and specific news. And of course you have this option. But it also has an option that allows us to react to the news with emojis . For what?
The new system of news interactions is too much like Facebook . It allows us to indicate if a content we like, we love, it surprises us, it leaves us thoughtful, it makes us angry or saddened. And all this using Skype emojis.
The only sense we can find to this is that Microsoft is going to turn its new Windows bar into a kind of “social network” , where we can see the interactions of other users to the same news. It only needs (although we wouldn’t like to give ideas, just in case) to add a comment system and we would have a crappy version of Facebook integrated into Windows 10. Hopefully, in the end, this feature does not finish arriving. Doing so will only worsen a feature that might appear interesting at first glance. And that’s not counting the impact it will have on our privacy and the use of our data and interests.
Other improvements that are worth it
Fortunately, not all are useless functions like the one we just saw. Microsoft is working to bring other functions and tools to our computer that are really more interesting. The first one is a new disk manager , within the Configuration panel, which will allow us to control all the disks and SSD units connected to the PC and create new storage spaces on the PC.
Microsoft’s data recovery tool, WinFR , is also going to receive important changes focused, above all, on facilitating its use in order to know what type of recovery we should use in each case. And the new Diskusage will also allow us to know better how we are using the space on our hard disk. Nor can we forget One Outlook , the new email client that will replace the Outlook program and the Mail app in Windows 10.
As we can see, not all the changes that are coming to Windows 10 are useless . But what we do fear, given what we have seen, is that Sun Valley is going to be an update that is too grotesque and full of unnecessary functions rather than focused on the changes that users really seek for a modern operating system.
