Microsoft shared some distressing news lately, when it announced that it was delaying the tabs feature in Windows 10. Sets, as the company calls it, were one of the more anticipated of additions.
And as we learned this week, quietly at that, Redmond will not be launching this option with the next update for the operating system.
Little has been said about this decision, which is surprising when you consider that Sets were already part of the preview builds of Redstone 5. For the most part, it looked like everything was running smoothly and testing was going fairly well.
But as it so happens, the changes that Sets brought along actually caused several app compatibility problems that eventually broke down certain functionality in third-party applications.
Some of these problems were so severe that Microsoft decided to delay Sets altogether while it took a look at the underlying code.
This has been revealed in a report that claims that Reddit apps are one example of broken compatibility with this native tabs feature in the OS. Removal of Sets from Windows 10 Redstone 5 builds returned them to normal, with everything working correctly after previously being unstable.
What’s interesting is that third-party app developers have applauded this Microsoft decision of pulling Sets temporarily, as their apps were sometimes broken due to the implementation of tabs.
Which comes as a bit of a surprise.
Of course, the big takeaway here is that Sets is not something that the company has stopped work on. It is just its debut that has been delayed.
Instead of Redstone 5 this year, we can expect this functionality to be part of the operating system in the spring of 2019, when the next update makes its way out to the wild.
The big question is whether the functionality will be same or will tabs have a slightly different form by then, with more options and better compatibility.
Time will tell.
All Comments
Was not a fan of sets. I personally did not run into any issues. But when it launches, I will most likely turn it off