Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows. The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 – although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer …
"Universal Print is not fit for purpose. You have to pay for the service AND pay per print"
Yes, but surely that means it's highly fit for purpose - Microsoft's purpose that is; the purpose of extracting as much cash from their customers as possible.
What the customers actually want or need won't be a consideration.
With Printix you can choose which driver to use.
It has some third-party drivers, but it will also upload any drivers used with known printers so you're not locked in.
It'll push whatever you want it to, including default settings.
You can also set it up with universal or PDF-based drivers (mostly used with "Printix Anywhere", where you can print to a single queue and get the document out of any printer you want).
It's often advertised as a drop-in replacement to a print server with added cloud functionality, and I honestly agree with that.
I was thinking that this is Micros~1's way of "picking winners and losers".
You want YOUR device to run on Windows, right? Pay UP or GET LOST! *WE* control *EVERYTHING* now!!!
3rd party drivers and the DDK were one of the BIGGEST REASONS windows became "a thing". This new "One OS to rule them all" posture from the latest generation of "It's OUR turn now" [probably woke] 'engineers' is one of the biggest "READY, *FIRE*, AIM" "Shoot your own foot" maneuvers from these "less than highly intelligent" people YET...
>Noticed that Brother (the only printer manufacturer worth a shit these days) is not part of the Morphia Mopria "consortium".
>Wonder what that means?
It means that you didn't research hard enough. Brother Industries are a member according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mopria_Alliance
so will Mopria include the ability to check that the printer does not have third party consumables installed ?
Although it cannot be that bad as Debian supports it.
We proceeded to apply the picture in the article to all HP inkjet printers in our possession. We made sure to smash them with extreme prejudice and toss them violently in the trash compactor, making sure every single one was torn to pieces.
We only use bulk-ink Epson ecotank printers - as far as inkjets are involved -, where a 75cc blister costs 10$ and it is legit from epson themselves. We could also buy per pint or per gallon, far cheaper than that.
As for everything else, we found that even A PLAYSTATION 3 can run our networked epson inkjet printer. Not kidding. Not joking.
As far as drivers go, Laserjet 4s have been included in every Windows since...
Joke icon to avoid concerns.
Ah, printing... the deeply unfashionable side of Microsoft's development that has been rolling around in Microsoft's self-made development hell for many years...
Microsoft had an opportunity to do a good thing with printing, but they chose not to. For example, print preview could have been a standard function for any application - although potentially not all printing devices may have been able to support it. Microsoft didn't do this and instead forced every application developer, including their own, to have to cobble together custom and inconsistent print preview functionality. The core applications in Microsoft 365 don't even do print preview consistently, what hope is there for others?
Microsoft have also been very, very slow to work with changes and functions in printers and, in particular, multi-function devices. Microsoft could have created common extensions, with an easy and common extension implementation but they didn't. Instead, device manufacturers had to cobble together their own custom hacks into the system in order to implement what is usually very similar functionality to other printers but named and implemented entirely differently. It doesn't help that many of these hardware manufacturers seemed to employ the least well paid rooms of monkeys to mash keyboards until, with compiler warnings turned off, the driver code compiled and was therefore considered complete. This kind of thing was the cause of the multiple "print nightmare" scenarios that Microsoft inevitably but indirectly created. Microsoft's response was necessary, but a half baked and lack of actual control security update that made it near impossible to install MFD printer drivers in a corporate environment was not what we needed. The new common print drivers that are out are near useless, with little actual support for additional functions - even the really common options such as duplex or colour control are frequently just not there, less common options such as stapling and booklet collation (incredibly useful in the corporate world) are nowhere to be seen.
I really wish that Microsoft had put the effort in years ago when it was obvious that printing was a mess, but they didn't. Some of the most time consuming development tasks I had revolved around trying to work around the deficiencies in Microsoft's OS by way of printer support as well as the vagaries of the printer drivers themselves - not wanting to hard code an application to a printer is a pretty high priority when long term development and support is considered.
Is this wish list for common functionality provided by any other platforms or are we Microsoft bashing? Does macOS or any of the Linux distros provide a common print preview API for example? I actually agree with your post, Microsoft had the resources and could of done a great job, instead of resting on their Windows 3.1 laurels about having a shared printer driver for multiple apps and never moving the sticks on to the next step.
The only other platform I'm aware of, Android, made printing even more hell than Windows by forcing a separate printer app to be used. Had to save the file to the file system and load up a separate app made by your printer manufacturer (if they bothered) to print anything. I'm out of date on this, maybe Android printing has evolved since the dark days a mere handful of years ago but it was an awful mess.
>> Does macOS or any of the Linux distros provide a common print preview API for example?
Yes, actually, mac OS does have a common print preview API (AppKit) which 3rd party apps can use, although they are still free to develop their own.
Hell, even MacOS Classic had a common print preview.
Apple has a standard in macOS and a different one in iOS. Both are consistent on their respective platforms, both do scanning and printing and, on macOS, faxing. I've never tried to fax from iOS, no idea if it works. The print system is directly descended from that of early Macs. Some time along the way Macs could print directly to PDF, PostScript, and assorted image formats. Most of that isn't available on iOS, but some other features are. Note that some applications (Firefox, MS Office) would rather that you use their print systems, but will use the standards if you hit them hard enough. (Yes, you can print to PDF from inside a PDF editor, even one from Adobe.) On iOS you can use the standard, and, in some cases (Epson, Brother) there's a vendor-supplied item that is usually inferior to the standard. HP might also provide its own item, but I haven't printed to an HP device from iOS in over a decade, mostly because of HP’s shenanigans.
I have never printed anything from Android. I only had an Android device for a few months before scrapping it and going to iOS.
Windows is a glorious mess, and always has been, and probably always will be.
Ubuntu is… Ubuntu. Great when everything works. Somewhat less than great when there are problems.
“The print system is directly descended from that of early Macs.”
No, not really - it just looked like it. The API and user interface for starting a print job may have been carried over, but this article is about drivers, and on that front there was a total break in 2001. For Mac OS X, Apple adopted the open-source CUPS project as the sole driver framework for printing.
Pre-OSX, print drivers had to map QuickDraw ‘PICT’ format primitives to their own output instructions, which required knowledge of QuickDraw (a rare thing in the 1990s) as well as the target printer - Mac printer drivers used to be pretty flaky for non-PostScript printers as a result. The people behind OSX’s print model made two very good decisions: first the OS adopted PDF as the native image metafile format of OSX. Second, they chose CUPS as a driver framework. These two decisions greatly simplified the driver-writer’s job, especially on printers that had PostScript support already as PDF is relatively simple to convert to and from PostScript.
But, because CUPS is open-source, any printer with a driver for macOS also automatically has a driver for Linux, which has greatly improved Linux printing support. However, the bigger problem with printing on Linux is the general dog’s dinner around graphics APIs used by applications to originate documents, with many try to everything themselves, so sometimes you end up with a classic Linux pipe-bludgeon of rasterising a postscript file, embedding it in a PDF container, and sending it to CUPS. Yes I know that’s stupid, but... “I got it to work”.
"Any printer that supports AirPrint accepts PDF as a native format"
You might find PDF support lacking or simply non-existant on the cheaper inkjets that simply don't have enough memory onboard to hold an entire page in raster form. For those, you're basically limited to sending URF (or PWG for IPP) in strips.
Not “acquire” it: the very nature of FOSS makes that impossible. They did hire its lead developer for nearly two decades, and they put a lot of development work into it in the early 2000s, but that’s all freely available thanks to the licence.
Actually, in that brief near-decade between the creation of MacOS X and iPhone becoming a hit, Apple was one of the better corporate citizens when it came to FOSS. WebKit is another project to which Apple contributed a lot, and for their internally-developed Bonjour/Zeroconf mDNS-based service discovery system they went through the IETF recommendation process (eventually RFC 6762, 6763) rather than keeping it proprietary. The XNU kernel and Darwin user-space are still open source, but now these days Apple keeps the drivers for its own hardware segregated from that..
Times changed once Apple stopped being a computer vendor, and the Jobs instinct to control everything took over.
"I have never printed anything from Android. I only had an Android device for a few months before scrapping it and going to iOS."
There is a built in driver that, in successive versions of Android, consistently fails to work with either of my printers (HP 3630 inkjet, Samsung MW2022 laser).
Each has its own driver. The HP one is "sort of good" (minus a billion points for the incessant need to be signed in to the HP account) but it allows for rotations, resize, with a little preview that you can drag the content around to get it where you want before printing (if an image), a little less control if a document. But there's a preview so you can see prior to printing.
The Samsung, on the other hand, lacks all of that and will just spit out stuff to the printer which may or may not be what you wanted.
What I have noticed is that the drivers tend to have two quality settings. There's the default, which is pretty poor (maybe 150dpi) and a high which is better (maybe 300dpi) but the only thing that even attempts to use the printer's full capabilities is photo printing. The laser is capable of 600dpi, the driver isn't.
On the other hand, I will concede that my experience with iOS is version 7, and I'm sure things have changed, but back in version 7 AirPrint was utterly dreadful. There was no control over things like quality or monochrome. Printing documents generally mostly worked. Printing images was a complete farce. A screenshot would be zoomed up to fill the page's longest dimension leading to large amounts overflowing the page and not getting printed, and printing smaller images and icons resulted in them being scaled to fill the page (and sometimes being cropped). If you're cropping parts of an icon, you know you're doing it wrong. Unfortunately Apple, being the control freaks that they are, only have the options of "which printer?" and "how many copies?" while managing all the rest automatically. Which would have been fine if it was in any way coherent, but about the only reliable thing was it would probably get it wrong.
So, like with their desktop cousins, mobile devices work best with custom drivers, so long as those custom drivers are actually useful. Not all of them are.
Since a few years back, HP took over doing the drivers for Samsung laser printers, so you're probably in the perverse position of the same HP driver being usable for both of your printers.
I used to have a Samsung colour laser (a CLP-365W) - well, I say "used to have", I still have it, but after the best part of ten years' use, it needs stripping down and rebuilding so that it starts recognising that it has toner cartridges installed again. Samsung tried to pull the same shit that HP do with putting chips in the cartridges to prove they are "genuine" (yes, I know not all toner is equal, but it's my choice, not theirs which I choose to use), and putting artificial lifespans on things like the imaging drum (which have to be circumvented by wire-wrapping a resistor of a specific resistance around pins in the cover, power cycling, and removing it, to fool it into thinking a new one has been installed).
Putting HP in charge of their drivers and trying to fill my PC with bloatware was the final straw, and it got replaced with a nice shiny Brother HL-L3230CDW last year. The "starter" cartridges it came with have just started running out now, so I'll reserve judgement on how much of a pain in the arse getting replacements is; the third-party cheap ones I bought seem to work with a bit of jiggling and swearing, but the one thing I'll say is that the printer's build quality is MUCH higher than that of the Sammy one, and it has a proper paper tray, not the horrible bit of plastic the Samsung has.
Back on topic, the Brother printer works with the built-in Android driver, and although Android tries to suggest installing Brother's own print service, perversely, this doesn't seem to find the printer at all.
It's an article about the Microsoft printing subsystem, therefore I'd expect it to include Microsoft bashing :)
It's been a while since I had a need to work with Linux printing and it was a different experience altogether. The core capabilities felt better but driver support was often lacking and to me it also felt that because printing development work is unfashionable that it languished behind in Linux too.
This was a good few years ago and I haven't had a need to print from Linux for a while, just scanning using a flat bed scanner that Microsoft/HP decided was no longer supported and therefore didn't work but worked perfectly in Linux. I believe there have been improvements in the Windows space for this with 3rd party generic scanner drivers that support these still functional scanners that Microsoft and various vendors have decided to drop.
Many years ago while playing with Linux I wanted to support the Brother inkjet that I had at the time.
Which meant following the instructions in a lengthy document that appeared to involve tearing out the installed printing system and putting in something else.
Only it all went to hell about halfway through. I'm not at all familiar with Linux so when it started throwing errors and looking online gave plenty of forum posts that mostly contradicted each other, that's about the point when I shut the machine down and switched the SATA cable back to the Windows setup. I mean, if getting the damn printer working requires deep magic, then screw that for a game of soldiers...
Strange, I have two machines I use at home running the latest version of Linux Mint, one with MATE and one with Cinnamon and both see my network connected Canon printer (printer, mind, not all-in-one) as soon as they boot up and I have never had any issues printing either documents or photos. No driver installation necessary, it just works. However, the Win7 VM I use on one of the machines required having the printer drivers installed, but that was expected.
Printing under Linux may have been problematic a few years ago but it's much, much better these days, and I've never had any issues when using multiple different printers with it over the past seven years.
Eh, this is an area where Apple really does have the edge. macOS uses CUPS and printing -- even network printing -- mostly just works. If you have a big network or different subnets where you can't use Bonjour it gets slightly more complicated, but only slightly. All of our network printers at work can be added to macOS just by selecting AirPrint as the protocol and putting in the printer's hostname. Everything else happens automatically.
WIA was supposed to be that original universal printer interface. It kind of almost worked, but it was half-assed -- which could have been fixed and evolved into something useful, excepting printing isn't sexy so it was abandoned instead -- and it relied way too much on manufacturers making their own UI, print preview, workflow, etc, while replicating all of their features from the Win32 drivers. Go figure, they didn't even half-ass it, and WIA drivers are almost universally pure shite, garbage with nothing better than the most bare-bones functions and rarely if ever updated. Not all of it was because of getting a half-assed framework to start with, but it certainly didn't light any fires, so both sides just abandoned it to the perfunctory lip service. Especially since they weren't phasing Win32 drivers out.
I mean, these hardware guys can't make software worth a damn in the first place, good luck asking them to support two separate parallel products that each had unique features and missing capabilities.
The user-mode driver transition was being forced at the same time, and they hated that just as much, but at least in that case they just had to adjust and debug their existing codebase, not start all over from scratch, so WIA barely stood a chance.
Now the Mopira UWP framework is the new attempt to make everyone wholesale start over with a globally shared functionality, but being a standard created by the most craven leeches in what's now a dying field, they've designed it so they can add hooks everywhere to upsell you. Some of the drivers are genuinely good and stick to the more sensible default, make media keys and other shortcuts both effortless and configurable, hook straight into apps that support it well... and then there's HP, of course. Sigh.
WIA was terrible compared to TWAIN
Morpira UWP sounds bad, because UWP is stupid for a desktop OS.
But it all went wrong at NT 3.1. Print drivers needing to use the GDI? I understood the logic, but it was faulty logic.
Then when GDI was moved into Kernel with NT4.0 a bad print driver could blue-screen NT.
... and Windows 9x*. And Windows XP. I fondly remember spending a couple hours of the client's money painstakingly removing the HP print software and drivers the hard way from a machine that would BSOD on bootup due to the wrong iteration of the print driver being referenced, causing the kernal to shit the bed.
For corporate devices and for 90% of the tasks, the HP universal driver really was universal- If the printer groked PCL of 'some form', or post script, it was a solid, basic driver that offered duplex and limited collation functionality. (But not staple and print, because Mopiers and MFPs were their own damned beasts.)
I'll be honest, the current desktop uses a MS supplied driver for the brother MFP that I have; I don't scan from it to a computer (I'll scan to a USB stick, though), and doing color correction on it is kind of pointless for that class printer (It's.. OK for photos; lineart and some images work out OK, but I have a photo printer for a reason.)
* To be fair, it didn't take a whole lot to cause windows 95, 98, and ME to BSOD.
I once had Windows 95 bluescreen on me in the process of automatically ejecting a CD-ROM. I guess back then the OS didn't bother to ask "everybody done with this media?" and something clearly wasn't.
I consider that to be the lowest low.
WinXP I could get to reliably crash thanks to a lousy USB serial driver. I don't remember what type, just that it would work for a few seconds and then "argh! blue!".
But the weirdest one was the USB video capture card utterly did not work with the USB WiFi dongle. Apart, both devices worked fine. Together, complete system freeze. No blue screen, no pointer movement, completely dead. Weird.
Microsoft had an opportunity to do a good thing with printing, but they chose not to. [...]
Not so much chose not to, but more like were incapable of doing so. The myth that Micros~1 was this engineering powerhouse has recently been exposed as the lie that it is, but it has been a myth for decades. The fact that printing is soooo messed up on Windows machines today is simply a reflection of the fact that those asshats simply don't know how to do it, and haven't know for basically forever.
> While some wags have dubbed the framework the "Unwanted Windows Platform", it's always good to see legacy tech being retired in favor of something with a bright future ahead of it.
How do you manage to type that stuff with a straight face? Bright future, oh goodness me.
So, if this horror comes to pass, to make full use of a printer's cleverest bits, I'll have to stop ripping out the whole Windows Store and all the UWP stuff? I suppose that might make the OS setup a little easier (a few clean ups to be stricken from the action list), but not looking forwards to having to live with the end result. When it gets to that stage, guess I'll not be bothering with any clever bits that require customisation to access <shrugs>.
You know that up until now, printer manufacturers provided the print drivers for Microsoft to include in their driver repository.
So it was not really Microsoft who made support work for printers...
This latest move is effectively Microsoft saying to printer manufacturers "If you're outside of the clique that we endorse, then we won't carry your drivers for you" (and this may well extend to having them signed!)
Since Cups became the dominant printer mechanism for Linux (it wasn't always there, and printing in Linux before then was REALLY hairy), all the printer manufacturers had to do was make sure that a Gutenprint or Ghostscript backend for their print engine existed, and provide a PPD file, both things that they had to do to get MacOS working. And yet, some didn't (Lexmark, I'm looking at you here).
Samsung/HP (Samsung sold their printer business to HP Ink [sorry, Inc.]) have done this for Samsung printers for a while. I did not have a problem installing the driver for an Xpress M2020 a few years ago.
But Cups is on the road to do something similar, stardardizing on IPP printing and deprecating all the support for the older Gutenprint/GS model.
Sometimes CUPS lags with 'bleeding edge' printer support. Solution: get a slightly older model, check for CUPS support beforehand. Save money. If it was bleeding edge 3 years ago, should be just fine now. Printer tech does not change THAT fast.
And if you check with the MFG they may have CUPS drivers, or if they support postscript even better!
I've found that using the CUPS PDF printer description actually does not allow many of the more advanced features of things like duplexers, multi-tray support, and extended colour gamut to be selected, and you can forget about staplers and booklet mode features.
The IPP format (which implies PDF) seems like the lowest common denominator, and in one case I tried to set up, only enabled greyscale prints on a colour printer (it was complex, involving remote printing through another server).
If there is a PPD file available for a printer, it is best to actually use it. Most printer manufacturers actually make a PPD file available, even if it is not in the CUPS package in the repository for your distro.
I don't think it works as well as used to, however. I remember back in the days of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron, one of the best Ubuntu releases IMHO), I plugged an HP OfficeJet 5610 MFP in and was astounded by the fact that it configured completely automatically, both the printer and the scanner, and I think that it also set up a fax queue for me, not that I ever used that feature.
This is Microsoft, so can expect the current “open” Windows print services to be depreciated - why have a print service that can be extended by third-party (non-MS store) drivers when you restrict it to UWP and Microsoft’s variant of Mopria.(*)
(*) Given previous performance with Standards: PDF, Office document formats, HTML, we can expect MS to vary from the agreed Standard.
Not so sure. The article says printer manufacturers can provide their own drivers under the new system, that does not guarantee that legacy drivers will still work. Since it seems unlikely that printer manufacturers will write new drivers for old printers it could still make old printers obsolete.
I have an older 'all in one' print/scan/copy/fax that works well with CUPS and WIn 7. Yeah it is an HP but HPLIP is fine with me.
Had to use Win10nic this year to do taxes (did not want cloudy version), corporate AND personal.. Did it in a VM. Using 'windows update' print driver hung the driver, left paper stuck in printer with nothing printed on it EVERY! SINGLE! TIME!!!
I gave up, wrote to PDF (which TurboTax lets you do) and then used atril on FBSD to print stuff.
Maybe I can find a GENERIC postscript driver for Win1X that is compatible with CUPS and set up CUPS for internet printing - anyone?
I've not used Windows Update for a printer driver in years... so hopefully that is fine then. I just reinstall the same old Win7 64-bit driver I've been using for ages. A simple reason for that - it works.
Next day I return and client is asking why Win1x has added a heap of random broken drivers that say "there's an app available" cluttering up their list of printers...
Or you click on that HP Smart app and the first thing it is trying to do is gather personal data... It is this they want to bring us more of via that UWP mess that makes interfaces look like a kids toy.
The current system had important business justifications when it got started For Microsoft, having a different driver for every printer model helped discourage use other operating systems. Since many printer vendors would only provide a Windows driver, it made OS2 and Linux second-class operating systems. That helped Windows go from "dominant" to "monopoly". For printer vendors, having their name on the list of drivers that popped up when you started to install a printer was a little advertisement for their brand. A truly compatible printer wouldn't need a new driver, but the user might not realize it was supported via another vendor's driver.
>> Since many printer vendors would only provide a Windows driver, it made OS2 and Linux second-class operating systems.
Only for bottom-of-the-barrel printers which were too cheap to have their own processors and relied on the host CPU instead (like GDI lasers).
Pretty much everything business class supported at least one HP LaserJet emulation, and in most cases PostScript as well, and these worked just fine under OS2, Linux or MacOS.
And even for cheap printers, many manufacturers still offered drivers for other operating systems than just Windows.
>> That helped Windows go from "dominant" to "monopoly"
I'm pretty sure that it wasn't printer drivers which made Windows a monopoly OS on desktop PCs, but rather Microsoft's anti-competitive practices such as paying PC vendors to only offer Windows with their PCs.
It also ignores that Macs have, over the last 30+ years, been the dominant platform in the DTP space. Which would have been impossible if the platform didn't have excellent printer support as designers still had to pre-print before sending jobs to the EFI.
>> A truly compatible printer wouldn't need a new driver, but the user might not realize it was supported via another vendor's driver.
I'm not saying such users don't exist, but in general the overwhelming majority of users have been able to use compatible drivers since at least the early 80's (using compatible drivers like Epson FX for line printers has been pretty common).
I would be lying if I said what you wrote here made any sense.
My "ancient" multi-function laser from Samsung HP, which has seen "no love" since HP took over Samsung's business, is going to become useless on Windows at some point, or will it still carry on as it is?
I've only just got it working under Windows 11 - the drivers provided by Windows "Add printer" claimed there was no duplexer, and I had to use the "manual install" HP drivers to get that going. Still, at least Windows does now automatically install drivers (it didn't when I switched to Mac 15 years ago*).
* this Window machine is provided by work to access a "secure" system - I still find printing on Mac easier, but it's getting close these days.
Microsoft just won't include them in the installer or the automatic check via Windows Update.
However, if HP doesn't bother to update them over time and the certificates expire, then you'll have to go through some heroics to get them installed without your system acting like it's a janky beta test. Drivers are pretty locked-down these days, even user-mode ones.
My "ancient" multi-function laser from Samsung HP, which has seen "no love" since HP took over Samsung's business, is going to become useless on Windows at some point, or will it still carry on as it is?
It sounds like it will be killed off. Many of my old HPs (a LaserJet 4050, for instance,) still works on my systems on which it was installed back in 1809, but new loads of 22H2 do not have its driver. A couple of colleagues have had to rip printer drivers from previous Windows 10 releases to get them to work on newer machines.
This has the potential to turn Microsoft into a print gatekeeper. Microsoft will dictate which printers may be used by not allowing third-party drivers. That also means me e-waste as otherwise perfectly fine printers will get junked. Build your printer to our driver specs, which will likely have to be licensed, or piss off.
Off topic, admittedly, but 30-odd years ago, the printer drivers supplied by Commodore-Amiga were abysmal. A divine being call Jeff Walker was bemoaning the poor output resolution of his Canon BubbleJet printer (BJ10 IIRC) in his magazine Just Amiga Monthly and a German reader called Wolf Faust took it upon himself to try to make a printer driver that took advantage of the printer features, such as the higher BubbleJet resolution (360*360) over the standard ink jet printers (300*300) of the time. Don't laugh, I did say it was a long time ago!
Long story short, not only did Mr Faust create a brilliant printer driver, then a suite of controlling programs, but Canon were so impressed that they gave him all the latest models so that he could develop for them and they could support the Amiga. Many Amiga users, myself included, specifically bought Canon BubbleJets because of Mr Faust. (And as a side note, most of my printers since have been Canon.)
My point being: Who is best to provide a printer driver that supports all the features of the printer? The manufacturer or a global alliance of printer manufacturers via Microsoft? Will all the features of my printer be supported or will only the main features be supported? Are printers and printer features now so indistinguishable from each other that an OS provider can distribute generic drivers? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
That's part of my ignorance as I don't know the ins and outs of modern printers and what features they can offer - how does one manufacturer differ from another these days to get your business as it surely cannot be on price alone? But as Reg Commentard Nick Ryan said above:
The new common print drivers that are out are near useless, with little actual support for additional functions - even the really common options such as duplex or colour control are frequently just not there, less common options such as stapling and booklet collation (incredibly useful in the corporate world) are nowhere to be seen.
Even pre-Covid I rarely printed, but in previous jobs I have certainly used stapling and booklet collation, both features selectable via the non-Microsoft supplied printer driver.
Decent booklet / brochure / paperback book printing?
How does the old Alps model with opaque "inks" including white work?
Punching / binding / stapling?
Vinyl cutting?
PCBs (either direct milling or UV head)
Cropping?
Tiling giant image to 100s of pages?
Some of these have been done by applications and some by printer / plotter driver in the past. Plotter drivers often were installed as "printer" drivers, though "printing" from other than vector based app was crazy. Then there were plotters that really were inkjet printers. They rasterised the vectors.
Mills and 3D printers have tended to use custom applications and communication.
I can't imagine really, and MS is even less likely to. Any alliance with Xerox or HP or Lexmark is bad for customers.
You're spot on. There are loads of things a robotic machine should be able to do when connected to your computer. Why is it limited to printing on one side of A4 paper? Why can't it print a brochure or paperback book? Load it up with blank business cards and have it print them, or postcards or a birthday card.
All of these examples are a total pain to do on a printer but at least if they wrote their own drivers there was a chance printers would one day do these tasks easily.
If you want to see a true example of this, look no further than:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4QJRLsVtys
And YES. it really is every bit as bad as in the video and YES, it really does comes with a USB memory stick containing cracked pirated software stuffed full of malware.
I know. I had to deal with one someone bought from eBay for..... £2,500 !!!!
I really hope that they take the time to make this an MDM option. We had good security around our laser printers, with nice windows queues, (mostly) sensible default and as cheep as possible toner, etc. However, first thing that every nob with a company credit card did was buy their own crappy, very crappy, printer for their desk. Because their fat bloated waste of oxygen could not be arsed to walk out of their office and perhaps 10 meters down the hall.
At least this was helicopter spend. We never accepted a chargeback for ink or repairs. But most of the crunts wanted us to support their shitty printers. Mostly we won that battle.
Was probably a badge of honour to have a personal printer. It was treated by IT was a sign that the owner was a f*cksticle of the highest order.
At least this might kill the 10gb printer "driver", I mean advertising for subscription.
Late 80's here. I went into a quasi UK government department where people were using Macs, and found that every person had their own Apple LaserWriter IINTX (about £5,000 then) sat by their desks. As a Mac consultant I gently wondered aloud why this setup had come about as Apple printers were net-workable with Apple's LocalTalk cabling or Ethernet adapters,
The answer was that they had recently moved over from a printing hell caused by MS-DOS computers and the nightmare of getting networked printers to work, and it was thus department policy to provide printers to all staff.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the sales meeting of the Apple Dealer who got THAT gig! "THIRTY-FIVE LaserWriter II's!!!, Here's my youngest daughter, bring her back in moderate condition tomorrow!!"
Is this going to be a way to make printers only work with the latest version of Windows?
I see this as a way to
1. Punish all the people who don't jump to the latest shiny version of Windows quickly enough. and
2. Make anyone who wants to sell a Windows-compatible device have to make it everything else incompatible.
Someone will mark this down as it is paranoid. It's not. It is based on Microsoft's actions in the past.
I have a Laserjet Pro MFP. I had to install drivers for Windows. My Chromebook and Android phone, saw it on the network and just added it. I prefer that to adding drivers. If MS can follow this example, that will be nice.
This sounds like they are taking away the option to add a printer the old way with the driver from the manufacture.
The only thing that consistently works for all the computers here? That the only selection I trust for installing network printers is TCP/IP Device.
This sounds like a fun headache in a couple of years.
As others have already noted, the fine article says manufacturers will be free to provide their own crapware, sourced from their own servers. However we both know the next thing will be under-the-table encouragement for makers to stop doing that in favor of the "universal" solution, which locks users into whatever the cartel decides is most profitable. After that comes bankruptcy or merger of the weaker cartel members into the stronger. Eventually a sole source for printing emerges which appears immune to anti-monopoly laws, but speculation there is a government back door involved somehow never gets printed.
I can only speak to my recent experience with Microsoft taking over the printer drivers for my HP 3830 printer. A Microsoft update took over the printer drivers for my up until that point reliable printer. I was never able to run my 3830 on Windows 10 again. On the other hand, it was quite easy to install my 3830 printer onto my Linux laptop. I could print and scan there.
After a few months using my Linux laptop as a printer server, I decided I needed to upgrade my printer. My new Epson runs a whole lot better than my admittedly aging 3830. This sucks for HP; I won't be buying printer cartridges for that printer anymore.
So now the Microsoft collective is taking over my Epson printer? Microsoft should remember that they need me as a customer. The converse is not necessarily true.
There absolutely is a difference.
32bit was killed off because the address spacing wasn't able to keep up with modern technology and therefore to keep it viable, required additional development, security and provisioning costs when deployed along with x64 which weren't justifiable. Not exactly 'wilful trashing of tech'.
3rd party pri... you know what? I can't even be bothered. You know the answer as well as I do.
Be well.
They have. Offices are now *mostly* paperless. It's months since I had to print anything personally, and the last thing I had to print for work was a shipping label about 2.5 years ago.
However there are occasions on when paper still wins. It can be read and annotated without power.
Don't give MS the idea that they are somehow the good guys in this.
I would be interested to know the ratio of sheets printed containing intended printed communication* compared to test pages printed since the dawn of time.
*I'm not including configuration sheets which convey - for instance - the current IP address at which the printer is currently hiding. Grrrr....
Umm, so will microsoft guarantee their drivers work properly with every concevable printer model? I think not...
If i allow windows to install the default drivers for my Brother MFD, printouts come out A5 in the centre of an A4 page.
The driver *thinks* its printing properly, previews look normal, paper size correct etc - except it isn't...
When i reinstall the driver from Brother, everything works fine.
Subscription plans will survive quite nicely, as the supplies will be automatically ordered from the Microsoft Store using the payment details you've already given them. Failure to keep the payment info updated will be a violation of the terms of service, a criminal offense under the latest Computer Misuse Act. Your trial will be held by ChatGOV, and your punishment for kidnapping applied promptly.
In other words, after the print spooler security vulnerability exposed a few years ago, Microsoft has tried desperately to fix it and just continued to muck things up and break functionality, security, and drivers. It cannot be fixed so it must be replaced.
To be fair, the print subsystem is something that I and many of my colleagues have agonized over for over a decade. This may not be such a bad thing... if it works.
For 20 years now it's been relatively painless to install a standard (non-MFP) printer in Windows using MS drivers.
How come installing a scanner or MFP is like going back to the early 90's?
So much faffing around with different versions of custom drivers, bespoke apps and control panels, some devices not working with some apps etc.
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