Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off? The Windows Insider Dev Channel has introduced a feature it is calling "Suggested Actions" to the work-in-progress build of Windows 11, and testers love it so much they are already asking how to turn it off. Build 25115 was released to the Dev Channel last night, marking the end of the period where Dev and Beta channels were …
"Exactly how one gets third-party apps into these pop-ups isn't entirely clear. We asked Microsoft what steps a third party would need to take to get on the guest list (perhaps a simple association?) but the company has yet to respond."
Well, in a nutshell, you don't without paying MS a lot of $$$. That's the traditional way. Misquoting RDJ's Iron man...
"That's how Microsoft did it! That's how America does it! And its worked out pretty well so far for the shareholders."
*Hopefully* it's only a feature available to those that hand over the dosh. Because if any old program can register itself to read whatever text you've got highlighted and run some arbitrary code to decide whether to offer an action or not, then that's your entire clipboard history being sent off to some server somewhere for perusal, while masquerading as something else.
Or alternatively, just switch the damned thing off.
No can do. Besides, it is not your computer anymore. It belongs to us. The sooner you understand that the better.
You clearly didn't read the (very) small print in the EULA that you agreed to. We take full ownership of the computer and we control everything you do on OUR machine.
Stop arguing or we'll lock it down so tight that you won't even be able to log in.
Yours Microsoft.
I already have enough trouble fighting with Excel to get it to accept what I type in verbatim, rather than trying to interpret it as a date / currency / phone number. Visual Studio has a few of these as well, where the oh-so-helpful suggested action is handily obscuring the bit of code that I actually want to change on the next line down. The last thing I want is having to dismiss half a dozen inane suggestions from the OS just because I'm copy-pasting stuff from one form to another.
Help offered when not needed is no help at all.
I'm surprised by the current popularity of VS-derived editors even where the user has no ties to Microsoft (eg platformio).
Presumably vscode - MS have put a lot of effort in to vscode, its mainly open source, and quite extendable. That makes it easy to roll-your-own editor.
It's like that 12 year old kid who keeps "making linux distros" - its so easy to make a Ubuntu derived distro, just edit a few files, and here's your ISO image.
> It's like that 12 year old kid who keeps "making linux distros" - its so easy to make a Ubuntu derived distro, just edit a few files, and here's your ISO image.
Or the person who just has to use a different font for every paragraph. Do you remember Word Processing was all the rage and we had that awful font salad from excited new users ?
The application may have changed but the attitudes haven't.
@My-Handle “Visual Studio has a few of these as well, where the oh-so-helpful suggested action is handily obscuring the bit of code that I actually want to change on the next line down.”
I assume you are referring to IntelliSense as that is the only thing, I can think of that pops up suggestions in Visual Studio’s text editor. I can’t see how it would obscure code below that you actually want to edit, as it only pops up suggestions on the line you are editing and only then if the line has not been ended, for example does not have say a required semicolon at the end.
The only time I could see a suggestion popping up for a completed line would be when you are missing a using in C#.
Now I don’t know what IntelliSense does in languages other than C# and C++. But for those two I have found it very useful, more so for C#. It is even more useful with ReSharper added to it.
> I assume you are referring to IntelliSense as that is the only thing,
Poorly named. There's no intelligence on show.
> for example does not have say a required semicolon at the end.
Also dumb. I don't want it correcting what isn't complete. How can it analyse something I haven';t typed yet ?
Badly, I think, is the answer.
My experience in C was that it would flicker up a distracting box while typing in a line, offering autocompletion to something that I didn't want. I know what I want to type. I don't need to be told, one bad guess at a time.
Why would I have started typing it if I didn't know what I wanted ? Maybe Microsoft's programmers work by hitting random keys until they get the code they want but I sure don't.
The time for offering suggestions is when I ask for them. I hate flickering crap showing up all over my screen.
Youtube's new bulging window homescreen can take a hike too. It's almost impossible to scroll through a page of it now without accidently expanding one window and obscuring the adjacent one. Do they think I stutter through each selection reading them individually ? I read a couple of relevant words from each heading and move onto the next line unless there's reason to inspect the detail.
“> for example does not have say a required semicolon at the end.
Also dumb. I don't want it correcting what isn't complete. How can it analyse something I haven';t typed yet ?
Badly, I think, is the answer.”
It is not analysing what you haven’t typed it is analysing what you have typed to suggest what you were going to type. Which it does very well because programming languages have rules which means there are limits to what can be typed next.
Why would suggesting what you were going to type anyway be useful? It is useful because it saves time. Why type in the full name of a method or property when you can complete it in a single keypress.
IntelliSense suggestions speed up the typing process. When the suggestion matches what you were going to type accept it otherwise carry on typing.
'IntelliSense suggestions speed up the typing process. When the suggestion matches what you were going to type accept it otherwise carry on typing.
But having suggestions flicker up near where I'm typing slows my typing, because it distracts my attention. I'm not much of a typist. I tend to read what I'm typing.
Yes, of course they're syntactically valid suggestions. But they're not likely functional suggestions, just valid autocompletes of the existing string. There are many possible such completions, only one is right, and it takes a good deal more 'intelligence' than VS has to predict what functionality I'm coding.
"trouble fighting with Excel to get it to accept what I type in verbatim"
I once had a similar problem with Access long ago when they introduced spell chucker. We'd inherited a complex database. One of the tables had an index field consisting of the lowercase letters "a" to "z". Access thought it would be helpful to capitalise all the letter 'i's without telling anyone. This only came to light when hundreds of CD's with the software had been shipped out the door to customers who discovered that under certain situations the software crashed due to the broken index. Thanks for your help Microsoft.
>> if Excel accepted.....
Yes, I already spend too much time dealing with MS "helpful" features.
Excel for example - I often find it easier to format an entire worksheet as text during data entry.
After my data is in place, I'll change column/cell formats so that calculations can function.
A REAL pain in the neck but... trusting the default formatting can be worse..er.
"Help offered when not needed is no help at all."
This! Constant second guessing on some systems is more of a hindrance than a help, especially when the "help" is >50% wrong. Even "helpful" spelling suggestions when typing, especially if what you are typing is technical or industry specific which the "help" invariably knowns nothing about.
The 3D design program SketchUp has that problem. You move the cursor to a point on a line - and a obscuring pop-up tells you something you already know about it - thus preventing you from doing the action there.
It's like shaking your fingers to try to remove a recalcitrant piece of something sticky.
If you release software, any software in general but an entire OS in specific, you had damn-well better make sure it's as bug tested, bug removed, security holes fixed, & as stable as you can possibly make it. Anything less than your best is tantamount to a bunch of Howler Monkies screaching & flinging shit at your audience.
Please release good code & stop flinging shit at us.
"... but an entire OS in specific, you had damn-well better make sure it's as bug tested, bug removed, security holes fixed"
Let me know when you find one.
Nothing pisses me more off than one that is released with known bugs.... And that "rare and minor" issue is the one that totally fucks up your set up..
"Suggested Actions" can already be said to exist thanks to the "magic" of right-click context menus. You remember those, right, Microsoft??
So why are you trying to reinvent the wheel you already invented years ago?? Just add another choice to the context menu and be done with it.
Yes, it's obvious that the are trying to recreate a phone interface as your desktop gui.
It became popular after Apple changed the osX vertical scroll bar direction to match that on the iPhone. Which you could sort of understand, because the iPhone and iPad were more popular than their desktop offering.
And understanding the design heritage, you can understand that it's a stupid idea, and it sucks.
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I wish Microsoft would not do this crap. I have to use Office as part of my job, and the amount of AI based suggestions stuff I've had to disable just to stop Outlook, Word et al popping up "helpful" suggestions for what I might like to do, just so I can keep the application vaguely usable.
IMO, a good user interface should enable you to do what you want with minimal interference, and leave you alone unless it's needed.
> IMO, a good user interface should enable you to do what you want with minimal interference, and leave you alone unless it's needed
But then you won't get the full User Experience!
Just think of all the time, maybe even whole minutes, that their highly paid UX specialists put into the memo that forced the devs to code all those popups.
Sounds very much like Klipper, the clipboard utility that KDE had in 2002. It can be configured to pop up a list of actions whenever a selection is made, which could be annoying - but it can be made less obtrusive by turning the automatic popup off and summoning it with a hotkey instead. And it will only give you the actions that you have configured - no "suggestions" from "selected partners", no network access at all.
They are the users who don't want to (or can't) think for themselves.
We see this sort of irritating 'helpfulness' from Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Goddess forbid you have to select something and then right click to see options, users want to see options immediately. This is a trend that's been with us at least since spell check and it's not going away. The best we can hope for is the ability to turn it off.
Once Upon a Time I needed to access a company's broadband router. Having got the password from the MD I typed it in, to be confronted with a prompt from Rapport along the lines of it having detected a security violation. Turns out that he was using the same password for banking. Ok, ok, he shouldn't be reusing passwords, particularly for banking, but Rapport shouldn't be so helpful. Why? Because I don't need to go anywhere near a banking app to run a dictionary attack, just compose an email window and paste-in likely passwords.
If MS is planning on being "helpful" in similar ways in future then we are all doomed. Because there have been occasions (some well-publicised) where people have pressed "Reply to All", perhaps MS might think this is another Good Thing To Offer. Who remembers the dinosaurs in one of their adverts joking about Reply To All? Did it cause any improvements to be made? Nope.
I have worked at several large companies and organizations that have disabled or restricted Reply to All in Outlook.
There are very few cases where you actually need to reply to everyone.
Now, to be perfectly objective, Borkzilla is not reponsible for Reply to All. That lies at the feet of the people who invented email.
'Rapport' isn't a banking app. It's a security app distributed 'free' and pushed by a lot of banks (lSantander, NatWest, HSBC)
"Rapport strengthens your online security by ‘locking down’ the connection between your computer, keyboard and Santander Online Banking. It helps stop your data going to counterfeit sites, so you can be safe in the knowledge that only you are transacting on your account. Rapport doesn’t replace the benefits of anti-virus and firewall software when accessing our online banking – it works alongside them to provide increased protection when transacting online (anti-virus software helps to stop threats by scanning your PC and looking for suspicious files and firewalls hide your computer from attackers, and help stop criminals getting data in and out of your computer)."
I notice that whenever this subject comes up - and I can absolutely respect those who favour Win2K just as much as those in the Windows 7 camp - no-one ever says "actually, the best Windows version ever was Windows ME".
(Watch. Some smartarse will do that now, complete with coherent and compelling justifications, just to prove me wrong...)
Certainly not the best overall, but given the particular combination of hardware I had at the time, it was easily the best of the 9x sub-genre for me thanks to its ability not to randomly fall over in a quivering heap due to my attempting to use one of those newfangled USB-connected thingys that were starting to become popular back then in place of the serial/parallel/bespoke-connected stuff we'd been having to use up to that point.
The most likely action when copying a phone number is not to ring it.
It is to put it in some other piece of correspondence or some form or data collation tool. If I want to ring it I will use my phone with its handy address book, no copy and paste required.
Please stop, and whilst you are at it make paste as plain text the default.
The upvote button is broken. I keep clicking it, but the counter only went up once.
Seriously though, what kind of proto-monkey thought that copying the formatting from the source into the destination document was a good idea? The chances of the formats actually matching are tiny, and only actually save you half a nano-second if you haven't already clicked a couple of buttons to set the format in your destination document. And god forbid you want to copy information from more than one source...
"The most likely action when copying a phone number is not to ring it."
Considering the number of online forms that try to force a format onto a phone number and can't cope with existing normal formatting leads me to believe that, as with Android, this "helpful" phone number pop-up will appear for various randomly formatted number combinations which a human will clearly see as NOT a phone number, and missing many layouts which a human will clearly recognise as an actual phone number.
Odds are, it will assume US formatted phone numbers only and miss everything else.
Picked up a new Mac Studio recently and have been getting used to having to hunt for ARM64 stuff when using Parallels (yes I know I can use UTM to run x86_64, but it's a bit sluggish...).
To scratch the itch/affliction that is World Of Warships (plus the very rare occasion when you do need Win for something) I've got a VM running Win 11 ARM64. Seems to run OK. Plus whilst I haven't got around to grabbing RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Alma 9 beta yet I've been re-acquainting myself with Ubuntu. So got all the main OS covered for a multitude of sins.
Magazine editor on a tight deadline. Questions about Bing and what document format would she like to use rendering her new laptop difficult to use.
I was in the neighbourhood so took Edge for a walk round the back of the bike-sheds, and uninstalled MS Office 365 (Click to run).
Now back to using what she had chosen to use for many years on her new laptop (which I'd setup a few days prior): Firefox and LibreOffice.
The kiosk concept is a compelling one, but locking things down then means callouts for applications that might rarely be required, such as Filezilla.
As someone else commented on this thread (windows as adware), rectifying MS's excesses is good for my business, but I'd prefer doing something a tad more intellectually challenging.
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