It's hard to believe Windows 10 is already ten years old, and set to reach the end of its life later this year. This version of Microsoft's operating system came at a near-perfect time. With my own laptop and off to college for the first time, I was completely engrossed in tech for the first time and just becoming a Windows enthusiast, not just on PCs, but also on phones. I was there since the first day of the Windows Insider Program, and feverishly followed every new build up to the official launch, and well past that.

The rolling nature of Windows 10 updates may make it seem like the operating system hasn't changed that much throughout its lifetime. Each update only brings a handful of changes, but there have been a lot of updates, and so the version of Windows 10 we have today is very different from the one we had ten years ago.

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of Windows 10 and enter the final months of its life, I wanted to take a look back at how it all started and compare that to how it's ending. It was a long and interesting (but not always exciting) journey, with some improvements, some downgrades, and many dreams that were lost along the way. So let's take a look at all of it.

The desktop and Start menu

Traces of Windows 8

In the beginning, Windows 10 was very clearly trying to bridge the gap between Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows 7 was the quintessential desktop operating system, while 8 wanted to modernize the platform for a new category of devices — tablets — which ended up alienating the desktop users that had always loved Windows. With Windows 10, Microsoft wanted to correct its course, but it was very apparent early on that this meant a lot of Windows 8 elements were simply being adapted to work in a more typical desktop environment.

There's a general feel of polish that Windows 10 acquired over the years. While the taskbar looks mostly similar in terms of the elements it contains, things overall just feel more fine-tuned in the latest release. In the original version, the notification icon was thrown together with other system tray icons on the taskbar, but it was eventually moved to the far corner to be closer to where the action center pops up, which makes sense. The system flyouts were also improved over time, adding a stronger blur effect to the background and more optimal sizes.

There is one new icon on the taskbar in the latest version of Windows 10, though, and that's for news and interests. This is essentially a news feed that also contains some useful widgets like weather and maps information, and it can even show some weather information directly on the taskbar. It's basically a precursor to the Widgets button on Windows 11.

The Settings app was also improved over the years. The initial release had a fixed set of buttons that was always centered within the app, leaving a lot of blank space when resized. Later versions implemented a more adaptive design that utilized the space a bit better. Interestingly, while testing out these versions, I also realized that the original release of Windows 10 forced you to sign out of your account in order to change display scaling settings. In the latest releases, these settings change instantly, and you're only advised to close and reopen apps that may not adjust correctly.

The Start menu has evolved a lot

The Start menu is one aspect that makes this more apparent. While they may seem similar at first glance, there's a very clear difference between the Start menu in the initial release of Windows 10 and the one we have right now. App icons were still entirely designed around the idea of tiles, with a plain colored background and simple white graphic drawn inside to represent the app. Not only did they look like this in the tiles themselves, but the app list as well, whereas in the latest release, tiles have colorless backgrounds and the icons are more colorful and detailed to compensate. It goes a long way to give Windows 10 more of its own identity, which was certainly missing in that original iteration.

The original iteration of the Windows 10 Start menu was also a bit less useful. It promoted a handful of apps and forced you to click through to the all apps list, rather than showing it directly next to the tile area. Plus, extra space was taken by things like the power and account menus, which were eventually collapsed into a smaller side area to prioritize the app list.

Strangely, though, when it came to tablet mode, the original iteration of Windows 10's Start menu was a little bit better, in my opinion. While the full app list wasn't shown by default, it would open as a list next to the Start menu tiles. In the latest release, you can swap between the tile view and the list view, but not have both at the same time, which I would prefer.

There was no dark mode, either

A big absence in the initial release of Windows 10 is one you may have forgotten, but the operating system initially didn't even have a proper system-wide dark mode, with some apps handling the switch between dark and light modes on their own. Despite Windows Phone being one of the first to bring this feature to market, Windows 10 only received it with version 1511 later that year. And even then, the implementation felt half-baked, with more elements being adapted to work in light or dark mode over the years.

In the initial release, Windows 10 featured a dark taskbar, Start menu, and flyouts, but oddly enough, every app stuck to light mode. Settings, File Explorer, and more were all blindingly bright against the dark tones that the desktop shell prepared you for.

By the final release of Windows 10, most of the common elements had been adapted for both modes. The Start menu, taskbar, and other areas all have a light mode now, while most apps support dark mode, including File Explorer. Many of these things were rolled out gradually, though. While dark mode first appeared in late 2015, there wasn't a light mode for the taskbar and Start menu until 2019. And dark mode for File Explorer also took many years to appear. Still, it eventually got there and became a much more polished release.

When OneDrive was bad

An incomprehensible misstep

The launch of Windows 10 was marked by one huge issue that Microsoft was forced to fix in later releases. After Windows 8 had introduced the genius concept of making OneDrive files visible in File Explorer without downloading them, Microsoft somehow thought it was a good idea to revert that for Windows 10, so if you wanted your files to appear in File Explorer, you had to download them. It felt really out of touch in an era where cloud files were starting to become more prominent.

It took some time, but Microsoft eventually reintroduced the behavior from Windows 8 by default, and gave users the choice of how OneDrive syncing should behave. The ability to see OneDrive files without downloading them was called OneDrive files on-demand, and it proved so popular that a ton of cloud storage apps now make use of it. Even macOS eventually borrowed this feature.

Microsoft Edge was more than a Chrome clone

Standing on its own with a new engine

Microsoft has been trying to shake off the bad reputation of Internet Explorer for many years now — in fact, it really started with Windows 10, with the introduction of Project Spartan, which was eventually named Microsoft Edge in time for the official Windows 10 release. Edge was a complete modernization of Microsoft's web browser, using a new HTML engine that greatly improved on Internet Explorer while providing a completely new UI that was friendly for both touch and desktop users, along with things like extension support.

As much as it wasn't perfect, Microsoft Edge Legacy (as it's called today) was a great browser at the time. It was speedy, and Microsoft was trying to do some unique things by adding the ability to draw directly on webpages for sharing — despite the feature never being fully fleshed out. You could only ever draw on a screenshot of the page, even though it had seemed like pages could still be interacted with when elements were drawn on them.

Sadly, the rapid development of the web and browsers like Chrome meant that Microsoft was often playing catch-up in terms of features and capabilities, and with Edge releases being tied to Windows updates, it was impossible to keep up with the release cadence of competing browsers. By 2020, Microsoft gave up on its bespoke version of Edge and rebuilt it based on the Chromium project, making it more like the majority of browsers out there.

This did make it so Microsoft could incorporate a ton more features into Edge, but on the flip side, many of these features weren't things anybody wanted. These days, Edge is riddled with a sidebar that's full of useless tools, Copilot, and even dangerous features such as "buy now, pay later" plans. Some might argue that effort would have been better spent building up the company's browser engine.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

One of Windows 10's biggest improvements

Microsoft had initially attempted to bring Android apps to Windows 10 through Project Astoria, and some preview builds actually allowed this to work in a limited capacity, even on Windows phones. But while the project was eventually scrapped, some of the work used to try and make it happen gave rise to the idea of running Linux on Windows. Microsoft formally introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in 2016, and it was a huge deal being able to run full Linux operating systems within Windows, rather than using a typical virtual machine or dual-booting.

WSL became one of the defining features of Windows 10 in the years following this initial launch, and it got some huge improvements, particularly with WSL 2 in 2019. This allowed users to go as far as running GUI Linux apps on Windows, making for an even more complete Linux experience. WSL has kept receiving improvements throughout the years, with even more capabilities introduced in Windows 11. It's likely the most impactful feature Microsoft added to Windows 10.

This also brought along a bigger focus on developers, which led to the introduction of features like Windows Terminal, which weren't there in the initial Windows 10 release, either. Windows Terminal is a modern wrapper for command-line interfaces, bringing them all together under one roof. In Windows Terminal, you can run Command Prompt, Windows PowerShell, Azure PowerShell, and terminals for whatever Linux distributions you have installed. You can open all these platforms in different tabs, and even use split-screen views for different profiles to multitask more easily.

A boulevard of broken dreams

Too many failed promises

My colleague (and boss) Rich Woods recently wrote about how Windows 10 is Microsoft's most successful failure, and booting up the original release, does that ever become apparent. Looking at the list of apps on a fresh install, it's a sea of corpses and reminders of what could have been. Even aside from Microsoft Edge legacy, almost everything we see here is dead, discontinued, or replaced.

Windows 10 shipped with a 3D Builder app for designing 3D objects, which, despite the rise in popularity in 3D printing, just never gained enough traction for Microsoft to support it. In 2017, the company even introduced Paint 3D as an attempt to replicate the success of Paint in a 3D space, and it just ended up being killed off, too.

Then there's Cortana, one of the more hurtful ones to see go, especially now that we know what it's been replaced with. Cortana was born on Windows Phone and I loved her there, but the audience was too small for it to be relevant as a legitimate assistant that could work with things like smart home devices. Bringing Cortana to the desktop increased the potential number of users significantly, but no one really wanted a voice assistant on the desktop, especially not for controlling a smart home. For me, Cortana was always more of a source of laughs than anything else, and I kind of wished Microsoft had leaned into that. I loved asking it for jokes or saying things like "I love you" or "Will you marry me?" to see what silly responses it would give me. Microsoft tried to turn Cortana into a productivity tool, and that was just not going to work.

Another bit that stings, looking at the original app list, is the Phone Companion app. A bitter reminder that Windows 10 Mobile was once supposed to become big, the Phone Companion app still says Windows phones are the "perfect" companion to Windows 10. Of course, today we have the Phone Link app that just works with Android and iOS. Windows 10 was built up to have so much connectivity between PCs and phones, and it's sad to see how quickly this vision fell through.

But as time has gone on, there are even more dead things on this list. Groove Music, a brand that Microsoft went through the trouble of buying for the Windows 10 launch, was discontinued a few years later with Microsoft pushing users to subscribe to Spotify instead. Movies & TV was recently announced to be killed off as well, and even the Get Skype app is now a reminder that Skype itself has also been discontinued. Some of these apps are still bundled with the latest releases of Windows 10 since their demise is very recent, but still.

What we gained and lost on the way

There's a lot you won't see here

The point of this article is to compare the beginning and end of the Windows 10 era, but you can't truly analyze this journey without at least looking at what happened in between. Many dreams of the Windows 10 era were so short-lived that they began and ended in the time between the original release and the final one. Here are a few examples.

Universal Skype

Part of the strategy of making Windows 10 a universal platform for PCs, phones, and Xbox was an attempt to bring Skype to each platform with feature parity. With Windows 10 version 1511, Microsoft introduced the Messaging, Phone, and Skype Video apps, all of which integrated different Skype features with more typical SMS messaging and phone calls. You could see your Skype messages and SMS messages to the same contact in one view, sort of similar to how iMessage works on iPhones, and you could turn a regular phone call into a Skype call with video on your phone.

This iteration was very quickly abandoned, but Microsoft later introduced a universal Skype app that still attempted to be on every platform. Eventually, this too was killed off in favor of an Electron-based app that relied mostly on web technologies. At this point, Windows phones were no longer relevant, so making a universal app wasn't a concern anymore.

The creator features

2017 was an interesting year for Windows 10, as Microsoft leaned hard into the idea of content creation with both of the feature updates for that year. Called the Creators Update and Fall Creators Update, these updates added some big features, such as Paint 3D, which I've already mentioned above. This was trying to take the simplicity of Paint, and how it made digital art accessible to everyone, and translate it into a 3D space. You could still paint and draw, but you could also model in 3D and then print those models. This ended up being killed off a few years later, too, and for Windows 11, Microsoft went back and modernized the classic Paint app instead of trying to supersede it.

But to me, the true shame was what happened with Beam (later known as Mixer). As part of one of these updates, Microsoft purchased the live streaming platform Beam, a competitor to Twitch, later renaming it to Mixer. With Mixer under its umbrella, Microsoft added the ability to live stream gameplay from your Windows PC directly onto the internet with no additional apps. The feature was just built into the Xbox Game Bar, and you could add things like a camera feed. It truly made streaming accessible to everyone at a time where it wasn't as attainable and well understood as it is today, and in my opinion, it was perfect. Of course, Microsoft eventually killed Mixer entirely and pushed users to Facebook Gaming, so that went nowhere.

My People

I've talked about the My People feature at length in the past, but it's yet another victim of Microsoft's flip-flopping strategy that appeared and disappeared within just a few years. My People was introduced with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in 2017, and it allowed you to pin your favorite contacts to the taskbar and communicate with them across different apps from the same place.

The idea, as I saw it, is that communication is built around the people you care the most about, rather than the apps you use to talk to them. So, this allowed you to pin contexts to your taskbar, and you could reach out to them on any of the apps where you had their contact saved. You could use the People app to link different platforms to one contact and make this work, and it was a genius idea, in my opinion. At the time, most of my online chats were focused on one or two people, so it made perfect sense. Sadly, the idea didn't catch on and the feature was scrapped a couple of years later.

Timeline

This one is a bit interesting, as you can still see remnants of it in the latest Windows 10 version, but really, the feature is nowhere near what it promised to be anymore. The timeline was a feature in Windows 10 that kept track of your activities and allowed you to jump back into what you were doing before. Not only did it work on one PC, but the timeline would actually sync between your different PCs and even your phone, provided you had compatible apps that enabled the syncing capability.

Conceptually, the idea was very smart, but with apps needing to implement support actively, and a lack of integration between phones and PCs (since Windows phones were already on the way out), there just wasn't enough support to make this feature worth maintaining, and the sync capabilities for it were shut down, making it a lot less interesting. The timeline is still there in the latest version of Windows 10, but it's even less useful than it was when it was actively maintained.

Windows Mixed Reality

Microsoft teased the idea of augmented or mixed reality from early on in the Windows 10 development cycle, but it didn't really start until the HoloLens headset was introduced in 2016, and it only became properly accessible with the formal launch of Windows Mixed Reality and dedicated headsets in 2017. These headsets were far more affordable than the HoloLens and had a proper consumer focus.

However, they took too long to come to market and were outshined by competing platforms such as the Oculus Rift, which made them basically useless by the time they released. There was never a successful consumer angle for Windows Mixed Reality, and while it wasn't removed completely until Windows 11 came around, it's got no support anymore.

Sets

For this last one, it's important to note that Sets never even made it to any public released of Windows 10. However, Microsoft tested this feature multiple times throughout the Windows 10 development cycle, putting it in Windows Insider builds for months before scrapping it. Sets was to be a feature that enabled tabs for basically every app. Essentially, every app could run inside a tab, so you could keep every part of a project in the same window, for example. The concept was very similar to Stardock's Groupy app, which is pictured above.

Despite testing the feature across multiple iterations, Microsoft ended up calling it quits, and instead added tab support to some of its apps, such as Notepad and Windows Terminal. It never saw the light of day.

Windows 10's legacy lives on — but barely

We've lost so much

Looking back at the original release of Windows 10 and comparing it to what we have today paints a picture of broken promises and failed goals. Windows 10 may have kind of succeeded in merging the more touch-friendly UI of Windows 8 with the desktop usability of previous Windows versions, but everything else Microsoft set out to do with Windows 10 seems to have fallen by the wayside. So much of what we see in the initial Windows 10 release is dead or discontinued now, and it only gets worse when you look at the other things Microsoft tried to add in later years.

The only parts of Windows 10 that lived through to the end were the goal of bridging the gap between Windows 8 and 7 (even then, the touch-friendliness of Windows 10 is kind of questionable at times), and the later introduction of the Windows Subsystem for Linux and similar development tools. That was all it needed to succeed in terms of widespread adoption, but it certainly doesn't feel like Windows 10 shaped anything nearly as much as it was shaped by the circumstances around it. You can argue whether that's good or bad, but it certainly feels disappointing to someone who was as excited for Windows 10 as I was back in 2015 and the years that followed.