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I can only speculate of course, but I'd suspect a far simpler reason, driving subscriptions. Even limited use for video editing can fill up the free 5GB tier very quickly and if iClouds rather aggressive nudges to upgrade and their success amongst the people around me are anything to go by, there is a lot of potential in getting people to subscribe for a few bucks.

The scenario I envision is basically, a user just edits a few 4k files together and starts approaching the 5GB limit. Because OneDrive is also by default used for other things such as documents and even the desktop nowadays, they soon thereafter hit the 5GB limit and start being inundated with offers to upgrade to the 100GB tier. "Just 1,99 per month, nothing major, barely felt", at least that's the pitch. Maybe they acquiesce, maybe they ignore it. That's the play I'd wager. And if enough people resist, maybe in an upcoming update a full OneDrive could lead to (artificially) degraded functionality. Not in the sense of local storage being impossible, just slightly less convenient over direct OneDrive. Say what you want about the iCloud nagging (I have and will continue complaining about that as well), at least it isn't required to have free iCloud storage to locally edit ones videos with iMovie.

In any case, forcing OneDrive for a video editor (arguably one of the highest storage requirement programs most people will ever use at the moment) is anti-consumer and showcases how little any commitment [0] by them…

Everyone is reacting negatively to the focus on AI, but does Mozilla really have a choice? This is going to be a rehash of the same dynamic that has happened in all the browser wars: Leading browser introduces new feature, websites and extensions start using that feature, runner-up browsers have no choice but to introduce that feature or further lose marketshare.

Chrome and Edge have already integrated LLM capabilities natively, and webpages and extensions will soon start using them widely:

- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

- https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/19/introducing-the-prompt-and-writing-assistance-apis/

Soon you will have pages that are "Best viewed in Chrome / Edge" and eventually these APIs will be standardized. Only a small but passionate minority of users will run a non-AI browser. I don't think that's the niche Firefox wants to be in.

I agree that Mozilla should take the charge on being THE privacy-focused browser, but they can also do so in the AI age. As an example, provide a sandbox and security features that prevent your prompts and any conversations with the AI from being exfiltrated for "analytics." Because you know that is coming.

The Windows 11 default context menu uses a newer API (IExplorerCommand) compared the older method which involved screwing around with the registry, and having everything play nice.

Here's a MS blog post explaining why they want to move to IExplorerCommand: https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-context-menu-and-share-dialog-in-windows-11/

Frankly, this just follows all the same problems that MS has had with since after W7. Their own APIs have a lot of warts and problems, but MS has not been able or willing to follow through on the migration required to actually move to a whole new API. This has shown up in their Windows GUI frameworks, it's the exact same problem with the Control Panel vs Settings, and here it is again.

I can sympathize with many of the stated goals/benefits, and I can understand the technical difficulties with transparently porting registry craziness into their new framework, and infact I applaud that their fallback is "perfect" - it is just the old context menu. I just wish there was a setting toggle to set the default.

Obviously it would be of great historic interest, but as a living software, just no. Go read this: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/19/modernizing-dom-tree-microsoft-edge/

IE implemented DOM without using tree. No, really. Up to 2017. After reading the article, all my questions why IE was so buggy evaporated and replaced by how could IE work at all.

MSVC up to 2015 also didn't create AST. Unbelievable, I know. The question is not why MSVC's C++ support was so buggy; the real question is how could MSVC implement C++ at all. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rejuvenating-the-microsoft-cc-compiler/

After learning about IE and MSVC, I gained respect for Microsoft developers and disdain for Microsoft. Tightrope walking is amazing display of skill. Letting your employees to commute by tightrope walking for years is amazing display of stupidity.

I have found one working enterprise use case.

UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such.

But I agree, selling UWP apps to businesses for traditional desktop use is ridiculously difficult.

> I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.

For a long time, UWP was the only way to get a working WebView (one based off of Edge instead of IE). But I think they fixed that and backported Edge to WPF a few months ago. (EDIT: they did kind of fix that - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webview-winforms-wpf-apps/ )

> As an aside I always kind of wondered why all browsers started including developer tools by default as they are not of use to 99.9% of users.

That percentage is actually pretty close to correct. For that reason and user studies of regular users Edge has already turned off their DevTools by default ( https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/11/22/balancing-user-friendliness-and-developer-convenience/ ).

Firefox is currently pursuing moving the DevTools out of the browser and will likely use a similar system to Edge / Safari for activating them. Going the extension route does have complexity drawbacks but being able to ship fixes faster, to a wider audience will be a greater benefit. Additionally as all browsers adopt WebExtensions this could mean that any Firefox panel developed as a WebExtension will be available for use within Chrome or Edge.