Spent Saturday afternoon watching Windows 10 chew through the November Update instead of doing literally anything else productive, and I want to talk about it because Microsoft has once again decided that installing a system update is the appropriate time to quietly reset a pile of settings I very specifically chose months ago.
The update itself, if you haven't grabbed it yet (it's rolling out now, build 10586, some people are calling it Threshold 2), is legit good. Right-click "uninstall" now works on basically everything pinned to the Start menu instead of just a handful of apps, you can resize the Start menu to show more or fewer tile columns, and colored title bars are back as an option if, like me, you found the all-white window chrome from July kind of sterile. Cortana can now listen to a song playing in the room and tell you what it is, which is a neat trick even if I'm not totally sure how often I need Microsoft's assistant doing what Shazam already does fine.
None of that is the problem. The problem is that Tuesday morning I clicked a link in an email and Edge popped open instead of Firefox, and I sat there for a solid five seconds legitimately confused about what had happened to my own computer. Turns out the update had quietly reset my default browser, my default PDF viewer, and apparently decided I wanted photos opening in the new Photos app again instead of the old viewer. I didn't touch a single setting. It just happened, the same way something similar happened to a couple people I know back in July. This is now, what, the second time in four months Microsoft has helped itself to my default app choices during a routine update? I get that they want people using Edge, I really do. I just don't want to use Edge. It's fine as a browser, genuinely, it's just not the one with my bookmarks, my extensions, and about a decade of muscle memory built around it.
It's a five-minute fix, back into Settings, System, Default apps, click Firefox and Adobe Reader again, so I'm not going to pretend this ruined my week. But it's exactly the kind of thing that makes me roll my eyes at software that's supposedly designed to "just work." Somebody on the Windows team decided that resetting defaults during a major update was acceptable, and I'd bet actual money nobody tested that decision against people who set a non-Microsoft default on purpose.
The other thing worth mentioning, mostly because I spent way too long poking at it this weekend, is that the taskbar and action center both got a visual pass too, and the tablet-mode transitions are noticeably smoother now. Not that I use tablet mode on this machine, so that part's mostly academic for me. If you're running Windows 10 Mobile on a phone, this update apparently bakes Skype's messaging, calling, and video calling in as the default communication stack, which is a much bigger deal for phone owners than for desktop people like me. I don't have a Windows phone (does anyone, at this point, really), so I can't tell you how that actually feels day to day.
If you haven't installed the update yet, do it, the fixes and the small quality-of-life stuff outweigh the annoyance by a wide margin. Just go check your default apps right after, because there's a decent chance Microsoft already made that decision on your behalf. Settings, System, Default apps. Bookmark that path. You'll probably need it again come the next big update, whenever that ends up being.