Boosting Productivity with Browserized Windows 10

Aiming to assist businesses and boost user productivity, Microsoft recently announced the new features Timeline and Sets, which are slated to go live next year.

Preview of Windows Timeline. Source: Microsoft

Each Set is a group of applications tabbed browser-style in one window. To change the active application, users will now click a tab in the browser instead of navigating to a separate window on the desktop. Sets can be chosen from a moment in time, a last-known location in a document, or an event on the PC – say, right before a shut-down.

Windows 10 keeps track of those moments and locations with the help of another Windows 10 technology called Timeline, which was previewed at Build 2017. The Timeline of a Set is made up of cards, each of which contains the “state” of the pages, applications, or events, to which the Set can be reverted.

The biggest benefit of Sets is that it enables users to organize their environments, and get to where they were and what they were doing quickly and without much fuss; time being the user’s most valuable commodity.

Sets and Timeline are intended to be released in short order, pending A/B testing. Timeline is likely to surface in the Windows 10 1803 update in April 2018, and Sets is expected to follow soon thereafter.

Sets will be optional and is not likely to replace the full desktop user interface. Following the philosophy of Windows 10 S, Sets is simple and is made more secure by supporting apps from the Windows Store only, at least initially. As history has shown, it wouldn’t be a big jump for Microsoft to open Sets to support 32-bit apps and apps from outside the Windows Store later.

Source: https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/update-whats-coming-next-windows-insiders/