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For months, Microsoft has been stepping up the pressure on users to upgrade to Windows 10. The company has multiple reasons for doing this — information technology wants to forestall a long tail of Windows seven or 8.1 users from dragging out its back up cycles (similar to what happened to Windows XP), it's prominently pledged to striking one billion users on Windows 10, and it undoubtedly wants to push button the market every bit a whole towards its new revenue model, which is much less focused on Windows 10 license sales, and more most advertizing and in-OS content sales.

In keeping with this goal, Microsoft has steadily made it more than difficult to opt out of Windows 10 upgrades. The company has reworked its installation messages to imply that consumers couldn't opt out of upgrading, merely clicking on the red "X" at the top right of those messages still canceled the process. According to reports streaming in from multiple sources online, Microsoft has inverse this behavior. Clicking the X does nothing to cease the upgrade process now.

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Clicking the X in this dialog doesn't actually cancel anything.

Concluding calendar week, ZDNet hailed these changes as a positive step for Microsoft, since there's now a "Click Here" link to cancel the upgrade equally opposed to no clear method of doing so. The problem is, Microsoft simply changed one of the core behaviors of the GWX.exe application without telling anyone information technology did and so. PC World's Brad Chacos wrote about how his wife was caught up in the upgrade, and reports have been coming in from Reddit as well.

Literal standards vs. perceived dishonesty

Microsoft would undoubtedly contend that this change isn't actually a change at all. At that place are many, many mod applications that don't automatically exit when yous click the "X" button — and Microsoft's formal guidelines as far back as Windows 95 instructed developers that they should treat the X as a "Close" button, not an "Leave" button. The problem is, 10 generally is interpreted as leave, and there are plenty of Microsoft applications, including Office, Net Explorer, and Edge, that notwithstanding follow this behavior.

In other words: Microsoft has technically done nothing incorrect with flip-flopping on treating the X as a "Close this dialog" option as opposed to a "Cancel this process" choice. It can even contend that information technology'due south now operating according to its own best practices, especially since GWX.exe runs in the groundwork anyhow unless you lot kill it via GWX Control Panel or Task Manager (and it restarts itself if all yous apply is Task Manager, so not much luck in that location.)

The problem is, humans who use Windows aren't devoted consumers of Microsoft's best practices as elucidated in UX evolution manuals, and clicking on the X to abolish the upgrade was the proper way to avoid the earlier Windows 10 upgrade notifications.

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The sometime version of the notification didn't accept a way to opt out, except for the Ten.

In this context, it's very hard to telephone call what Microsoft has washed anything just disingenuous. The visitor has swapped ane behavior for some other, likely counting on the fact that people would wake up and discover themselves running Windows 10 afterward they thought they'd disabled this from happening.

Yes, treating the Ten like an go out or abolish push is against Microsoft's recommended UX practices, merely so is dramatically overhauling the behavior of application buttons without informing the consumer that things take changed.

It's fourth dimension for Microsoft to step dorsum and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. In the starting time, GWX.exe served a useful purpose — it told users that they were eligible for costless Windows 10 notifications, and it communicated when PCs were fix to update. Over the by 10 months, GWX.exe has become an invasive application. Information technology has adopted malware-like obfuscation tactics designed to trick people into choosing an upgrade they didn't desire, including irresolute the function of icons and hiding the option non to upgrade.

Making the opt-out button slightly more than prominent while irresolute the office of X is no improvement at all. This is an case of a dark pattern — a pattern congenital into an application designed to trick y'all into making certain choices, similar to how adware will sometimes flip the "No" and "Yes" dialog boxes, or use registration choices that crave you to check a box if you desire to opt out of something equally opposed to opting into information technology.

The people who wanted to upgrade to Windows 10 have already done so. The people now being captured by these dragnets are those who haven't wanted to do then, and forcing them into scenarios where they mistakenly upgrade anyway will not create feelings of warmth and joy. What you're actually edifice is a group of users who will either fight to hold on to Windows 7 / viii.1 with both easily or volition shift to either Os Ten or Linux.

Forcing people into upgrades by tricking them is perhaps the worst mode to build support for Windows 10 we can imagine. It's time to knock this off and let people who choose non to upgrade go their ain way.