To make crashes 'friendlier,' Microsoft adds QR codes to Windows 10 BSOD
Windows users will no longer be forced to manually Google error messages to figure out why their computer crashed, as development builds of Windows 10 now include a QR code on the Blue Screen of Death.
The QR codes appeared in build 14316 of the Windows 10 Insider Preview, according to Ars Technica. Though it currently points to a generic help page, the QR code will presumably eventually direct users to specific Windows support articles.
Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death was long a spartan, utilitarian affair. It displayed a generic message and an often unintelligible crash code in a monospaced font.
That changed with Windows 8, when the BSOD was redesigned to add a sad emoticon and more nuanced error instructions.
Apple's modern equivalent -- the OS X kernel panic screen -- has always been somewhat more refined, though less helpful. Until OS X 10.8, rather than providing a reason, the kernel panic screen simply instructed users to perform a hard reset of their system; more recent revisions perform the reboot automatically.
The QR codes appeared in build 14316 of the Windows 10 Insider Preview, according to Ars Technica. Though it currently points to a generic help page, the QR code will presumably eventually direct users to specific Windows support articles.
Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death was long a spartan, utilitarian affair. It displayed a generic message and an often unintelligible crash code in a monospaced font.
That changed with Windows 8, when the BSOD was redesigned to add a sad emoticon and more nuanced error instructions.
Apple's modern equivalent -- the OS X kernel panic screen -- has always been somewhat more refined, though less helpful. Until OS X 10.8, rather than providing a reason, the kernel panic screen simply instructed users to perform a hard reset of their system; more recent revisions perform the reboot automatically.
Comments
It will be fun to collect the QR codes for all the W10 crashes. I'm sure someone will create a log and present it in a unique and friendly way.
The only time I've seen Mac OS X crash these days is on my wife's old 2010 MacBook Pro (where the actual hardware seems to be failing).
So which would you rather have: a computer which crashes fairly often but gives you (possibly) helpful information when it does, or a computer which crashes less often but doesn't give you that information?
When I code, I think about what the user is going to see and understand when an error occurs. The more they understand and are able to do on their own, the less they have to rely on me to explain what "Error 2" means and what they need to do to fix it.
First, how do you know that the hard drive has an error, not the cable, power supply, chipset or overclocked CPU? People are going to change their hard drive 3 times and get upset.
Second, you don't do this on your PLCs, but Windows supports 109 languages. Every string has to be translated 108 times. Plus, now your panic routine has to handle full Unicode, knowing how to write CJK. Your font you have to keep around in RAM is now 10 MB+ because you can't read it from the hard drive in a crash. Take Arabic, for example, you need RTL support and ligatures. A lot of low-level systems work for something you can write down and Google...