Microsoft launched Windows 10 preview build 18890 yesterday with the removal of the friendly dates feature. Friendly dates arrived in build 18272 in a bid to make timestamps more readable and previously turned it on by default.
It displayed dates and times in ‘minutes ago’ and ‘hours ago’ if documents were modified recently. It also introduced ‘Yesterday at ___’, the day of the week with time, and month and day if in the current year.
Microsoft confirmed that friendly dates will not ship with the May 2019 update and gave no indication if it would return. Why it cut the feature is also unclear, as it was possible to toggle and many considered it an improvement. The additional lack of inclusion in 18890, the Windows 10 20H1 branch, doesn’t inspire confidence.
Windows 10 20H1 Build 18890 Fixes and Known Issues
In better news, Microsoft squashed some annoying bugs with this build. Those with audio hangs will be particularly pleased, as well as people with slow desktop refreshes. Here’s the full changelog:
- “We fixed a hang in the audio service when checking whether a machine was licensed to use spatial audio.
- We fixed an issue that could result in the desktop being unexpectedly slow to refresh (if you right-click the desktop and select Refresh or press F5).
- We fixed an issue resulting in not being able to access network shares if you booted into Safe Mode with Networking.
- We fixed an issue where hardware keyboard text predictions wouldn’t appear (if enabled) when the es-US keyboard was active.
- We fixed an issue that could result in cumulative updates potentially failing with error 0x800f0982 if a language pack update was happening at the same time.”
Still, this is an Insider build, and users should be aware there are still a number of issues. Gaming anti-cheat crashes still persist for some games, while some Realtek SD card readers cease to function. Tamper Protection may also be off by default after updating.
You can find a full list of known issues on the Microsoft blog.
