Arriving April 11, it's not that creative, but Windows 10 keeps getting better.

The next big update to Windows 10 is nearly upon us: Windows 10 version 1703, known as the Creators Update, will be published to Windows Update next Patch Tuesday, on April 11th.

The final build is—probably—15063. That build is already available to insiders and should soon become available for the Windows 10 Media Creation tool, but we also know that there are going to be some patches materializing some time between now and when that happens. There's a small chance those patches will bump the build number; more likely, they will instead bump the patch number, which is currently a pristine and perfect 0 on the desktop. The mobile build has already been bumped to 15063.2 to handle an installation problem when upgrading from version 1607.

Version 1703 has been branded the "Creators Update" (without an apostrophe). Frankly, this made more sense in the context of its grand unveiling than it does now; when the Creators Update was revealed, Microsoft also introduced its new Surface Studio desktop computer, and promised that a range of affordable virtual reality headsets would be developed for Windows 10. With the Surface Studio being a machine unambiguously designed for digital artists, and with virtual reality needing a wealth of new 3D applications to truly shine, the "Creators Update" branding was an obvious nod to these new hardware form factors.

In terms of what's actually been delivered, however, and 1703 just doesn't seem all that, well, creative. Let's start with those headsets: they're not on the market yet, and they're probably some months away. The Creators Update introduces substantial programmatic support for them, and will be enough for developers to start creating software for the Windows Holographic APIs—but the operating system itself doesn't include any particularly significant 3D features for the end-user. Those will probably start to happen in the second major update, planned for later this year.

On the edge of being good

The biggest recipient of visible changes is probably the Edge browser. In a nod to the Windows 8 immersive browser, the tab bar can be expanded to show nice little previews of all your open tabs, and there's a new "set aside" feature that lets you stash away all the current tabs as a group, and then load them all up again later. For people who like to use tabs as if they were bookmarks—and I know I do—this is almost a really neat feature.

"Almost," because it doesn't feel fully fleshed out yet. The set aside tabs aren't persistent; if you un-set-aside them, they're no longer stored in the set aside area. Close the window and they're gone forever. I would like to, for example, have a bunch of tabs that I use for when I file expenses, so that I can simultaneously open our expense system, instructions for our expense system, Uber (for retrieving receipts), and the American Express website. But I can't create a set of persistent set-aside tabs for "expenses." For me, this greatly limits the utility of the feature.

Edge is now an e-book reader. Along with PDFs, which it has been able to load since its debut, it can now open EPUB files, which Microsoft sells in the Windows Store. Edge has a new pane for managing your library, and there are a number of options for controlling the display of those books. Unfortunately, e-books don't support one of Edge's other features: annotation. Since its release, Edge has supported creating annotated Web pages with a pen. In truth I've never found this particularly valuable; while I imagine it could prove very useful in, for example, Web development and design—just have a client mark up all the parts of the page where they want the font larger, or a QA person circle bugs for a developer to fix—the appeal to a general audience seems limited.

But the ability to mark up e-books seems more attractive and generally useful. Adding inking support to PDFs and EPUBs seems like an obvious way to make the basic technology more usable by more people. Unfortunately, inking isn't supported in e-books. Microsoft told me this is for copyright reasons, which may be true, but feels like a missed opportunity in any case.

Under the hood, the new Edge includes the usual array of standards improvements, including support for WebRTC 1.0, for building real-time voice and video communications software within the browser, the Web Payments API, click-to-run Flash, CSS Variables, and full-color emoji. It also includes a preview of WebAssembly support (off by default).

Microsoft is also working to make Edge a more secure browser. The Edge sandbox is now stricter, with its access prohibited to a wide range of Windows APIs—meaning that even if an attacker gets malicious code to run within the browser, that code now has far fewer opportunities to break out of the browser process and attack the system.

Microsoft has also changed how Edge's "Chakra" JavaScript engine works. The JavaScript engines in all modern browsers are JIT ("just in time") compilers, meaning that they compile the JavaScript into executable x86 code on-the-fly to reduce the overhead of running scripts. Every browser also respects and uses non-execute protection: data in memory can either be executable, or writable, but should never be both at the same time. This means that the browser has to have access to the API that marks data in memory as executable. That's a problem, because that API is equally useful to attackers, so that they can mark their malicious data as being executable.

In the new Edge, access to this API is now prohibited; the process that handles (potentially malicious) Web content can no longer mark data as being executable. Chakra's JIT compilation has been moved to a separate process, and this separate process is responsible for making memory in the sandboxed browser process executable on an as-needed basis.

Edge is on the cusp of being a really great browser, but it's still not there yet. Chrome is very forgiving if you close a window accidentally; ctrl-shift-T brings the window back, with all its tabs intact. Chrome similarly lets you close all windows simultaneously, preserving all their tabs, so that when you reopen it, you're back exactly where you left off, with multiple windows and multiple tabs all in the place you left them. Edge can't do either of these things. As a result, it's all too easy to lose your tabs.

The way it handles a crashed tab is inelegant. Chrome just turns the tab into a sad tab. In the background, it's collecting a crash dump and no doubt notifying Google that something went wrong, but there's no end-user interruption. You just hit reload and the tab is back. Edge, in contrast, uses the default Windows crash handler, popping up that annoying dialog box with its slow-moving progress bar, while it laboriously writes out a crash dump, making you wait before you can resume whatever you were doing.

The extension ecosystem is also sparse, though slowly improving.

That said, the core engine continues to feel good. Pages render well, and quickly, scrolling feels smooth, and its memory usage seems to be quite a bit more reasonable than Chrome's. With some improvements to tab handling and crash handling, in particular, it would be a solid daily driver browser. It's just not quite there yet.

Beam me up, Scotty

Gaming tends to be destructive more than it is creative, with killing and mayhem, but gaming-related improvements make up the other large part of the Creators Update: Game Mode and integrated Beam streaming.

Game Mode is intended to boost gaming performance by a few percent. The idea is straightforward enough: when a game is using Game Mode, Windows plays around with thread affinities to dedicate processor cores to games, shuffling background tasks to other cores. Foreground games already get access to most of the GPU's resources; Game Mode shifts the balance even further in their favor.

Game Mode is available for both regular Win32 games, and for UWP games sold through the Windows Store. In the case of the latter, Microsoft intends to offer an API so that games can automatically enable the mode. For the former, the user will have to opt in explicitly.

How much difference does it make in practice? Frankly, I'm not seeing any real difference in the games I've used—to the extent that I'm not even sure Game Mode is functioning. My game of choice, Dota 2, spawns dozens of threads (more than 80) and seems to put some amount of load on every core. I tend to have YouTube and Discord running when I play, creating a modest baseline processor load. I also use borderless windowed mode, so that my three monitors behave normally even when in-game, meaning that the GPU always has to spend a little of its time updating the desktop.

In principle, this should be the best case for Game Mode. "Clean" machines running nothing other than the game are already going to be functionally dedicated to the game; busy systems with a bunch going on in the background should be the ones that see the most gains. But I'm not feeling anything from having Game Mode enabled, nor am I seeing any big change in processor activity.

I wonder if Game Mode is a precursor to some kind of stricter, more rigorous hardware partitioning. The Xbox One, when running games (rather than apps), allocates almost all of its processor and GPU resources to the game, making its behavior much more predictable and consistent than that of a regular Windows PC. As Microsoft brings its disparate Windows forks together, it wouldn't be tremendously surprising to see desktop Windows pick up features from the Xbox operating system. Giving PC games dedicated resources comparable to those on the Xbox would undoubtedly make performance a little better and a little more consistent.

The other major gaming addition is support for Beam, the streaming service that Microsoft bought last August. Beam is pretty cool, because its streaming has much lower latency than Amazon's Twitch, the dominant force in game streaming today. Lower latency makes it much easier for streamers to interact with viewers. Beam also has an SDK so that viewers can cause in-game events—like picking a map to play on, or spawning more enemies.

Beam streaming in the Creators Update is straightforward; you'll need an account on Beam and an Xbox Live ID, but with those in hand it's more or less a question of clicking the stream button on the game bar (which appears when you press Win-G), and letting it do its thing. As well as the game itself, it can include webcam and microphone input, making it all that you need to get started with game streaming. This obviously has some overhead in terms of both processor time and bandwidth, but Beam appears to be relatively lightweight on this front.

My experience with the integrated Beam support brought up some issues that call to mind broader concerns about how Windows 10 is tested. The Windows Insider program is huge, with Microsoft now claiming more than 10 million testers, but my suspicion is that few of these testers are using the previews on their daily driver PCs—the preview quality simply isn't good enough. Rather, I suspect most testers are using the previews in virtual machines or on secondary systems. As such, the previews get relatively little use on systems that have lots of hardware—as became apparent with version 1607's handling of webcams—or a wide range of software.

In the current builds—though I'm assured that this will be patched before launch—the integrated Beam streaming doesn't work if you have Skype, Skype for Business, Teams, or certain other applications running. Microsoft tells me that this is because of concerns about people broadcasting their private communications by accident. The problem is that these restrictions ignore how people play games on PC. Though Discord's share is increasing dramatically, Skype is still commonly used for in-game chat between friends. It's convenient because a Skype call can stay up even as you move between game servers, or if you need to restart a game. Blocking Beam if Skype is running kills a lot of Beam's utility.

If the Beam integration had been tested by people using real hardware to play real games, I feel sure that this design would have been scrapped long ago. Real people playing and streaming real games clearly aren't going to tolerate this kind of limitation, and dedicated streaming software such as OBS and XSplit doesn't enforce any such restrictions. But I would guess that the large majority of that 10 million people running insider builds aren't doing so on their powerhouse gaming systems, even though these are the ones that'll be used for streaming.

As problems go, this one is relatively harmless—and it should get a fix soon. But it feels like a problem that should have been caught far earlier. Insider builds need real-world testing, and for that they need to be consistently good enough to use on daily driver machines. Right now, they're not.

A chattier out-of-box experience

The other part of Windows 10 that's seen a lot of change in the Creators Update is a part that you may well never even see: the installation/out of box experience. Microsoft has added Cortana support to the installer, and many (though not yet all) parts of the initial setup are controllable by voice.

The new setup experience also includes revamped privacy settings. While the defaults still tend to favor sharing information and enabling cloud services, the new process is much clearer about what privacy controls are being set, presenting them all on screen rather than simply having an "express" button that picks all the defaults without ever showing what gets defaulted.

The telemetry options have also been simplified—the "enhanced" option has been removed, leaving only "basic" and "full"—though it's still not possible to opt out of telemetry entirely without using the Enterprise version.

However, the new version does give greater control in other areas. For example, Windows 10 has been criticized for rebooting for updates at awkward times. In 1703, updates can be snoozed for several days, and active hours, during which it shouldn't reboot, have been expanded to cover 18 hours per day, rather than 12 in the previous version. All updates can be paused for up to seven days, and the eventual reboots can be scheduled as well.

This is a good step in the right direction, and I think should satisfy most people. Microsoft isn't backing away from automatic updating, and given the historic experience of consumer patch installation, this is probably the right move. Unpatched systems represent something of a public health hazard thanks to their participation in spam and denial of service botnets, and there are many users who if given the choice will for no good reason defer updating forever.

Automatic installation greatly reduces the threat posed by Windows 10 machines, and the new settings should go a long way toward ensuring that systems aren't rebooting in the middle of live broadcasts or when up against an urgent deadline, while still ensuring that Windows 10 overall remains up-to-date. A new dashboard, the Windows Defender Security Center, makes it a bit easier to make sure that your system is healthy.

Enterprise, of course, gets additional security and manageability capabilities, with cloud management and greater control over the installation of updates and upgrades. Corporate users might also enjoy the ability to lock out installation of non-store applications.

As with previous Windows 10 updates, 1703 continues to add more spit and polish. Some icons have been improved, too, such as the use of a standard pen icon in applications with specific pen support. Settings continue to migrate from Control Panel to the new Settings app, making Windows feel a bit more like a coherent single operating system.

There are a couple of interesting new settings, too. Dynamic Lock is supposed to lock your PC whenever a paired Bluetooth device is too far away to be detected. Night Light offers the increasingly popular ability to use a cooler (redder) color temperature when the sun is down, and a hotter (bluer) temperature during the day. This red shifting is believed by some to aid sleeping.

Both features are notably lacking in configuration options. For Dynamic Lock, you can't pick which devices are used to trigger the feature. I might want a Surface Book to lock when my phone goes out of range, but I probably don't want it to lock when the (Bluetooth) Surface Pen goes out of range. There's no way to specify this at present. Night Light also makes its transition from day to night very abruptly, with the screen becoming markedly more red very quickly. I'd like to be able to slow this down, so that it transitions as the sun sets, as it's much less jarring (this would match the functionality already present in third-party apps like f.lux).

Assorted apps

Rounding out the Creators Update are the inevitable app updates. In some ways it continues to be strange that Microsoft ties app updates to major Windows updates, as apps are independently updatable through the Windows Store. There's more inking—you can now draw on pictures and videos in the Photos app. There's new pen support in Maps, too; you can draw lines and paths on maps, and it'll show you how far the route you've traced out is.

And finally, as the other concession to creativity, there's a new app called Paint 3D, which lets you composite 2D and 3D images together. Paint 3D strikes me as the kind of thing that kids will have a lot of fun with, but which I will never use. There's a library of 3D clip art, allowing you to import complex objects and place them in your 3D artwork, and with Windows' built-in support for 3D printing, you can create objects that you then turn into real life. A companion app, View 3D, lets at your 3D pictures.

This is all paving the way for a wider 3D experience using virtual reality headsets, but at present these apps are all regular 2D apps designed for a normal monitor.

The Creators Update represents more solid incremental improvement to Windows 10. With features such as Night Light, Microsoft is showing that it can use the new Windows 10 development and release model to react more quickly to work done by its competitors, and to put new features in front of Windows users more quickly than before. While the changes to the privacy settings won't make everyone happy, they show that the company is also able to respond to user demands more rapidly than in the past, too.

That said, the "creators" theme feels like a stretch. The release doesn't include everything originally planned—the People Hub, demonstrated at last year's launch event, was pushed back—but even if that were included, it wouldn't make the build seem any more creator-y. Some of the work, such as the VR support, is foundational rather than something people are going to run out and use. Others, such as Game Mode, are (I hope) a taste of things to come rather than a finished product.

Overall, it makes me wonder if there's really much value in Microsoft trying to brand these releases—most people probably won't see the "Creators Update" naming anyway—or bundle up these disparate features into single releases. For example, some of the Edge features (like EPUB support) have been ready for weeks or months. Surely one of the points of "Windows as a Service" is that these features aren't held back for a "big release" but rather are shipped when they're ready; that would be closer in spirit to how Microsoft ships its "real" services such as Azure and Team Foundation Services.

Still, even this style of release represents a big change from the Windows team, and it's clear that there's still some degree refinement and improvement of the development process going on. Microsoft's transition to git for source control shows how many aspects of Windows' development are still in flux and being improved. Windows 10 was the best Windows ever when it was launched, and updates like this one mean it's getting better and better. I just wish its level of testing didn't give me such cause for concern.