December 28th, 2016

The case of the four unlabeled toggle buttons

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In an Insider build of Windows 10 some time ago, there was a bug that caused four new toggle buttons to show up in the Settings app, but with no description aside from “On” and “Off”.

Off

The fact that this was a known bug didn’t stop people on the Windows team from wishing what the toggles really did.

  • “Make ⟨internal tool 1⟩ take less than 2 hours.”
  • “⟨internal tool 2⟩ always finds a valid checkpoint.”
  • “Always submit my jobs to the front of the queue.”
  • “Prevent partner teams from checking in stupid bugs.”

In reality, the toggle buttons weren’t hooked up to anything. They were associated with a new feature that, if supported, would have provided descriptive text as well as hooking up the toggle buttons so that they, y’know, actually did something. The bug was that when the feature was not supported, they forgot to hide the inert toggle buttons.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Other

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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