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Hopefully not a potential infection vector, but the hardware industry just has an impeccable history of writing iron-clad drivers, so I am sure it is fine.
Could they expand this to the other garbage software suites hardware companies get to auto-install? I plugged a Logitech mouse into my work laptop, and Windows helpfully installed a Logitech control utility. Lacking admin, I cannot disable this little utility, and so it is just there, sucking away CPU+RAM. Hopefully not a potential infection vector, but the hardware industry just has an impeccable history of writing…
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Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1]. Microsoft is behind the times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking
The only thing I know about Bonjour is that I had to uninstall it every time after installing iTunes on my PC.
This is solely because HP is so terrible at updating their drivers for new operating systems. Every HP printer I've owned eventually didn't support the next version of windows. No brother printer I've ever owned has had this problem.
On the other hand my HP color AirPrint compatible printer that I bought in 2016 works with everything from an old iPad running iOS 5 circa 2010 that I pulled out of the closet to the latest Apple devices with no drivers.
This would be a move on the right direction, but >This framework improves reliability and performance by moving customization from the Win32 framework to the UWP software development framework. I can't trust Microsoft to do anything right anymore.
Anymore?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt that a one computer, one printer, scenario is any problem for any OS. You'll see who the ugly one is when the kids play together. File sharing isn't a tangent. The purpose of Bonjour is to couple printing and file sharing as a network discovery protocol.
But a one printer one computer being a problem is precisely the issue in the thread at hand. Once the router reboots the printer changes IP address (since it gets a dynamic IP by default) and then Windows can't find it, hence the need to assign it a static IP.
Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?
Apple seems to have solved this a long time ago. I didn't even set up my printer, I just turned it on, connected it to the network, and all the Macs and iPhones print to it, no problem.
The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before.
I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.
This is solely because HP is so terrible at updating their drivers for new operating systems. Every HP printer I've owned eventually didn't support the next version of windows. No brother printer I've ever owned has had this problem.
So a trick that some people used was the wrong driver to make some printers behave in unsupported ways for a particular programs. And if a new driver didnt work, using the HP LaserJet 4 driver usually resolved the problem if it was a HP laser printer of sorts.
Throw in Inkjet printers that routed down USB connections, and the management of the USB wasnt the best, and it became a nightmare quickly having to remove registry entries because the printer uninstaller software behaved like McAfee AV software when people attempted to uninstall it.
I live in the Apple ecosystem and I know HP does a lot of consumer-hostile stuff but I bought my HP laser from Costco (who refuse to sell subscription printers) mostly because of it's support for AirPrint with no additional software. And it works, the quality is great, and I'm happy. Didn't have to install anything.
I have a bog standard M28p that works without installing all the HP stuff, but it still earned the network name "That HP piece of s**".