Perhaps, they forced them to do that in the middle of their workday in order to get their UX back. Imagine if your computer crashed and when it restarted it came with the mouse drivers disabled and you had to use the arrows to move the mouse around, and you were reassured you could sign up for WDN to restore use of the mouse.

And I don’t think expecting the user to personally recompile for every update is reasonable, especially if you claim to let users gain control of their machines again.

Compiling a browser isn't exactly a walk in the park for the average 5 year+ old PC, either.

Googlers working on Chromium dev get maxed-out machines for this reason.

The same users who have complete “control of thier computer” who don’t know what they are doing is what causes all of the crapware, malware, ransomware on many Windows based PCs.

I’m all for platforms being in a wall gardener by default where you have to jump through a few hoops to unlock an “advanced mode”.

And signing up for WDN (Windows Developer Network?) hopefully you would get signed drivers.

You can’t imagine the number of times my mom has done the perfectly reasonable thing of searching for Windows printer drivers on Google and ended up installing crapware from a third party site instead of getting the official driver. Signing requirements from MS would hopefully alleviate that and let advanced users try to figure out how to load unsigned drivers.

(Also tangentially, why are printer drivers still a thing on Windows anyway? Anyone who connects a Mac, iPad, or iPhone to my home network - if I give them access to the non-guest network - automatically can print.)