The bummer is that they made Safe Mode about 10 times harder to get into. Last time I tried, you could not hit F8 at boot time to select safe mode. You have to either be able to boot into the OS and say boot to safe mode, or you have to do it from recovery media, which doesn't come with new PCs. I think there's also the condition that you can get to recovery mode after the PC fails to start 3 times... either way, F8 made it easy enough to tell someone how to boot into Safe Mode over the phone without all the extra steps... but I guess you gotta save that half a second of boot time.

Seems like it still falls under the condition that "you can get to recovery mode after the PC fails to start 3 times," as parent mentioned. Just a more explicit way of forcing the PC to fail to start.

They had a fun blog post about it back in the day: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/b8/designing-...

I guess the obvious idea of holding down the Shift or Alt keys to extend the boot time and/or bring up the boot menu was off the table?

I think there's a problem of how the keyboard works and when in the boot process it's reset. With NVMe drives, the boot processes is even faster!