Are we seeing the first step in forcing people (corporate users, at least) to use the paid-for Universal Print subscription service?

so will Mopria include the ability to check that the printer does not have third party consumables installed ?

Although it cannot be that bad as [1]Debian supports it .

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Introduction

Ah, printing... the deeply unfashionable side of Microsoft's development that has been rolling around in Microsoft's self-made development hell for many years...

Microsoft had an opportunity to do a good thing with printing, but they chose not to. For example, print preview could have been a standard function for any application - although potentially not all printing devices may have been able to support it. Microsoft didn't do this and instead forced every application developer, including their own, to have to cobble together custom and inconsistent print preview functionality. The core applications in Microsoft 365 don't even do print preview consistently, what hope is there for others?

Microsoft have also been very, very slow to work with changes and functions in printers and, in particular, multi-function devices. Microsoft could have created common extensions, with an easy and common extension implementation but they didn't. Instead, device manufacturers had to cobble together their own custom hacks into the system in order to implement what is usually very similar functionality to other printers but named and implemented entirely differently. It doesn't help that many of these hardware manufacturers seemed to employ the least well paid rooms of monkeys to mash keyboards until, with compiler warnings turned off, the driver code compiled and was therefore considered complete. This kind of thing was the cause of the multiple "print nightmare" scenarios that Microsoft inevitably but indirectly created. Microsoft's response was necessary, but a half baked and lack of actual control security update that made it near impossible to install MFD printer drivers in a corporate environment was not what we needed. The new common print drivers that are out are near useless, with little actual support for additional functions - even the really common options such as duplex or colour control are frequently just not there, less common options such as stapling and booklet collation (incredibly useful in the corporate world) are nowhere to be seen.

I really wish that Microsoft had put the effort in years ago when it was obvious that printing was a mess, but they didn't. Some of the most time consuming development tasks I had revolved around trying to work around the deficiencies in Microsoft's OS by way of printer support as well as the vagaries of the printer drivers themselves - not wanting to hard code an application to a printer is a pretty high priority when long term development and support is considered.

Is this wish list for common functionality provided by any other platforms or are we Microsoft bashing? Does macOS or any of the Linux distros provide a common print preview API for example? I actually agree with your post, Microsoft had the resources and could of done a great job, instead of resting on their Windows 3.1 laurels about having a shared printer driver for multiple apps and never moving the sticks on to the next step.

The only other platform I'm aware of, Android, made printing even more hell than Windows by forcing a separate printer app to be used. Had to save the file to the file system and load up a separate app made by your printer manufacturer (if they bothered) to print anything. I'm out of date on this, maybe Android printing has evolved since the dark days a mere handful of years ago but it was an awful mess.

>> Does macOS or any of the Linux distros provide a common print preview API for example?

Yes, actually, mac OS does have a common print preview API (AppKit) which 3rd party apps can use, although they are still free to develop their own.

Hell, even MacOS Classic had a common print preview.

Apple has a standard in macOS and a different one in iOS. Both are consistent on their respective platforms, both do scanning and printing and, on macOS, faxing. I've never tried to fax from iOS, no idea if it works. The print system is directly descended from that of early Macs. Some time along the way Macs could print directly to PDF, PostScript, and assorted image formats. Most of that isn't available on iOS, but some other features are. Note that some applications (Firefox, MS Office) would rather that you use their print systems, but will use the standards if you hit them hard enough. (Yes, you can print to PDF from inside a PDF editor, even one from Adobe.) On iOS you can use the standard, and, in some cases (Epson, Brother) there's a vendor-supplied item that is usually inferior to the standard. HP might also provide its own item, but I haven't printed to an HP device from iOS in over a decade, mostly because of HP’s shenanigans.

I have never printed anything from Android. I only had an Android device for a few months before scrapping it and going to iOS.

Windows is a glorious mess, and always has been, and probably always will be.

Ubuntu is… Ubuntu. Great when everything works. Somewhat less than great when there are problems.

It's an article about the Microsoft printing subsystem, therefore I'd expect it to include Microsoft bashing :)

It's been a while since I had a need to work with Linux printing and it was a different experience altogether. The core capabilities felt better but driver support was often lacking and to me it also felt that because printing development work is unfashionable that it languished behind in Linux too.

This was a good few years ago and I haven't had a need to print from Linux for a while, just scanning using a flat bed scanner that Microsoft/HP decided was no longer supported and therefore didn't work but worked perfectly in Linux. I believe there have been improvements in the Windows space for this with 3rd party generic scanner drivers that support these still functional scanners that Microsoft and various vendors have decided to drop.

WIA was supposed to be that original universal printer interface. It kind of almost worked, but it was half-assed -- which could have been fixed and evolved into something useful, excepting printing isn't sexy so it was abandoned instead -- and it relied way too much on manufacturers making their own UI, print preview, workflow, etc, while replicating all of their features from the Win32 drivers. Go figure, they didn't even half-ass it, and WIA drivers are almost universally pure shite, garbage with nothing better than the most bare-bones functions and rarely if ever updated. Not all of it was because of getting a half-assed framework to start with, but it certainly didn't light any fires, so both sides just abandoned it to the perfunctory lip service. Especially since they weren't phasing Win32 drivers out.

I mean, these hardware guys can't make software worth a damn in the first place, good luck asking them to support two separate parallel products that each had unique features and missing capabilities.

The user-mode driver transition was being forced at the same time, and they hated that just as much, but at least in that case they just had to adjust and debug their existing codebase, not start all over from scratch, so WIA barely stood a chance.

Now the Mopira UWP framework is the new attempt to make everyone wholesale start over with a globally shared functionality, but being a standard created by the most craven leeches in what's now a dying field, they've designed it so they can add hooks everywhere to upsell you. Some of the drivers are genuinely good and stick to the more sensible default, make media keys and other shortcuts both effortless and configurable, hook straight into apps that support it well... and then there's HP, of course. Sigh.

Erm, what's that link to xkcd's standards?

> While some wags have dubbed the framework the "Unwanted Windows Platform", it's always good to see legacy tech being retired in favor of something with a bright future ahead of it.

How do you manage to type that stuff with a straight face? Bright future, oh goodness me.

So, if this horror comes to pass, to make full use of a printer's cleverest bits, I'll have to stop ripping out the whole Windows Store and all the UWP stuff? I suppose that might make the OS setup a little easier (a few clean ups to be stricken from the action list), but not looking forwards to having to live with the end result. When it gets to that stage, guess I'll not be bothering with any clever bits that require customisation to access .

So will that mean a ban on installing old printer drivers on Win11? Or just no automatic finding them in the OS?

I can already tell how happy some of my clients will be when I tell them we have to scrap perfectly good printers "because Microsoft said so".

Scrap Microsoft instead, because the printers say so.

"Scrap Microsoft instead, because the printers say so."

At least Windows can run my Samsung Laser printer without some hell on earth kludge job, unlike Linux....

You know that up until now, printer manufacturers provided the print drivers for Microsoft to include in their driver repository.

So it was not really Microsoft who made support work for printers...

This latest move is effectively Microsoft saying to printer manufacturers "If you're outside of the clique that we endorse, then we won't carry your drivers for you" (and this may well extend to having them signed!)

Since Cups became the dominant printer mechanism for Linux (it wasn't always there, and printing in Linux before then was REALLY hairy), all the printer manufacturers had to do was make sure that a Gutenprint or Ghostscript backend for their print engine existed, and provide a PPD file, both things that they had to do to get MacOS working. And yet, some didn't (Lexmark, I'm looking at you here).

Samsung/HP (Samsung sold their printer business to HP Ink [sorry, Inc.]) have done this for Samsung printers for a while. I did not have a problem installing the driver for an Xpress M2020 a few years ago.

But Cups is on the road to do something similar, stardardizing on IPP printing and deprecating all the support for the older Gutenprint/GS model.

Not a ban, as said within artlce it just means they won't be distributed via Windows Update

This is Microsoft, so can expect the current “open” Windows print services to be depreciated - why have a print service that can be extended by third-party (non-MS store) drivers when you restrict it to UWP and Microsoft’s variant of Mopria.(*)

(*) Given previous performance with Standards: PDF, Office document formats, HTML, we can expect MS to vary from the agreed Standard.

Not so sure. The article says printer manufacturers can provide their own drivers under the new system, that does not guarantee that legacy drivers will still work. Since it seems unlikely that printer manufacturers will write new drivers for old printers it could still make old printers obsolete.

It’s axe, please. Whilst ax is technically yes a correct spelling, the one we’re taught in school and is the most common spelling is axe.

AX is so good in Scrabble though.

UNWAXED would be a lot more Scrabble points because it's a Scrabble Bingo!

"Nazify" with the Z on a triple letter

"Nazify" with the Z on a triple letter

That has to be the most benign instance of Godwin's Law yet seen.

So you want them to axe ax? Think of all the labour, energy and bandwidth required to support that extra letter! Next you will have them adding extra 'U's all over the place for no explicable reason.

The current system had important business justifications when it got started For Microsoft, having a different driver for every printer model helped discourage use other operating systems. Since many printer vendors would only provide a Windows driver, it made OS2 and Linux second-class operating systems. That helped Windows go from "dominant" to "monopoly". For printer vendors, having their name on the list of drivers that popped up when you started to install a printer was a little advertisement for their brand. A truly compatible printer wouldn't need a new driver, but the user might not realize it was supported via another vendor's driver.

It predates that by a long way. With first releases of Windows, MS realised they could never provide drivers for everything. That's why a standard framework was created to push the work (correctly) onto the device manufacturers.

>> Since many printer vendors would only provide a Windows driver, it made OS2 and Linux second-class operating systems.

Only for bottom-of-the-barrel printers which were too cheap to have their own processors and relied on the host CPU instead (like GDI lasers).

Pretty much everything business class supported at least one HP LaserJet emulation, and in most cases PostScript as well, and these worked just fine under OS2, Linux or MacOS.

And even for cheap printers, many manufacturers still offered drivers for other operating systems than just Windows.

>> That helped Windows go from "dominant" to "monopoly"

I'm pretty sure that it wasn't printer drivers which made Windows a monopoly OS on desktop PCs, but rather Microsoft's anti-competitive practices such as paying PC vendors to only offer Windows with their PCs.

It also ignores that Macs have, over the last 30+ years, been the dominant platform in the DTP space. Which would have been impossible if the platform didn't have excellent printer support as designers still had to pre-print before sending jobs to the EFI.

>> A truly compatible printer wouldn't need a new driver, but the user might not realize it was supported via another vendor's driver.

I'm not saying such users don't exist, but in general the overwhelming majority of users have been able to use compatible drivers since at least the early 80's (using compatible drivers like Epson FX for line printers has been pretty common).

I would be lying if I said what you wrote here made any sense.

My "ancient" multi-function laser from Samsung HP, which has seen "no love" since HP took over Samsung's business, is going to become useless on Windows at some point, or will it still carry on as it is?

I've only just got it working under Windows 11 - the drivers provided by Windows "Add printer" claimed there was no duplexer, and I had to use the "manual install" HP drivers to get that going. Still, at least Windows does now automatically install drivers (it didn't when I switched to Mac 15 years ago*).

* this Window machine is provided by work to access a "secure" system - I still find printing on Mac easier, but it's getting close these days.

Microsoft just won't include them in the installer or the automatic check via Windows Update.

However, if HP doesn't bother to update them over time and the certificates expire, then you'll have to go through some heroics to get them installed without your system acting like it's a janky beta test. Drivers are pretty locked-down these days, even user-mode ones.

Off topic, admittedly, but 30-odd years ago, the printer drivers supplied by Commodore-Amiga were abysmal. A divine being call Jeff Walker was bemoaning the poor output resolution of his Canon BubbleJet printer (BJ10 IIRC) in his magazine Just Amiga Monthly and a German reader called Wolf Faust took it upon himself to try to make a printer driver that took advantage of the printer features, such as the higher BubbleJet resolution (360*360) over the standard ink jet printers (300*300) of the time. Don't laugh, I did say it was a long time ago!

Long story short, not only did Mr Faust create a brilliant printer driver, then a suite of controlling programs, but Canon were so impressed that they gave him all the latest models so that he could develop for them and they could support the Amiga. Many Amiga users, myself included, specifically bought Canon BubbleJets because of Mr Faust. (And as a side note, most of my printers since have been Canon.)

My point being: Who is best to provide a printer driver that supports all the features of the printer? The manufacturer or a global alliance of printer manufacturers via Microsoft? Will all the features of my printer be supported or will only the main features be supported? Are printers and printer features now so indistinguishable from each other that an OS provider can distribute generic drivers? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

I think you may have the wrong end of the stick

the printer manufacturers can provide features limited to Microsoft's software capabilities to support them but what features does one printer have that no others have, or have been thought of?

surely you don't mean features like resolution. PostScript has has that problem solved for decades. so what super fancy features would not be supported by a generic driver?

That's part of my ignorance as I don't know the ins and outs of modern printers and what features they can offer - how does one manufacturer differ from another these days to get your business as it surely cannot be on price alone? But as Reg Commentard Nick Ryan said above:

The new common print drivers that are out are near useless, with little actual support for additional functions - even the really common options such as duplex or colour control are frequently just not there, less common options such as stapling and booklet collation (incredibly useful in the corporate world) are nowhere to be seen.

Even pre-Covid I rarely printed, but in previous jobs I have certainly used stapling and booklet collation, both features selectable via the non-Microsoft supplied printer driver.