14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8.1 will bring quite a lot of improvements to Microsoft’s flagship operating system, with some recent reports claiming that the Redmond-based tech giant is planning to introduce a feature that would allow users to skip the Start Screen and boot directly to desktop.
It turns out that the references we heard about a couple of days ago aren’t quite related to the Start Screen bypassing option, but to a so-called “kiosk mode” that could be part of the upcoming Windows 8.1.
“twinui-CanSuppressStartScreen is related to a ‘kiosk mode’ and I didn't find any other feature that it controls, at least in this early build. Any user without admin rights then gets a blank screen instead of the start screen (it does not switch to desktop automatically, you can start any desktop or store app with the search charm though),” a post on the My Digital Life forums spotted by Neowin.net reveals.
As usual, Microsoft doesn’t comment on its future projects, but such an option would obviously come in handy to many users, especially because quite a lot of Windows 8 adopters have installed third-party apps to skip the Start Screen and get directly to the desktop at startup.