Among the “usual” tools included in Windows is File Explorer has always played a very important role in being able to find and manage our files, something that may seem “minor” but is actually nothing major in many use cases. It’s not for nothing that there have been alternatives to it for decades, not to mention some precedents from the days of MS-DOS (remember Norton Commander?). They’re not as common these days, but they still exist and have some pretty loyal users.

However, due to this “secondary” nature Microsoft has gone long periods without bringing any kind of update to File Explorer, beyond the cosmetic changes intended to accommodate the different design paradigms used in subsequent versions of Windows. We saw the most recent example in the Windows 11 major update last year, i.e. in 23H2.

However, it was different in 2022, when after many years of demanding it and many months since its official confirmation, Finally The long-awaited eyelashes have arrived. A feature so basic and practical at the same time, in fact, many of us are still wondering why it took so long to become a reality. Heck, even Norton Commander, the MS-DOS explorer I mentioned a bit above, offered a split-screen feature to display the contents of two folders/drives, which is the most comparable to tabs in this context.

The good news is that Redmond seems to have taken a liking to improving this tool, and as we read in The Verge, Microsoft has announced that Windows File Explorer will offer native versioning support. Of course, this announcement happened in Microsoft Build 2024, so it is obvious that the first ones who will be able to enjoy this new feature will be developers, but once this technology is implemented, there is nothing to prevent it from being extended to support version control in other contexts.

Although version control is a concept unknown to the vast majority, In fact, there are many people who do this with techniques as common as using increment numbers in the names of the files they want to store the various revisions of. Now, unless there is a strict protocol in place for naming and storing them, this method is pretty unreliable. So if Microsoft (which also owns GitHub) can implement some kind of universal version control system, it could be a huge improvement for many, many users.