Microsoft has announced that they will not be including File Explorer's Friendly Dates feature in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update version 1903.

Friendly Dates, or Conversational Format, is a feature that Microsoft was testing in early Windows 10 Insider 19H1 builds that displayed file dates in a more "conversational format" such as "minutes ago", "yesterday", "hours ago", etc.

Friendly Dates Example

The Friendly Date formats that we saw when testing the feature included:

Just Now - File modifications done just now.

File modifications done just now. minute(s) ago (16 minutes ago) - File modifications done on the same day but less than an hour ago.

- File modifications done on the same day but less than an hour ago. hour(s) ago (2 hours ago) - File modifications done on the same day but over an hour ago.

- File modifications done on the same day but over an hour ago. Yesterday with time (Yesterday at 07:13) - File modifications done the previous day.

- File modifications done the previous day. Day of week at time (Tue at 06:44) - File modifications done two days ago.

- File modifications done two days ago. Month Day (October 7) - File modification times older than two days and in the same year.

- File modification times older than two days and in the same year. Month Day, Year (December 7, 2017) - File modification times over a year old.

When being tested it was possible to enable and disable this feature from the Folder options settings where it was called "conversational format".

Folder Options

In the Windows 10 Insider build 18890 release notes, Microsoft has stated that they have decided to not roll out this feature as part of the 19H1 release.

"Thank you for all of the feedback you provided on Friendly Dates in File Explorer. At this time, we’ve decided not to roll out Friendly Dates to users as part of the 19H1 release. Insiders will see this option go away starting today, regardless of build number."

Microsoft has not ruled out this feature coming back in a future version of Windows 10.