As someone who deploys a lot of WordPress sites over time, rather than just maintaining a couple large sites, there are two major (major to me!) changes coming in WordPress 4.3 that I am very happy about.
1) Comments are now turned off by default.
As anyone who launches many non-blog websites with WordPress knows, one big step in a site launch is deactivating comments everywhere. We suggest every user have a blog, because blog posts increase total website word count which can increase SEO and make a site more popular. However, most companies that might be convinced to post a blog once a week are not ready for the headache of regulating comments. Many don’t want to deal with comments at all – and certainly not on “Pages” of the site. One big step in every site staging or launch has been removing comments. It’s so exciting that this step gets to leave my workflow. No more headaches when someone goes in and adds hundreds of pages/posts before turning off comments, causing the need to mass edit in the database.
As someone who has attempted to provide favicon support over time with customizer options for users, this new favicon option will be much better, and I don’t have to worry about it! Integrating Favicon support is awesome, and just one more thing to be really, really excited about.