Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers.
The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility.
While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be touched very easily without breaking compatibility, And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect.
While desktop Linux/BSD isn't exactly well known for it's UIs, I found GNOME 3/40 to be more consistent UI-wise than Windows 10, being a user of GNOME 3 on FreeBSD at home (which I am typing this comment from), and helping port GNOME 40, while (unsurprisingly) using Windows 10 at $DAYJOB.
But then GNOME, KDE, Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.
This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
Asking the obvious question: why aren't the UIs in newer Windows versions not "just" different themes over Win32 widgets? Instead the UI theme seems to be tied to UI frameworks which seem to be created and discarded annually at Microsoft, so each time some genius decides to overhaul the UI, a completely new sediment layer is created instead of letting some UI designers tinker with a theme editor.
I don't get it. Functional UI changes should be different from visual fluff, yet Windows seems to the only OS where the two aren't separated.
> Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on
You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had an entire ecosystem that was uniform. Letting this go has really hurt the brand IMHO, and creates a very low bar for third parties.
The juice is absolutely worth the squeeze. Everybody and their grandmas think Windows is a mess, yet theres no real alternative for most people, so there’s no real incentive for MS to make it better (or for a start, stop making it worse with telemetry, forced restarts and adware).
Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception.
Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the legacy components. It is not the reason reams of GUIs have gone untouched for 20 years. It is not the reason Windows now has at least 4 versions(!) of Performance Monitor, all of which are broken in at least one glaring way. (More on that below.)
The believable reasons for the GUI inconsistencies I've heard are:
1) API churn, because of which the UI teams did not have sufficient time to work on features versus playing catchup.
2) Bad system GUI APIs that are very difficult for even in-house teams to work with.
3) Unwillingness to take ownership of legacy code, with literally noone left at Microsoft willing to touch things like the ODBC connections panel or the Component Services snapin. People prefer to add new things instead of fixing or removing old things because it's "easier".
Actually, let's just stop here for a second. That last point explains the performance monitor views. I mentioned at least 4 copies, written over decades, by different people. Each new team has steadfastly refused to touch (or remove!) the old code, but hasn't replaced the functionality of the old code, so now end-users need 4 different versions to get things done.
These versions are:
1) The performance tab in Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that exposes some metrics such as GPU temperatures. Only shows a small number of fixed metrics.
2) Resource Monitor, which is opened from Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that shows certain per-process metrics, such as the names of files being touched, or per-connection network stats. Has permanent UI issues that will never be fixed, such as not using the system number formatting in some places, making large metrics unreadable as they change faster than users can count the digits. Similarly, the graphs take forever to change their vertical axes, making them useless 90% of the time.
3) The Performance Monitor MMC snapin. Totally legacy, with un-resizable controls that cut off text. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential because it provides the only live GUI view of 100% of the performance metrics available in the system. It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings. It is the only GUI for creating metric logging that persists. Etc...
4) The various versions of Server Manager's performance views, which are so useless that I've literally never used it. Nobody can get their job done doing this, we're all still using RDP to connect to servers so that we can simultaneously launch the three tools above. Why RDP? Because 2 of the 3 above do not support remoting.
I could go on and on like this for hours about how bad just this one aspect of Windows is, let alone the hundreds of other GUIs that have been butchered by bad decision making and internal NIH syndrome leaving a trail of half-baked messes behind.
Wait... did I say 4 performance metrics GUIs? I meant 5, because there's also the new Windows Admin Center, which was clearly written by people that have never had to diagnose a performance issue on a server. It's very pretty and utterly useless, which means that: Nobody will use it, and it will be superseded by someone else's half-baked attempt in a few years, 100% guaranteed.
> such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future
I'm always very skeptical of refusal to handle the past because of the promise that the same won't reiterate in the future. What could also happen is that 5 years from now, you or another dev justifies refusal to handle inconsistencies developed "temporarily" and or accidentally in the meantime with exactly the same reasoning.
A more direct and simple observation is that if nobody is working on converging / cleaning up stuff, they don't converge and aren't cleaned up.
As for the amount of backward compat already provided by Windows, it is good but not great anyway. Try to play old games, install/use old VS with a few patches, install/old Matlab, use old devices, etc... Hell even try to continue to use your semi-recent devices across new build of windows, like 20H2 breaking USB-C on my XPS 15 9560 (but now I'm ranting so I'll stop :D )
Honestly thank goodness for the backwards compatibility, otherwise I'd have to rewrite an existing legacy app I've been put in charge of maintaining at my place of work. The thing is in winforms and a weird third party UI library built with winforms as well. It would just be a nightmare for me to have to go through each screen to recreate it reliably.
I don't know if Apple deserves to be in that list, UI-wise at least.
Yes, they do break backwards compatibility in many many other ways, but you could put a technical layperson who is used to Mac OS 9 and put them on macOS 11.4 (for those unfamiliar, Apple's OS has been at 10.x for about 20 years) and they would still reasonably be able to find their way around.
One element especially (the global menu bar) is why I got my parents to switch to macOS. They had to learn where 'print' or 'edit' or 'save' was once, and now they can find it for any program, and it'll probably still be in that place in 20 years time.
Its also why I think it's sad that Gnome abandoned the global menu bar. It's an amazing concept that if stuck with makes computers so much easier to use for a large contingent of people.
Yes. There are so many things Mac got it right for parents or grand parent users. Global Menu Bar and Single Mouse Button.
But generally speaking for them it was still a hassle and hurt to use a computer. iPad with Home Button was so much easier. No support calls for years. It was the computing devices that works. But now they moved on to Smartphone meant iPad get way less usage.
Which also means some of those design decisions that make macOS easier to use might not be relevant as PC transfer to a more professional type usage rather than consumer / everyone computing devices. But even in that case I still think Global Menu Bar is a better design.
I like the global bar and also its underrated, consistent command search function. I think it was probably abandoned by gnome because every application also has a top row of icons in each window now.
My perfect OS would have a global menu bar and enforce that all commands can be issued by searching and all ribbons/icon bars can be turned off.
I think global menubars are severely underrated. They act as a sort of index of any given program's functionality, complete with key shortcuts and because it's a facet of the OS itself and will be there regardless, there's no point in paring away menus for minimalism's sake.
The worst part about the new gnome not only we don't have the global menu bar, the default top bar is basically a waste of space with barely any useful content in it.
I argue that global menu bar is bad UI for big and multiple monitor era. It's fine for laptop but not for desktop. It's also not friendly to touch panel since it relies on what app is foreground.
3. The OS has a lightweight virtualization layer for file system and registry, that’s how 32-bit apps view things differently: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winprog64/fil... Microsoft could have used that thing not just for 32-bit apps, for backward compatibility too, i.e. old apps could use special compatibility view of the environment.
4. Finally, the kernel supports multiple user-mode environments, Win32 is just one of them. The initial good version of WSL (I still use it every day, too bad they have killed the awesome product moving to virtual machines in WSL 2) runs Linux binaries directly on top of Windows 10 kernel, the subsystem is implemented in lxss.sys and lxcore.sys. Microsoft could have embedded couple popular Windows versions, such as 7 and XP, as different subsystems used for running old apps.
I understand the backwards compatibility case for APIs, but not for OS dialogs. Is there a compatibility reason why the folder properties dialog is crufty (unresizable, etc)? I always just assumed there was no engineering appetite or business case to work on it.
Non-resizable dialogs are one of the top reasons why I cannot stand Windows and find it a huge pain to work with as a non-regular user.
Now, while I can understand the sibling's point about third-party overlays [0] which may break when the windows suddenly become resizable, what I find absolutely infuriating is that even what seem like recent features still inherit this stupid behavior.
The thing that I'm reminded of is "Windows Defender Exceptions" (or similar, don't have a Windows box at hand). Those are configured through a new, Settings App-looking window.
Now I understand this is somehow different, because even though the window vaguely looks like the Settings App (huge icons, tons and tons of whitespace), it behaves very differently.
This "exceptions" panel shows a list of the folders that is fixed, although the outer window can be resized. So if you've got a big high-res screen and maximize it, you'll get 90% of blank space and will still have to scroll around to see the contents. Bonus points for the list being so skinny that I'm only able to see "C:\Users\vlad\..." and have to click on each entry to see it in full.
I sometimes jokingly say that it shows MS has a mouse business, and having to click a thousand times for the simplest of things is by design.
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[0] Not sure what those are. Do random third-parties "augment" system dialogs by drawing random stuff on top of them? I find that thought horrendous.
If any program tweaks a dialog, say by floating a title-barless window with a new control on top of some empty space (possibly after slightly resizing the window or a control in the window to make space), you can’t resize any window control, can’t change tab order, can’t add controls, can’t change background color, etc.
Detecting whether that is being done is challenging. Typical workaround is that, if any callback is registered with a dialoog, to keep things ‘as is’.
>The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely)
...completely unjustifiable?
Come on, why does this mean we need 5 different sound dialogues to do 5 different things? That's ridiculous on every level. It used to all be in one place anyway, so it's not even like it needs to be spread out in the first place. Make the old dialogues inaccessible, hide them, and create a new one which does all of those jobs. Then get rid of the old, now unused ones at the first opportunity.
Is the explanation really backwards compatibility, or is it lack of organisation?
Every windows update makes the strips a function from the control panel and ads something not quite as good to the settings app.
After the last update the settings app even has ads for 'bing rewards points' in it. Which appear to be impossible to remove.
I need to look harder at getting one of the commercial versions of windows that only gets security updates, but no feature updates, because I've come to hate and fear upgrades.
Backwards compatibility would be the most likely explanation for why the settings panel has interfaces from the last five operating systems versions. Considering how flaky Windows settings have been historically, and how complex it must be (in part due to the 40 years of backwards compatibility) it surely wasn’t practical to completely rewrite those components.
I'm also involved with Microsoft, and my view is that the culture is to move on to the next goal too soon after the next gen solutions have been developed.
So they make control panel 2.0, reach 70% coverage, launch, and never move the remaining features into the new version so they can sunset the old one.
> Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers.
Completely unrelated and a shot in the dark, but if you’re both a Microsoftie and a FreeBSD user/committer, the FreeBSD .NET port is stumbling/regressing somewhat and could definitely use a little help:
This is part of the explanation but it's clearly not the whole explanation. The other part is why Windows has gone through half a dozen different UI toolkits while macOS is recognizably the same with some re-skins since 2001. There's no backwards compatibility to be broken if you get the UI right the first time, and there's no excuse for introducing a whole new UI model with every release. It makes the whole OS feel like a gigantic pile of technical debt, and gives the appearance that engineering simply moves on and greenfields a new UI system when the old one becomes unmaintainable.
> Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.
macOS has actually been pretty good at seamlessly adding new features to old apps, with just a recompile against the latest SDK, like all the NSDocument-derived stuff (auto-save, auto-recover, iCloud etc.), Dark Mode, accessibility etc.
There's some intuitive logic to this. But it's also really really hard to understand why they cannot write modern interfaces for all the backwards compatible systems. Just pretty it all up.
It's bizarre that to do some basic audio or networking configuration I have to wander through 2-3 generations of UI.
Well I thought Windows on ARM or Windows 10X was the perfect moment to get rid of those backward compatibility problem. At least there are incentive / reasons to be doing so.
And why can Microsoft goes the same route as Apple's Cocoa and Carbon?
Nope. Because the goal was to make it as seamless as possible to port software to those platforms, ideally by just recompiling with a different flag. The offerings would be DOA without dev buy-in which wouldn’t happen if there was too much friction in porting.
The GNOME project burnt all their good will and capital building a touch focused UI (for all those touch devices running linux, you know) at the cost of their very desktop orientated userbase (sound familiar?). The core project members are more interested in social justice witch hunts than creating a good product and it shows.
Open UNIX's are desperate for a light comprehensive desktop environment with modern features. GNOME ain't it chief.
I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be.
All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.
This. I would forgive the inconsistencies if the new stuff was better. But it's worse. Its not a "meh I'm used to the old and hate change" situation.
It's a "holy shit fire the UX design and product manager leads in charge of this asap". The audio tab is another good example. It's so hard to do anything with the new one, you almost have to know how to get to the old UX to make any kind of change.
I have a 1440p screen. Why do I need to scroll to do anything in the new audio properties dialog? The old one fit more functionality on screen all at once on 768p laptops
Why has there been such a push to nerf UIs? Is it just trying to ape mobile? Mobile UIs are more basic because the screen is so damn small and the use case is more casual.
Most use cases for Windows are casual. I don't want to hazard a guess but I'd say easily more than 70% of Windows users may be basic? The type to not go particularly deep into the options and explore these menus and instead leave it up to the experts or get systems configured for them
For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough
In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies".
The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windows 10.
> In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies".
Don't you ever have to change sound settings? Because I have to deal with that every week, and have to dig through 3 different style of UIs and several different windows/dialogs to get to what I need.
Everything related to control panel / settings is a giant mess, and it's often really hard to find the settings you want, especially if you don't already know where it is. Some things is in the new UI, some in an old UI.
It's actually one of the main reasons why I really don't want to use Windows for my home laptop. Windows does have it strengths, and I don't mind using it at work, but I really don't want any of that bullsh*t when I get home from work.
As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it.
I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.
>I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it.
They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets.
Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine.
They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty.
No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
Until reading this article I didn't know Fluent Design, Metro and Windows 8 Win32 were supposed to be separate design languages; I'm still not convinced, and in any case I can only see those with the sharpest of eyes noticing any differences here.
Calling out things like MMC, winver and screensaver settings as relics from Windows 95 also seems like a huge stretch to me. Even though their layout has remained the same (which is a good thing; they do their job well), their design language is quite clearly different from their Windows 95 counterparts.
Isn’t it interesting that the inconsistency arguments mostly surfaces around software configuration, like “_Settings_ app is stupid” “I still use XP style _driver installation_ screen” etc?
It makes sense why it’s not much of an issue on other GUI environments: in GNU/Linux and macOS, only what’s available on GUI is available on GUI, and the rest goes to the unified scary black screen with very task specific procedures.
Only in Windows the GUI is primary means of configuration and only Windows carry over old GUI associated with each configuration items.
The worst offender is network settings. After years of at least weekly needing to change some setting for a virtual adapter, VPN etc, I find myself stumbling trying to get to the right screen.
You just have to know it is called 'network connections'. So like most other GUI things: hit Start button, start typing 'network connections'. For me it pops up after typing 'net' already. Which is actually easier and more consistent than in any other Windows version (IIRC), and super accessible, and faster than hunting for things with the mouse. Now if they'd add fuzzy matching this would be wild :)
Alternative would be knowing that a lot of 'old' control panel UIs are accessible through the new one, so: go into the new settings UI to network-related stuff (Win-x, w or Win-X, n and start typing 'network') and there will be 'change adapter settings' somewhere. Or possibly you can change the setting you want from the new UI.
Which indeed shows this particular par was turned into a mess. But as the OP says: I haven't actually been bothered by it a lot myself. Likewise for some UI parts looking different: it has been like that since as long as I can remember on computers, no matter which OS or whether it's a CLI, TUI or GUI: if you use more than a couple of tools there are always going to be tools which look and/or do things in a different way. So people kinda get used to that anyway. Not that it's an excuse for doing this to an OS, but just looking at it from the practical side.
Maybe the Windows God Mode "cheat" would help. It has all Windows settings in one place. You can create a direct shortcut to any of them from there. Activate it be creating a new folder and naming it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}".
I don't understand why the UI is such a big deal to people here. I can deal with UI. I'll (grudgingly) accept changes to UI that break my hard-learned muscle memory and figure out the "new way" to do things.
I just want a version of Windows that I am in control of. I don't want my machines (or my Customers' machines, for whom I am responsible to support) torpedoing themselves with shoddy updates that try to install at inappropriate times (need to shut down your laptop to put it into a bag and head home-- tough-- we're installing updates!).
I can deal with UI. I've been learning new UI my whole life. The whole "it's not your computer anymore" tack Microsoft took with Windows 10 is condescending and abusive.
Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.
It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft.
So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, people bash Linux distros for inconsistent UIs so I get a kick out of pointing out that the shoe is on the other foot.
The article shows clearly there are multiple design languages in very common tasks. The first point is that the volume picker is different from the latest design. This is something users interact with on a daily basis.
My beef is mostly with the lack of consistency with the control panel and settings. They have "Win10"ed most of it by now, though, but for several years you had this weird, often overlapping set of UIs from Win7 and Win10.
Minor things like Win10 vs. Metro are less obvious, though.
It’s very nice that you can install and all the driver, but what does that have to do with the control panel being a chaotic mess of layers from the past 25 years?
I find this article rather informative as someone who hasn’t used windows in 10 years. Now that it’s all laid out there, I can clearly see that various layers of the control panel are using the visual style of Vista, 2000, and so forth.
I suppose Microsoft has technical reasons for not making the some of the most important user-facing parts of their flagship product consistent in terms of interface, but it’s quite a stretch to say that the consistency shown here is anything other than abysmal. No wonder my parents find this incredibly confusing.
The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.
I agree and am actually surprised that several years in there is still a bunch of stuff that is not configurable in the new Settings screen. I am obviously speaking without extensive knowledge of the underlying internals but surely it can't be that difficult to wrap some settings in a new UI if you dedicate a team to it?
I actually spent 15 minutes the other day trying to remove an additional keyboard layout that somehow found itself on my machine. I had to give up as I could not find the option in the new Settings screen and it seemed to have disappeared (or moved?) from the usual place in the Control Panel...
I had this too. I found and fixed the setting in the registry. They seem to have arrived at an UI design that cannot correctly represent the possible states of the underlying "real" model.
Their current GUI for managing installed language keyboards is unfortunate. It appears to be optimized for a perceived majority of users only needing a single layout, in a way that makes it difficult to manage multiple layouts.
Somehow their UI mix the keyboard layouts together with the GUI display language.
I don't quite understand, why they don't just let the user manage a simple list of installed keyboard layouts (I believe it used to work that way, and behind the scenes it probably still does?)
Yep. It seems to occasionally add keyboard layouts if your region, language, and keyboard layout are different. Not handy if you live abroad. The new UI assumes it's more clever than the user.
It super frustrating to have to go on a treasure hunt just to find some options there.
To this day, every time I need to uninstall an application I still do: win+R -> control appwiz.cpl -> enter and it brings me to the place I want to be.
The SaaS version of exchange has the same problem, and the support people start by having you switch to the old menu because they don't know where everything has been moved in the new one.
The settings app completely mauls things as well, turning off static DNS will just completely remove _all_ DNS servers instead of using dhcp like adapter settings
I rarely use Windows but this is indeed ridiculous. I find myself guessing which button or link is hiding the dialogue that I really want. In almost all cases I just want the one from Windows 95, like display settings, but end up opening the wrong ones and seemingly going in circles before I finally crack the code.
I mostly agree, but if you use US English GUI locale there’s a shortcut — both new settings, and old control panel, have built-in search.
Very often I don’t bother opening either of them, instead using start menu search. For instance, to open the old “network and sharing center” GUI I press Win key, type “netw”, and press enter.
TBH I don't really see how the Settings app is an embarrassment at this point in time. This was definitely true in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 versions, but with the leaps and bounds it's made since, I feel like 'settings app suxx' is a meme that has overstayed its welcome.
I do not have much to do with windows these days, but if you try to cange advanced network interface settings or audio settings beyond selecting a single input, you stil need to find the link to the old panel hidden somewhere. Also, good luck changing WiFi settings from the fluid menu.
And lastly, while it always stays responsive, control of the background processes is also lacking. I spent quite some time restarting the download of a system language, just because I started it while having DNS issues (and to fix those... see above).
I personally don't mind the older designs being mixed in, especially since most of them look good enough with the updated buttons, but the settings panel is, in its current state, still a sidegrade at best.
I don't sit around configuring my machine so I can't really say if it's gotten better, but I know the past 5 years have taught me too look anywhere but there. There's never been a good reason to have two different overlapping configuration apps.
I've used it fairly recently and it still has only the absolutely most common settings you'd want to change. 90% of the settings are still in the control panel.
It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.
I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform.
But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state.
I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix.
With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.
As far as I know Project Reunion is not really a UI framework - it's more about refactoring Windows APIs into individual libraries which can be used across different OS versions. This should enable apps targeting all versions of Windows 10 to use the latest stuff, in a similar fashion to polyfills in browsers.
This is probably to encourage developers to build software using the new Windows 10 APIs. Which is something they definitely have a problem with - I've been using Windows 10 quite heavily since the first beta and I don't think I've ever seen or used a third party Windows 10 (fluent / modern / metro) application.
It is a bit more than that, and I bet with Windows 11 announcement we will get a more clear picture on it.
It is also a way to bring into Win32 side most of the API that really matter on the UWP side of the fence, most likely (although they are yet to confirm this) as migration path to UWP developers.
.NET Native, C++/CX are pretty much dead, and C++/WinRT keeps missing many of the tooling available on C++/CX for XAML applications.
So I expect them to migrate the APIs into an OS version independent layer, and then give the mercy shot on UWP apps.
I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps.
[1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.
> They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago.
Enterprises expect to run programs developed a quarter century ago... if a quarter decade was all that was required, MS could have abandoned a lot more cruft.
I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.
What about me? I don't care about backwards compatibility - but I don't want "UWP" because it's impossible to make great apps following the guidelines.
I'm on the same boat, and would like to see proper design instead of supporting 200-years-old programs. But apparently we are minority and not the best interest of Microsoft. (Which is okay, BTW)
Afaik the Win3 file dialog gets called up by some old apps that use old APIs. I think I even ran into it in Wine.
The analog in Unix apps are GTK's file dialogs, which always look jarring and out-of-place anywhere other than Gnome (and maybe XFCE and KDE, dunno)—making me feel like I stepped into 90s Unix with those Motif-derived concrete slabs. Plus they're un-integrated with non-Linux OSes, missing features. And the dialogs keep being dragged around by GTK apps—open Gimp on Mac or Windows and there you go: GTK dialogs.
I don't think the Fluent+Metro stuff is so different as to be a real consistency issue. Certainly minor inconsistencies that can be easily pointed out in a list but little that makes a typical user think "this is a completely different thing I'm using". The rest of the "old" stuff seems to have been made visually consistent in the 7 era even if the tools themselves originated from different eras with most gaining high DPI support and following the newer theming, again not a consistency issue in itself. There are a few REALLY old dialogs called by ODBC and maybe some others but I can't think of any you run into unless you're intentionally looking to run old software that will call them. So technically 3 but really 2 really noticeable UI environments in day to day.
I'm worried with 11 it'll be a repeat of Windows 10 where at the start you're constantly using "yet another UI". At this point it's nearly gotten decent to the point if you aren't a sysadmin (MMC, regedit, task manager, advanced control panel items not nowadays part of Settings) you rarely run into the "old" style stuff with the one exception of File Explorer. Hopefully it doesn't take another 6 years to be saying that about Fluent/Metro stuff being updated to match 11's new look.
I kind of hate how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to find a familiar management ui in windows today. I find myself using run commands to bring up these UIs more and more.
It would be an acceptable tradeoff if these new interfaces added more functionality or visibility but it seems they're just trying to move to the new settings ux and not thinking about adding better function.
Try adding a new local user account to latest windows, compare the functionality in new the network interface settings page vs the legacy adapter properties prompt.
Seems most of the "this just works" stuff that I respect is from windows 2000 and the NT team.
Wish Microsoft would head back that way with a nod to modern usability instead of dumbing things down and worse: changing it every release.
I did some work on Windows servers in the XP era and it was a continuous hassle that the menus were always different in NT 4, Win 2k, Xp, Vista, and all the different versions of Windows server.
Contrast that to command-line admin on Linux that stays the same or the perpetually busted Linux admin GUIs that should just be taken behind the woodshed and shot.
How is MacOS able to maintain such a consistent UI even with massive changes in their design language ? Is Windows UI not a separate layer or something that they can update ?
Or is it that the UI elements somehow get baked into the program at the time you build it, so if you didn't update you are just stuck with that particular version of UI you built the program ?
The biggest thing is that a much larger percentage of Mac apps are written using the native UI toolkits, which receive most of the aesthetic changes for "free" (even in lieu of updates/recompiles). There's also stronger expectation from users for apps to fit in, so even devs who write in foreign toolkits (e.g. electron) are more likely to put in the effort to mimic the native toolkit, because failure to do so makes their app look crusty and outdated relative to the rest of the system and other apps.
Under Windows, the rule has been that basically anything goes, and that's been true for upwards of two decades. Anybody who used Windows 98/2K/XP can probably name several apps they remember using totally custom UI off the top of their heads. That never really changed. Custom UI has become a lot less wild looking, but it's still custom (which means no "free" updates), and on top of that there's no incentive for developers to update their apps to match the latest look.
macOS isn't afraid to deprecate or completely remove things even if that means old things won't work. Windows demands 16 bit apps from the 90s should have a very decent shot at running on Windows 11. That level of "it'll always be there" means for the vast majority of old UI it has no technology pressure to be redone, only pressure of what most average users will see day to day. E.g. nobody at Windows is going to dump control panel (need 3rd party add-ons to work) and nobody is going to rewrite it in a backwards compatible way when most users can do everything via Settings these days and it works with all quirks for legacy apps as is.
That's not to say a lot of the Metro stuff shouldn't/couldn't be made to be Fluent but it also isn't as out of place as some of the older stuff. The only one that is really surprising is File Explorer - but again a lot of legacy app integration that wouldn't work with a new one (though maybe it is time anyways).
I think it relates to how their internal structure is set up and their brand positioning. Apple has only one design team and design system I think, and only caters to folks who prefer simplicity over power features.
I suspect that Windows is more like compilation of what different teams produce at MS, each with their own design opinions and target audience.
I can only imagine how challenging it is to serve beginners and power users with the same UI at the same time in Windows, which kinda implies different UI densities depending on the part of the OS or type of widget.
Apple has the advantage that they get away with simplifying things and have built a brand image around being easy to use.
> macOS only caters to folks who prefer simplicity over power features
This is said quite often, almost as a given, but I never thought it reflected reality. macOS has an abundance of useful features for power users — system services, automator, AppleScript, tons of productivity touches like titlebar proxy icons and universal drag-and-drop support... not to mention it's all built on Unix so a terminal is right there for anything not exposed in the UI.
Built-in Windows controls, like buttons, scroll bars, etc. are updated with each system release. However, they are relatively inflexible, and no one uses WinApi anyway, so most frameworks and apps build their own components, with varying dedication to emulating the "native" style. Built-in controls also don't perform much in the way of layout (I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions?) so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.
My guess is MacOS's consistency comes from some combination of developer incentives, and UI toolkit design.
> I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions? so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.
I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.
Mac UI elements don't move around much—afaik they use about the same positioning that was decided when OSX was made. So the looks change but the layout not so much, and thus apps don't break on updates. Big Sur is probably the biggest change in the layout, in all these years.
Whereas MS keeps rearranging the layouts that were perhaps too complex to begin with. Especially the toolbars, with the row upon row of buttons and whatever other stuff MS crammed in there. My pet theory is that MS treats all UI as tables of various sizes, because it's easy for devs to just slap whatever they think up into rows. Apple was much better at the ‘proximity principle’ so avoided cramming from the start.
It also helps that MacOS is slimmer in terms of GUI apps—there's no ‘management console’ for admins and such heavy stuff. My litmus test of GUI environments is the control panel—and it's much lighter and more comprehensible in MacOS. (A similar telling exercise is comparing control panels of Gnome and KDE, at least it was when I last touched KDE in the 2000s.)
That’s what I wonder… understood that the windows internals are developed to maintain backwards compatibility, but why are they not able to change the user interface?
The Vista control panel being the second layer of the Windows 10 control panel is one of the weirdest. Other than maintaining the same layout for users, why is the second layer of their settings panel just the exact settings panel from the OS 14 years ago?
This. It's not about backwards compatibility for Windows itself; it's about investment. They don't want to pay to update all their menus and settings screens.
Easy.
They never design their system with compactibility in mind. Also, since they own their own software and only allow to be installed in their own hardware, they have full control on everything.
I don't think Microsoft has been truly interested in improving the Windows experience in a long time. I mean, surely if they cared about us you'd be able to right-click on any Notification icon and hit "always show icon and notifications" without having to open two menus to get to that option. It's been a pain in my ass for twenty years.
Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please?
I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them.
Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey.
Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime.
I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible.
I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows.
Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced.
Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.
I completely share your sentiment that Windows' constant nagging and irritating behavior is terrible for productivity.
But I'm not sure that this is a Windows issue per se, in that apps can and sometimes do produce random, custom notifications even on Linux and macOS. I think it's a "cultural" thing: it happens more often on Windows because... it happens more often, so people aren't as surprised when some new app does it, they've been seeing those for years and years. It's kind of "expected", the same way that most Windows users will say "just reboot it" without batting an eye [0]. "It's just how things are".
However, what trips me, is that even Microsoft's own products do this crap. I'm thinking of Teams in particular. I understand they've only recently introduced the "feature" of sending alerts to the notification center, yet Teams is a brand-new product, that appeared in the Windows 10 era.
And they use those same custom notifications on macOS and Linux, too, where they happily ignore any system configuration. Of course, those are actually custom windows that they put up, they didn't even configure the windows properties to be considered a notification (on Linux/X11).
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[0] I know Windows requires much fewer random reboots nowadays, but the people are still trained to reboot it whenever something "doesn't work". They won't even consider that there's something wrong that should be investigated.
Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications.
Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off.
For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)
Man, the sheer number of times I have fucked something up because a background window jumped to the foreground while I was in the middle of typing and striking the spacebar activated whatever option button was highlighted on the pop-up is staggering.
The inconsistency doesn’t bother me so much as a lack of immediate responsiveness when I start a program.
Sometimes I can wait 30 seconds after clicking on the menu before there is visual indication that the program is really loading. In that time I don’t know if I should click again, reboot the computer, walk away for 5 minutes for the services to settle, or start diagnosing the problem and take remedial action.
Part of a ‘computer users bill of rights’ is getting rid of all hourglasses and spinners and always having clear visual indication that progress is being made.
That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect.
Opportunities here.
Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale.
What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait?
One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout.
If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.
Metro/fluent apps always look "broken" to me. Like someone forgot to add styling and that's why a bunch of stuff ends up with some kind of default 3px solid black border. Transient popups (e.g. drop-downs) have some kind of shadow but it just looks weird and broken. Clicking on "cards" (I believe that's what they're called, e.g. a program in the new software manager) animates them but it just looks completely broken and blurry. Windows are resizable but in most cases it seems like the app isn't using an layout, so the contents don't adjust to match. It all feels a lot like a broken webpage in a standalone window. Including no/bad error handling, infinitely hanging indeterminate progress displays, lack of keyboard usability etc.
That being said the Windows 10 Win32 styling looks horrendous to me as well. Like BS_FLAT in Windows XP, it never looked good, not in 2005, not in 2021.
Same. It just doesn't work for my brain. We're looking at pixels on a screen so you need to somehow trick the brain into registering this as an interface and the metro/fluent ones completely fail in this regard. I see something more like a dense information sheet than an interactive interface.
Technically it seems broken too. There was a bug in the calculator app where one button was off by 1 pixel. It boggles the mind to imagine how that kind of thing is possible.
In Win7's control panel I counted ten different kinds of windows—in only MS' own sections, no third-parties (who tend to make the problem worse). Some of navigational widgets weren't used anywhere in the remainder of the OS.
I absolutely hate that if I open control panel, I can only focus on a single thing instead of having multiple windows open. My 64-core PC is not a smartphone, thank you very much!
I really disliked the experience of trying to read that page so much I just chose not to read it. What a surprisingly awful experience - I'd really encourage the author to remove that.
Not just a terrible idea, but it was completely unnecessary. The highjacked PgUp/Dn keys scroll the screenshot galleries horizontally, but so do the left and right arrow keys just like in other image galleries.
It did remind me to try a pair of browser shortcuts that I haven't used in probably ten years: Space and Shift+Space. They work!
I think the tray and notification system is cruel.
When I was a kid I saw other kids torment a horse by holding a hand up, getting the horse to turn away, then slapping the horse with the other hand.
The tray is always popping up notifications that tell me to click on them but clicking on them does nothing. The notification often covers the UI elements that I need to respond to the notification. There is no way to clear the notification except to wait for the notification to be cleared.
It’s cruel, and even more cruel that if the notification isn’t just actively in the way of your work and acting on the notification but the notification frequently disappears before you can act on it and you can’t count on scrolling back and looking at it later.
I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications).
Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.
If you're using a non-home version of Windows, open the Policy Editor, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings, find "Remove Notifications and Action Center", enable it, and poof! Annoying distractions begone.
While experimenting with this I also discovered another unexpected quirk or the switcher. AltGr+Tab makes it "sticky".
Also, I realized that despite being initially liking the beautiful 3D animated Win+Tab switcher when it was introduced in Vista, I never use it anymore.
Sorry for the tangent but: I get really nostalgic looking at the Windows 3.1 icons. I remember using moreicons.dll for shortcuts so long ago that they didn't look out of place.
Almost everyone can relate to hearing a song, or a smell, that takes you back to a different time in society and your life, but it's weird to get it from a computer UI. I think it may happen for me because computing has always been such a big part of my life, even since early childhood.
Seems like there used to more open criticism and suggested improvements of Microsoft Windows on the internet/web. When the company bought out Mark Russinovich that quelled some of it. There was also a website called annoyances.org. Anyone know why it disappeared. This is the last record of it I could find in the Internet Archive:
While i agree that there's a lot of old layers in Windows I must say that I much prefer this to the way Apple does things. In their camp it is like UI designers change things around for no other reason than to have a job (see also: Firefox). I feel like Apple have moved a lot closer to what they used to point fingers at in their commercials about PCs but without gaining any of the strengths. With that said I also think Gnome (and KDE) are light-years ahead of both OS' UI.
I know that Windows Vista still had some Windows 3.x UI elements included. For example, the file picker dialog you’d get when installing a font would be a pretty ancient one. Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime?
I find it hilarious that even in such a comprehensive post, the author missed some:
Some apps are now shipping with “Fluent but inconsistently round”, mostly the ones that use WinUI. Maps is a good example where this is noticeable. You can see some screenshots in link below.
There's just an insane amount of UI and code in Windows. I don't even want to hazard a guess how many millions, maybe billions of lines of code it takes to build Windows 10. Nobody is ever going to go through every dialog and update it to the design language of the week, while allocating the testing and QA resources to make sure it all works, in every language. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There's a Uservoice thread I've been following for years as comic relief that demands that Microsoft port all of Visual Studio to Linux and Mac. It's the same thing; people largely have no concept how much hoary old code there is lurking there, or how many man-years their "simple" ask entails.
Funnily as a design developer, i switch off all UI enhancements because they slow down the system. So my system looks almost like Windows 95 confusing people.
I think the inconsistency is the price of having a system with so many features. I rather have them than have consistent Windows. Moreover, sometimes updating UI does not go as planned.
A regular calculator started like a breeze. After redesigning it in Windows 10 it takes several seconds to load. It is not a time worth spending if you add 2 plus 2.
To sum it up, consistent UI is great. But if it comes to my OS i don't care about it too much. More about the speed.
I remember doing this with my Intel Atom netbook because it had the processing power of a baked potato, but with any modern system (something made in the last 8 years) with GPU acceleration, does it matter? I haven't noticed much of a difference in my Thinkpad with a fourth generation i5. Which is the oldest machine I have Windows installed on.
Why wouldn't MS just start a new OS like they ditched IE?
They can't get rid of backward compatibilities and pretending to be moving forward with the pace of walking in snow and everything is just half way done for the past 10+ years.
Just port the drivers, add some compatibility layers so that half apps work, ask big software vendors to port their apps to the new platform and let Windows fade out slowly so that finally they can create a fully vertically controlling software/hardware based on ARM and compete with Apple.
I grew up with Windows as my daily driver so I feel a bit of nostalgia but after switching over to macOS about a decade ago when I look at Windows it always feels to me like their engineering/design efforts are just alright with getting things 85% correct and then never finishing the job. It's the last 15% where you start seeing attention to detail, treatment of edge cases, and thoughtfulness.
To me it feels like the OS simply doesn't respect the user's time.
Although the Mac OS X “Blue Box” was ugly for a time, the virtualization approach worked and it also created a clear incentive for app developers to get their software updated to run better outside of that constraint.
If this “backwards compatibility” is important, fine: provide that compatibility on an older OS running in a layer. Free up the main OS to finally evolve.
Semi-related: if you enjoy classic Windows UI and feel like going to a nostalgia trip there's a great little game which will make you feel it's the turn of the millennium again - Progressbar95.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its creators in any way, just wanted to share some fun.
I feel you could a whole post also with just the inconsistencies in context menus. I remember a few releases of Windows 10 where already in the first screen right out of OOBE, you would get differently-styled context menus depending on where you clicked.
If you kill dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) or if it crashes in widows 10 you can see the old UI on all windows that are open for maybe a second or so before dwm.exe comes back. (obviously not recommendation on "production" machines)
One more thing missing in the list: MDI (multiple document interface) child windows are styled with Aero basic (i.e. without glass styling) frames, which really look rather ugly when embedded into a Window with a Windows 10 frame.
If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers.
The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility.
While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be touched very easily without breaking compatibility, And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect.
While desktop Linux/BSD isn't exactly well known for it's UIs, I found GNOME 3/40 to be more consistent UI-wise than Windows 10, being a user of GNOME 3 on FreeBSD at home (which I am typing this comment from), and helping port GNOME 40, while (unsurprisingly) using Windows 10 at $DAYJOB.
But then GNOME, KDE, Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.
I work on the core OS.
This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
Asking the obvious question: why aren't the UIs in newer Windows versions not "just" different themes over Win32 widgets? Instead the UI theme seems to be tied to UI frameworks which seem to be created and discarded annually at Microsoft, so each time some genius decides to overhaul the UI, a completely new sediment layer is created instead of letting some UI designers tinker with a theme editor.
I don't get it. Functional UI changes should be different from visual fluff, yet Windows seems to the only OS where the two aren't separated.
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> Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on
You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had an entire ecosystem that was uniform. Letting this go has really hurt the brand IMHO, and creates a very low bar for third parties.
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The juice is absolutely worth the squeeze. Everybody and their grandmas think Windows is a mess, yet theres no real alternative for most people, so there’s no real incentive for MS to make it better (or for a start, stop making it worse with telemetry, forced restarts and adware).
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Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception.
Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the legacy components. It is not the reason reams of GUIs have gone untouched for 20 years. It is not the reason Windows now has at least 4 versions(!) of Performance Monitor, all of which are broken in at least one glaring way. (More on that below.)
The believable reasons for the GUI inconsistencies I've heard are:
1) API churn, because of which the UI teams did not have sufficient time to work on features versus playing catchup.
2) Bad system GUI APIs that are very difficult for even in-house teams to work with.
3) Unwillingness to take ownership of legacy code, with literally noone left at Microsoft willing to touch things like the ODBC connections panel or the Component Services snapin. People prefer to add new things instead of fixing or removing old things because it's "easier".
Actually, let's just stop here for a second. That last point explains the performance monitor views. I mentioned at least 4 copies, written over decades, by different people. Each new team has steadfastly refused to touch (or remove!) the old code, but hasn't replaced the functionality of the old code, so now end-users need 4 different versions to get things done.
These versions are:
1) The performance tab in Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that exposes some metrics such as GPU temperatures. Only shows a small number of fixed metrics.
2) Resource Monitor, which is opened from Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that shows certain per-process metrics, such as the names of files being touched, or per-connection network stats. Has permanent UI issues that will never be fixed, such as not using the system number formatting in some places, making large metrics unreadable as they change faster than users can count the digits. Similarly, the graphs take forever to change their vertical axes, making them useless 90% of the time.
3) The Performance Monitor MMC snapin. Totally legacy, with un-resizable controls that cut off text. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential because it provides the only live GUI view of 100% of the performance metrics available in the system. It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings. It is the only GUI for creating metric logging that persists. Etc...
4) The various versions of Server Manager's performance views, which are so useless that I've literally never used it. Nobody can get their job done doing this, we're all still using RDP to connect to servers so that we can simultaneously launch the three tools above. Why RDP? Because 2 of the 3 above do not support remoting.
I could go on and on like this for hours about how bad just this one aspect of Windows is, let alone the hundreds of other GUIs that have been butchered by bad decision making and internal NIH syndrome leaving a trail of half-baked messes behind.
Wait... did I say 4 performance metrics GUIs? I meant 5, because there's also the new Windows Admin Center, which was clearly written by people that have never had to diagnose a performance issue on a server. It's very pretty and utterly useless, which means that: Nobody will use it, and it will be superseded by someone else's half-baked attempt in a few years, 100% guaranteed.
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> such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future
I'm always very skeptical of refusal to handle the past because of the promise that the same won't reiterate in the future. What could also happen is that 5 years from now, you or another dev justifies refusal to handle inconsistencies developed "temporarily" and or accidentally in the meantime with exactly the same reasoning.
A more direct and simple observation is that if nobody is working on converging / cleaning up stuff, they don't converge and aren't cleaned up.
As for the amount of backward compat already provided by Windows, it is good but not great anyway. Try to play old games, install/use old VS with a few patches, install/old Matlab, use old devices, etc... Hell even try to continue to use your semi-recent devices across new build of windows, like 20H2 breaking USB-C on my XPS 15 9560 (but now I'm ranting so I'll stop :D )
Is this also the reason why there are no tabs in windows explorer?
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Honestly thank goodness for the backwards compatibility, otherwise I'd have to rewrite an existing legacy app I've been put in charge of maintaining at my place of work. The thing is in winforms and a weird third party UI library built with winforms as well. It would just be a nightmare for me to have to go through each screen to recreate it reliably.
They tried modernizing with Windows RT, which was actually very smooth and functional if it wasn't so locked down.
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This is exactly what unit tests are for. Besides, the business logic should be already fairly separated from the presentation logic.
As for preventing inconsistencies in future, try getting your QA team back.
Could you ever see Microsoft dropping the registry?
My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.
Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.
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I don't know if Apple deserves to be in that list, UI-wise at least.
Yes, they do break backwards compatibility in many many other ways, but you could put a technical layperson who is used to Mac OS 9 and put them on macOS 11.4 (for those unfamiliar, Apple's OS has been at 10.x for about 20 years) and they would still reasonably be able to find their way around.
One element especially (the global menu bar) is why I got my parents to switch to macOS. They had to learn where 'print' or 'edit' or 'save' was once, and now they can find it for any program, and it'll probably still be in that place in 20 years time.
Its also why I think it's sad that Gnome abandoned the global menu bar. It's an amazing concept that if stuck with makes computers so much easier to use for a large contingent of people.
Yes. There are so many things Mac got it right for parents or grand parent users. Global Menu Bar and Single Mouse Button.
But generally speaking for them it was still a hassle and hurt to use a computer. iPad with Home Button was so much easier. No support calls for years. It was the computing devices that works. But now they moved on to Smartphone meant iPad get way less usage.
Which also means some of those design decisions that make macOS easier to use might not be relevant as PC transfer to a more professional type usage rather than consumer / everyone computing devices. But even in that case I still think Global Menu Bar is a better design.
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I like the global bar and also its underrated, consistent command search function. I think it was probably abandoned by gnome because every application also has a top row of icons in each window now.
My perfect OS would have a global menu bar and enforce that all commands can be issued by searching and all ribbons/icon bars can be turned off.
I think global menubars are severely underrated. They act as a sort of index of any given program's functionality, complete with key shortcuts and because it's a facet of the OS itself and will be there regardless, there's no point in paring away menus for minimalism's sake.
The worst part about the new gnome not only we don't have the global menu bar, the default top bar is basically a waste of space with barely any useful content in it.
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The global menu bar is great for laptops and small screens. I'm less convinced it makes sense for big cinema displays or dual displays.
I argue that global menu bar is bad UI for big and multiple monitor era. It's fine for laptop but not for desktop. It's also not friendly to touch panel since it relies on what app is foreground.
> And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect.
They should stay on disk to be used by programs compiled 20 years ago.
They should not be used by OS components, nor visible to end user unless they run these old applications.
The OS already has multiple good ways to achieve that.
1. New programs can opt in to new stuff with a manifest. That’s how you get high DPI support in WinAPI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/setting...
2. New programs can call some API functions to enable new stuff. That’s how you get modern versions of Win32 common controls: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/commctrl/...
3. The OS has a lightweight virtualization layer for file system and registry, that’s how 32-bit apps view things differently: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winprog64/fil... Microsoft could have used that thing not just for 32-bit apps, for backward compatibility too, i.e. old apps could use special compatibility view of the environment.
4. Finally, the kernel supports multiple user-mode environments, Win32 is just one of them. The initial good version of WSL (I still use it every day, too bad they have killed the awesome product moving to virtual machines in WSL 2) runs Linux binaries directly on top of Windows 10 kernel, the subsystem is implemented in lxss.sys and lxcore.sys. Microsoft could have embedded couple popular Windows versions, such as 7 and XP, as different subsystems used for running old apps.
I understand the backwards compatibility case for APIs, but not for OS dialogs. Is there a compatibility reason why the folder properties dialog is crufty (unresizable, etc)? I always just assumed there was no engineering appetite or business case to work on it.
Non-resizable dialogs are one of the top reasons why I cannot stand Windows and find it a huge pain to work with as a non-regular user.
Now, while I can understand the sibling's point about third-party overlays [0] which may break when the windows suddenly become resizable, what I find absolutely infuriating is that even what seem like recent features still inherit this stupid behavior.
The thing that I'm reminded of is "Windows Defender Exceptions" (or similar, don't have a Windows box at hand). Those are configured through a new, Settings App-looking window.
Now I understand this is somehow different, because even though the window vaguely looks like the Settings App (huge icons, tons and tons of whitespace), it behaves very differently.
This "exceptions" panel shows a list of the folders that is fixed, although the outer window can be resized. So if you've got a big high-res screen and maximize it, you'll get 90% of blank space and will still have to scroll around to see the contents. Bonus points for the list being so skinny that I'm only able to see "C:\Users\vlad\..." and have to click on each entry to see it in full.
I sometimes jokingly say that it shows MS has a mouse business, and having to click a thousand times for the simplest of things is by design.
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[0] Not sure what those are. Do random third-parties "augment" system dialogs by drawing random stuff on top of them? I find that thought horrendous.
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If any program tweaks a dialog, say by floating a title-barless window with a new control on top of some empty space (possibly after slightly resizing the window or a control in the window to make space), you can’t resize any window control, can’t change tab order, can’t add controls, can’t change background color, etc.
Detecting whether that is being done is challenging. Typical workaround is that, if any callback is registered with a dialoog, to keep things ‘as is’.
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>The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely)
...completely unjustifiable?
Come on, why does this mean we need 5 different sound dialogues to do 5 different things? That's ridiculous on every level. It used to all be in one place anyway, so it's not even like it needs to be spread out in the first place. Make the old dialogues inaccessible, hide them, and create a new one which does all of those jobs. Then get rid of the old, now unused ones at the first opportunity.
Is the explanation really backwards compatibility, or is it lack of organisation?
Or they could just stop screwing with it?
Every windows update makes the strips a function from the control panel and ads something not quite as good to the settings app.
After the last update the settings app even has ads for 'bing rewards points' in it. Which appear to be impossible to remove.
I need to look harder at getting one of the commercial versions of windows that only gets security updates, but no feature updates, because I've come to hate and fear upgrades.
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The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility.
I've been a Windows user since Windows 3.11. I suggest another explanation: Microsoft has been a monopoly in desktop OSs for 40 years, and it shows.
Backwards compatibility would be the most likely explanation for why the settings panel has interfaces from the last five operating systems versions. Considering how flaky Windows settings have been historically, and how complex it must be (in part due to the 40 years of backwards compatibility) it surely wasn’t practical to completely rewrite those components.
Surely at least the old bitmap graphics could be updated without breaking backwards compatibility?
I'm also involved with Microsoft, and my view is that the culture is to move on to the next goal too soon after the next gen solutions have been developed.
So they make control panel 2.0, reach 70% coverage, launch, and never move the remaining features into the new version so they can sunset the old one.
> Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers.
Completely unrelated and a shot in the dark, but if you’re both a Microsoftie and a FreeBSD user/committer, the FreeBSD .NET port is stumbling/regressing somewhat and could definitely use a little help:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537
(Better start at the end of that thread, rather than the start)
Anything you could do to help (if only pushing the right buttons/people internally), I’m sure would be greatly appreciated.
Why can't old code remain underneath but UI elements replaced?
UI and logic are probably not as decoupled as we’d like to think.
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This is part of the explanation but it's clearly not the whole explanation. The other part is why Windows has gone through half a dozen different UI toolkits while macOS is recognizably the same with some re-skins since 2001. There's no backwards compatibility to be broken if you get the UI right the first time, and there's no excuse for introducing a whole new UI model with every release. It makes the whole OS feel like a gigantic pile of technical debt, and gives the appearance that engineering simply moves on and greenfields a new UI system when the old one becomes unmaintainable.
> Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.
macOS has actually been pretty good at seamlessly adding new features to old apps, with just a recompile against the latest SDK, like all the NSDocument-derived stuff (auto-save, auto-recover, iCloud etc.), Dark Mode, accessibility etc.
Not to mention they pulled two complete arch changes.
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There's some intuitive logic to this. But it's also really really hard to understand why they cannot write modern interfaces for all the backwards compatible systems. Just pretty it all up.
It's bizarre that to do some basic audio or networking configuration I have to wander through 2-3 generations of UI.
Well I thought Windows on ARM or Windows 10X was the perfect moment to get rid of those backward compatibility problem. At least there are incentive / reasons to be doing so.
And why can Microsoft goes the same route as Apple's Cocoa and Carbon?
Nope. Because the goal was to make it as seamless as possible to port software to those platforms, ideally by just recompiling with a different flag. The offerings would be DOA without dev buy-in which wouldn’t happen if there was too much friction in porting.
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Please don't waste your time and talent on GNOME.
The GNOME project burnt all their good will and capital building a touch focused UI (for all those touch devices running linux, you know) at the cost of their very desktop orientated userbase (sound familiar?). The core project members are more interested in social justice witch hunts than creating a good product and it shows.
Open UNIX's are desperate for a light comprehensive desktop environment with modern features. GNOME ain't it chief.
I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be.
All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.
This. I would forgive the inconsistencies if the new stuff was better. But it's worse. Its not a "meh I'm used to the old and hate change" situation.
It's a "holy shit fire the UX design and product manager leads in charge of this asap". The audio tab is another good example. It's so hard to do anything with the new one, you almost have to know how to get to the old UX to make any kind of change.
I have a 1440p screen. Why do I need to scroll to do anything in the new audio properties dialog? The old one fit more functionality on screen all at once on 768p laptops
Why has there been such a push to nerf UIs? Is it just trying to ape mobile? Mobile UIs are more basic because the screen is so damn small and the use case is more casual.
Most use cases for Windows are casual. I don't want to hazard a guess but I'd say easily more than 70% of Windows users may be basic? The type to not go particularly deep into the options and explore these menus and instead leave it up to the experts or get systems configured for them
For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough
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For some reason when you search for files and folders now, this menu does not return the folder path, but some strange search path
I would hate for Microsoft to kill off the original Control Panel.
This issue is way overblown here on HN.
In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies".
The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windows 10.
> In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies".
Don't you ever have to change sound settings? Because I have to deal with that every week, and have to dig through 3 different style of UIs and several different windows/dialogs to get to what I need.
Everything related to control panel / settings is a giant mess, and it's often really hard to find the settings you want, especially if you don't already know where it is. Some things is in the new UI, some in an old UI.
It's actually one of the main reasons why I really don't want to use Windows for my home laptop. Windows does have it strengths, and I don't mind using it at work, but I really don't want any of that bullsh*t when I get home from work.
Right click on the volume icon > Sounds - goes straight to the old XPish UI, which offers most if not all settings.
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Can you explain what sound settings are you changing?
As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it.
I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.
>I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it.
They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets.
Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine.
They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty.
No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
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I concur.
Until reading this article I didn't know Fluent Design, Metro and Windows 8 Win32 were supposed to be separate design languages; I'm still not convinced, and in any case I can only see those with the sharpest of eyes noticing any differences here.
Calling out things like MMC, winver and screensaver settings as relics from Windows 95 also seems like a huge stretch to me. Even though their layout has remained the same (which is a good thing; they do their job well), their design language is quite clearly different from their Windows 95 counterparts.
Isn’t it interesting that the inconsistency arguments mostly surfaces around software configuration, like “_Settings_ app is stupid” “I still use XP style _driver installation_ screen” etc?
It makes sense why it’s not much of an issue on other GUI environments: in GNU/Linux and macOS, only what’s available on GUI is available on GUI, and the rest goes to the unified scary black screen with very task specific procedures.
Only in Windows the GUI is primary means of configuration and only Windows carry over old GUI associated with each configuration items.
It's a good point - I wonder if the actual user really sees an old-looking GUI screen as worse than an arcane terminal configuration.
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The worst offender is network settings. After years of at least weekly needing to change some setting for a virtual adapter, VPN etc, I find myself stumbling trying to get to the right screen.
You just have to know it is called 'network connections'. So like most other GUI things: hit Start button, start typing 'network connections'. For me it pops up after typing 'net' already. Which is actually easier and more consistent than in any other Windows version (IIRC), and super accessible, and faster than hunting for things with the mouse. Now if they'd add fuzzy matching this would be wild :)
Alternative would be knowing that a lot of 'old' control panel UIs are accessible through the new one, so: go into the new settings UI to network-related stuff (Win-x, w or Win-X, n and start typing 'network') and there will be 'change adapter settings' somewhere. Or possibly you can change the setting you want from the new UI.
Which indeed shows this particular par was turned into a mess. But as the OP says: I haven't actually been bothered by it a lot myself. Likewise for some UI parts looking different: it has been like that since as long as I can remember on computers, no matter which OS or whether it's a CLI, TUI or GUI: if you use more than a couple of tools there are always going to be tools which look and/or do things in a different way. So people kinda get used to that anyway. Not that it's an excuse for doing this to an OS, but just looking at it from the practical side.
Maybe the Windows God Mode "cheat" would help. It has all Windows settings in one place. You can create a direct shortcut to any of them from there. Activate it be creating a new folder and naming it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}".
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yep... It now have about 3 or 4 dawn places for you to configure.
The wifi and hotspots are in metro ui setting app.
Interfaces are in its own standalone app. (win7 style)
However... The firewall are in a xp style standalone app.
Can't they combine them into one app or at least make a folder that contains link to them?
I don't understand why the UI is such a big deal to people here. I can deal with UI. I'll (grudgingly) accept changes to UI that break my hard-learned muscle memory and figure out the "new way" to do things.
I just want a version of Windows that I am in control of. I don't want my machines (or my Customers' machines, for whom I am responsible to support) torpedoing themselves with shoddy updates that try to install at inappropriate times (need to shut down your laptop to put it into a bag and head home-- tough-- we're installing updates!).
I can deal with UI. I've been learning new UI my whole life. The whole "it's not your computer anymore" tack Microsoft took with Windows 10 is condescending and abusive.
Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.
It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft.
So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.
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On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, people bash Linux distros for inconsistent UIs so I get a kick out of pointing out that the shoe is on the other foot.
The article shows clearly there are multiple design languages in very common tasks. The first point is that the volume picker is different from the latest design. This is something users interact with on a daily basis.
My beef is mostly with the lack of consistency with the control panel and settings. They have "Win10"ed most of it by now, though, but for several years you had this weird, often overlapping set of UIs from Win7 and Win10.
Minor things like Win10 vs. Metro are less obvious, though.
It’s very nice that you can install and all the driver, but what does that have to do with the control panel being a chaotic mess of layers from the past 25 years?
I find this article rather informative as someone who hasn’t used windows in 10 years. Now that it’s all laid out there, I can clearly see that various layers of the control panel are using the visual style of Vista, 2000, and so forth.
I suppose Microsoft has technical reasons for not making the some of the most important user-facing parts of their flagship product consistent in terms of interface, but it’s quite a stretch to say that the consistency shown here is anything other than abysmal. No wonder my parents find this incredibly confusing.
I personally also don't have a problem.
Think however about people who are new to computers, whether adults or kids growing. They find it all confusing.
The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.
I agree and am actually surprised that several years in there is still a bunch of stuff that is not configurable in the new Settings screen. I am obviously speaking without extensive knowledge of the underlying internals but surely it can't be that difficult to wrap some settings in a new UI if you dedicate a team to it?
I actually spent 15 minutes the other day trying to remove an additional keyboard layout that somehow found itself on my machine. I had to give up as I could not find the option in the new Settings screen and it seemed to have disappeared (or moved?) from the usual place in the Control Panel...
I had this too. I found and fixed the setting in the registry. They seem to have arrived at an UI design that cannot correctly represent the possible states of the underlying "real" model. Their current GUI for managing installed language keyboards is unfortunate. It appears to be optimized for a perceived majority of users only needing a single layout, in a way that makes it difficult to manage multiple layouts. Somehow their UI mix the keyboard layouts together with the GUI display language. I don't quite understand, why they don't just let the user manage a simple list of installed keyboard layouts (I believe it used to work that way, and behind the scenes it probably still does?)
Yep. It seems to occasionally add keyboard layouts if your region, language, and keyboard layout are different. Not handy if you live abroad. The new UI assumes it's more clever than the user.
It super frustrating to have to go on a treasure hunt just to find some options there.
To this day, every time I need to uninstall an application I still do: win+R -> control appwiz.cpl -> enter and it brings me to the place I want to be.
The SaaS version of exchange has the same problem, and the support people start by having you switch to the old menu because they don't know where everything has been moved in the new one.
The settings app completely mauls things as well, turning off static DNS will just completely remove _all_ DNS servers instead of using dhcp like adapter settings
I rarely use Windows but this is indeed ridiculous. I find myself guessing which button or link is hiding the dialogue that I really want. In almost all cases I just want the one from Windows 95, like display settings, but end up opening the wrong ones and seemingly going in circles before I finally crack the code.
I mostly agree, but if you use US English GUI locale there’s a shortcut — both new settings, and old control panel, have built-in search.
Very often I don’t bother opening either of them, instead using start menu search. For instance, to open the old “network and sharing center” GUI I press Win key, type “netw”, and press enter.
TBH I don't really see how the Settings app is an embarrassment at this point in time. This was definitely true in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 versions, but with the leaps and bounds it's made since, I feel like 'settings app suxx' is a meme that has overstayed its welcome.
I do not have much to do with windows these days, but if you try to cange advanced network interface settings or audio settings beyond selecting a single input, you stil need to find the link to the old panel hidden somewhere. Also, good luck changing WiFi settings from the fluid menu.
And lastly, while it always stays responsive, control of the background processes is also lacking. I spent quite some time restarting the download of a system language, just because I started it while having DNS issues (and to fix those... see above).
I personally don't mind the older designs being mixed in, especially since most of them look good enough with the updated buttons, but the settings panel is, in its current state, still a sidegrade at best.
I don't sit around configuring my machine so I can't really say if it's gotten better, but I know the past 5 years have taught me too look anywhere but there. There's never been a good reason to have two different overlapping configuration apps.
I've used it fairly recently and it still has only the absolutely most common settings you'd want to change. 90% of the settings are still in the control panel.
It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.
I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform.
But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state.
I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix.
With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.
As far as I know Project Reunion is not really a UI framework - it's more about refactoring Windows APIs into individual libraries which can be used across different OS versions. This should enable apps targeting all versions of Windows 10 to use the latest stuff, in a similar fashion to polyfills in browsers.
This is probably to encourage developers to build software using the new Windows 10 APIs. Which is something they definitely have a problem with - I've been using Windows 10 quite heavily since the first beta and I don't think I've ever seen or used a third party Windows 10 (fluent / modern / metro) application.
It is a bit more than that, and I bet with Windows 11 announcement we will get a more clear picture on it.
It is also a way to bring into Win32 side most of the API that really matter on the UWP side of the fence, most likely (although they are yet to confirm this) as migration path to UWP developers.
.NET Native, C++/CX are pretty much dead, and C++/WinRT keeps missing many of the tooling available on C++/CX for XAML applications.
So I expect them to migrate the APIs into an OS version independent layer, and then give the mercy shot on UWP apps.
I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps.
[1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.
> They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago.
Enterprises expect to run programs developed a quarter century ago... if a quarter decade was all that was required, MS could have abandoned a lot more cruft.
Blergh, was trying to decide between "two decades" and "quarter of a century" and my brain went with both!
2.5 years?! Who wants stability that short?
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> retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago
I think I've seen computers with more uninterrupted uptime than that, even if servers. Or at least approaching this figure.
Perhaps you meant ‘quarter of a millennium’ or something like that.
I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.
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What about me? I don't care about backwards compatibility - but I don't want "UWP" because it's impossible to make great apps following the guidelines.
Sounds like you might want to look into MacOS. Or at least might've wanted before Big Sur, dunno about now.
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> something even newer
;) Sadly I think this is the group Microsoft is least likely to attempt to cater towards.
I'm on the same boat, and would like to see proper design instead of supporting 200-years-old programs. But apparently we are minority and not the best interest of Microsoft. (Which is okay, BTW)
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Win 3.1 File Open Dialog can be found in Windows 11
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocki...
Afaik the Win3 file dialog gets called up by some old apps that use old APIs. I think I even ran into it in Wine.
The analog in Unix apps are GTK's file dialogs, which always look jarring and out-of-place anywhere other than Gnome (and maybe XFCE and KDE, dunno)—making me feel like I stepped into 90s Unix with those Motif-derived concrete slabs. Plus they're un-integrated with non-Linux OSes, missing features. And the dialogs keep being dragged around by GTK apps—open Gimp on Mac or Windows and there you go: GTK dialogs.
I don't think the Fluent+Metro stuff is so different as to be a real consistency issue. Certainly minor inconsistencies that can be easily pointed out in a list but little that makes a typical user think "this is a completely different thing I'm using". The rest of the "old" stuff seems to have been made visually consistent in the 7 era even if the tools themselves originated from different eras with most gaining high DPI support and following the newer theming, again not a consistency issue in itself. There are a few REALLY old dialogs called by ODBC and maybe some others but I can't think of any you run into unless you're intentionally looking to run old software that will call them. So technically 3 but really 2 really noticeable UI environments in day to day.
I'm worried with 11 it'll be a repeat of Windows 10 where at the start you're constantly using "yet another UI". At this point it's nearly gotten decent to the point if you aren't a sysadmin (MMC, regedit, task manager, advanced control panel items not nowadays part of Settings) you rarely run into the "old" style stuff with the one exception of File Explorer. Hopefully it doesn't take another 6 years to be saying that about Fluent/Metro stuff being updated to match 11's new look.
I kind of hate how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to find a familiar management ui in windows today. I find myself using run commands to bring up these UIs more and more.
It would be an acceptable tradeoff if these new interfaces added more functionality or visibility but it seems they're just trying to move to the new settings ux and not thinking about adding better function.
Try adding a new local user account to latest windows, compare the functionality in new the network interface settings page vs the legacy adapter properties prompt.
Seems most of the "this just works" stuff that I respect is from windows 2000 and the NT team.
Wish Microsoft would head back that way with a nod to modern usability instead of dumbing things down and worse: changing it every release.
Windows has been on this road for a long time.
I did some work on Windows servers in the XP era and it was a continuous hassle that the menus were always different in NT 4, Win 2k, Xp, Vista, and all the different versions of Windows server.
Contrast that to command-line admin on Linux that stays the same or the perpetually busted Linux admin GUIs that should just be taken behind the woodshed and shot.
How is MacOS able to maintain such a consistent UI even with massive changes in their design language ? Is Windows UI not a separate layer or something that they can update ?
Or is it that the UI elements somehow get baked into the program at the time you build it, so if you didn't update you are just stuck with that particular version of UI you built the program ?
The biggest thing is that a much larger percentage of Mac apps are written using the native UI toolkits, which receive most of the aesthetic changes for "free" (even in lieu of updates/recompiles). There's also stronger expectation from users for apps to fit in, so even devs who write in foreign toolkits (e.g. electron) are more likely to put in the effort to mimic the native toolkit, because failure to do so makes their app look crusty and outdated relative to the rest of the system and other apps.
Under Windows, the rule has been that basically anything goes, and that's been true for upwards of two decades. Anybody who used Windows 98/2K/XP can probably name several apps they remember using totally custom UI off the top of their heads. That never really changed. Custom UI has become a lot less wild looking, but it's still custom (which means no "free" updates), and on top of that there's no incentive for developers to update their apps to match the latest look.
> Under Windows, the rule has been that basically anything goes
Those rules were set by example by microsoft.
But the programs we are discussing here are parts of windows written by Microsoft with their own toolkits.
macOS isn't afraid to deprecate or completely remove things even if that means old things won't work. Windows demands 16 bit apps from the 90s should have a very decent shot at running on Windows 11. That level of "it'll always be there" means for the vast majority of old UI it has no technology pressure to be redone, only pressure of what most average users will see day to day. E.g. nobody at Windows is going to dump control panel (need 3rd party add-ons to work) and nobody is going to rewrite it in a backwards compatible way when most users can do everything via Settings these days and it works with all quirks for legacy apps as is.
That's not to say a lot of the Metro stuff shouldn't/couldn't be made to be Fluent but it also isn't as out of place as some of the older stuff. The only one that is really surprising is File Explorer - but again a lot of legacy app integration that wouldn't work with a new one (though maybe it is time anyways).
> Windows demands 16 bit apps from the 90s should have a very decent shot at running on Windows 11.
16 bit applications never worked on any 64 bit Windows.
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I think it relates to how their internal structure is set up and their brand positioning. Apple has only one design team and design system I think, and only caters to folks who prefer simplicity over power features.
I suspect that Windows is more like compilation of what different teams produce at MS, each with their own design opinions and target audience.
I can only imagine how challenging it is to serve beginners and power users with the same UI at the same time in Windows, which kinda implies different UI densities depending on the part of the OS or type of widget.
Apple has the advantage that they get away with simplifying things and have built a brand image around being easy to use.
> macOS only caters to folks who prefer simplicity over power features
This is said quite often, almost as a given, but I never thought it reflected reality. macOS has an abundance of useful features for power users — system services, automator, AppleScript, tons of productivity touches like titlebar proxy icons and universal drag-and-drop support... not to mention it's all built on Unix so a terminal is right there for anything not exposed in the UI.
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Built-in Windows controls, like buttons, scroll bars, etc. are updated with each system release. However, they are relatively inflexible, and no one uses WinApi anyway, so most frameworks and apps build their own components, with varying dedication to emulating the "native" style. Built-in controls also don't perform much in the way of layout (I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions?) so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.
My guess is MacOS's consistency comes from some combination of developer incentives, and UI toolkit design.
> I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions? so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.
I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.
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Mac UI elements don't move around much—afaik they use about the same positioning that was decided when OSX was made. So the looks change but the layout not so much, and thus apps don't break on updates. Big Sur is probably the biggest change in the layout, in all these years.
Whereas MS keeps rearranging the layouts that were perhaps too complex to begin with. Especially the toolbars, with the row upon row of buttons and whatever other stuff MS crammed in there. My pet theory is that MS treats all UI as tables of various sizes, because it's easy for devs to just slap whatever they think up into rows. Apple was much better at the ‘proximity principle’ so avoided cramming from the start.
It also helps that MacOS is slimmer in terms of GUI apps—there's no ‘management console’ for admins and such heavy stuff. My litmus test of GUI environments is the control panel—and it's much lighter and more comprehensible in MacOS. (A similar telling exercise is comparing control panels of Gnome and KDE, at least it was when I last touched KDE in the 2000s.)
That’s what I wonder… understood that the windows internals are developed to maintain backwards compatibility, but why are they not able to change the user interface?
The Vista control panel being the second layer of the Windows 10 control panel is one of the weirdest. Other than maintaining the same layout for users, why is the second layer of their settings panel just the exact settings panel from the OS 14 years ago?
This. It's not about backwards compatibility for Windows itself; it's about investment. They don't want to pay to update all their menus and settings screens.
Easy. They never design their system with compactibility in mind. Also, since they own their own software and only allow to be installed in their own hardware, they have full control on everything.
I think it is because breaking API changes are introduced often, and most apps only work across a narrow window of 2-3 major releases.
I don't think Microsoft has been truly interested in improving the Windows experience in a long time. I mean, surely if they cared about us you'd be able to right-click on any Notification icon and hit "always show icon and notifications" without having to open two menus to get to that option. It's been a pain in my ass for twenty years.
Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please?
I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them.
Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey.
Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime.
I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible.
I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows.
Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced.
Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.
I completely share your sentiment that Windows' constant nagging and irritating behavior is terrible for productivity.
But I'm not sure that this is a Windows issue per se, in that apps can and sometimes do produce random, custom notifications even on Linux and macOS. I think it's a "cultural" thing: it happens more often on Windows because... it happens more often, so people aren't as surprised when some new app does it, they've been seeing those for years and years. It's kind of "expected", the same way that most Windows users will say "just reboot it" without batting an eye [0]. "It's just how things are".
However, what trips me, is that even Microsoft's own products do this crap. I'm thinking of Teams in particular. I understand they've only recently introduced the "feature" of sending alerts to the notification center, yet Teams is a brand-new product, that appeared in the Windows 10 era.
And they use those same custom notifications on macOS and Linux, too, where they happily ignore any system configuration. Of course, those are actually custom windows that they put up, they didn't even configure the windows properties to be considered a notification (on Linux/X11).
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[0] I know Windows requires much fewer random reboots nowadays, but the people are still trained to reboot it whenever something "doesn't work". They won't even consider that there's something wrong that should be investigated.
Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications.
Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off.
For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)
Man, the sheer number of times I have fucked something up because a background window jumped to the foreground while I was in the middle of typing and striking the spacebar activated whatever option button was highlighted on the pop-up is staggering.
Does it not help to turn the notifications off in the notifications settings?
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The inconsistency doesn’t bother me so much as a lack of immediate responsiveness when I start a program.
Sometimes I can wait 30 seconds after clicking on the menu before there is visual indication that the program is really loading. In that time I don’t know if I should click again, reboot the computer, walk away for 5 minutes for the services to settle, or start diagnosing the problem and take remedial action.
Part of a ‘computer users bill of rights’ is getting rid of all hourglasses and spinners and always having clear visual indication that progress is being made.
That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect. Opportunities here.
Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale.
What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait?
One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout.
If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.
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The sad part is that old win32 UI from the win95 era, rendered with a modern style, are the most useable and nicer looking, in my opinion.
Metro/fluent apps always look "broken" to me. Like someone forgot to add styling and that's why a bunch of stuff ends up with some kind of default 3px solid black border. Transient popups (e.g. drop-downs) have some kind of shadow but it just looks weird and broken. Clicking on "cards" (I believe that's what they're called, e.g. a program in the new software manager) animates them but it just looks completely broken and blurry. Windows are resizable but in most cases it seems like the app isn't using an layout, so the contents don't adjust to match. It all feels a lot like a broken webpage in a standalone window. Including no/bad error handling, infinitely hanging indeterminate progress displays, lack of keyboard usability etc.
That being said the Windows 10 Win32 styling looks horrendous to me as well. Like BS_FLAT in Windows XP, it never looked good, not in 2005, not in 2021.
Same. It just doesn't work for my brain. We're looking at pixels on a screen so you need to somehow trick the brain into registering this as an interface and the metro/fluent ones completely fail in this regard. I see something more like a dense information sheet than an interactive interface.
Technically it seems broken too. There was a bug in the calculator app where one button was off by 1 pixel. It boggles the mind to imagine how that kind of thing is possible.
If did not age well, but it came out a long time ago.
In Win7's control panel I counted ten different kinds of windows—in only MS' own sections, no third-parties (who tend to make the problem worse). Some of navigational widgets weren't used anywhere in the remainder of the OS.
I absolutely hate that if I open control panel, I can only focus on a single thing instead of having multiple windows open. My 64-core PC is not a smartphone, thank you very much!
yes! modern UI feels so "trapped".
speaking of UI inconsistencies - why did the author of this page thing it was a good idea to hijack my page up/down buttons. come on man.
I think it's caused by the stock WordPress image gallery widget. I've noticed the same issue in a KDE blog[1] also built with WordPress.
[1]: https://pointieststick.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-kde-plasm...
The irony.
I really disliked the experience of trying to read that page so much I just chose not to read it. What a surprisingly awful experience - I'd really encourage the author to remove that.
Not just a terrible idea, but it was completely unnecessary. The highjacked PgUp/Dn keys scroll the screenshot galleries horizontally, but so do the left and right arrow keys just like in other image galleries.
It did remind me to try a pair of browser shortcuts that I haven't used in probably ten years: Space and Shift+Space. They work!
I think the tray and notification system is cruel.
When I was a kid I saw other kids torment a horse by holding a hand up, getting the horse to turn away, then slapping the horse with the other hand.
The tray is always popping up notifications that tell me to click on them but clicking on them does nothing. The notification often covers the UI elements that I need to respond to the notification. There is no way to clear the notification except to wait for the notification to be cleared.
It’s cruel, and even more cruel that if the notification isn’t just actively in the way of your work and acting on the notification but the notification frequently disappears before you can act on it and you can’t count on scrolling back and looking at it later.
I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications).
Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.
If you're using a non-home version of Windows, open the Policy Editor, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings, find "Remove Notifications and Action Center", enable it, and poof! Annoying distractions begone.
I will always find it funny that you can use the windows 95 alt+tab switcher by:
- Pressing alt (don't release)
- Pressing altgr
- Releasing altgr
- Pressing tab
While experimenting with this I also discovered another unexpected quirk or the switcher. AltGr+Tab makes it "sticky".
Also, I realized that despite being initially liking the beautiful 3D animated Win+Tab switcher when it was introduced in Vista, I never use it anymore.
It's not just the UI that's inconsistent, it's that the different UI layers can actually present contradictory information.
https://i.imgur.com/oNxlUzv.png
Sorry for the tangent but: I get really nostalgic looking at the Windows 3.1 icons. I remember using moreicons.dll for shortcuts so long ago that they didn't look out of place.
Almost everyone can relate to hearing a song, or a smell, that takes you back to a different time in society and your life, but it's weird to get it from a computer UI. I think it may happen for me because computing has always been such a big part of my life, even since early childhood.
Seems like there used to more open criticism and suggested improvements of Microsoft Windows on the internet/web. When the company bought out Mark Russinovich that quelled some of it. There was also a website called annoyances.org. Anyone know why it disappeared. This is the last record of it I could find in the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121222074911/http://www.annoya...
While i agree that there's a lot of old layers in Windows I must say that I much prefer this to the way Apple does things. In their camp it is like UI designers change things around for no other reason than to have a job (see also: Firefox). I feel like Apple have moved a lot closer to what they used to point fingers at in their commercials about PCs but without gaining any of the strengths. With that said I also think Gnome (and KDE) are light-years ahead of both OS' UI.
I know that Windows Vista still had some Windows 3.x UI elements included. For example, the file picker dialog you’d get when installing a font would be a pretty ancient one. Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime?
Screenshot found online (from XP): https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/35b17bed9c542383/faq_xp_winz...
> Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime?
It's been updated. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553728
I find it hilarious that even in such a comprehensive post, the author missed some:
Some apps are now shipping with “Fluent but inconsistently round”, mostly the ones that use WinUI. Maps is a good example where this is noticeable. You can see some screenshots in link below.
https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/3767
Interesting read. There's also "State of the Windows, part 2: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?": https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/state-of-the-windo...
Similar thread from earlier today:
There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553108 - June 2021 (125 comments)
There's just an insane amount of UI and code in Windows. I don't even want to hazard a guess how many millions, maybe billions of lines of code it takes to build Windows 10. Nobody is ever going to go through every dialog and update it to the design language of the week, while allocating the testing and QA resources to make sure it all works, in every language. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There's a Uservoice thread I've been following for years as comic relief that demands that Microsoft port all of Visual Studio to Linux and Mac. It's the same thing; people largely have no concept how much hoary old code there is lurking there, or how many man-years their "simple" ask entails.
I have so many irritants in the experience of using windows professionally, that I’m not going to waste time discussing it.
I will leave you with one observation though.
For any given text box in Windows, I have found that CTRL-A may or may not Select All.
Funnily as a design developer, i switch off all UI enhancements because they slow down the system. So my system looks almost like Windows 95 confusing people.
I think the inconsistency is the price of having a system with so many features. I rather have them than have consistent Windows. Moreover, sometimes updating UI does not go as planned.
A regular calculator started like a breeze. After redesigning it in Windows 10 it takes several seconds to load. It is not a time worth spending if you add 2 plus 2.
To sum it up, consistent UI is great. But if it comes to my OS i don't care about it too much. More about the speed.
I remember doing this with my Intel Atom netbook because it had the processing power of a baked potato, but with any modern system (something made in the last 8 years) with GPU acceleration, does it matter? I haven't noticed much of a difference in my Thinkpad with a fourth generation i5. Which is the oldest machine I have Windows installed on.
Why wouldn't MS just start a new OS like they ditched IE?
They can't get rid of backward compatibilities and pretending to be moving forward with the pace of walking in snow and everything is just half way done for the past 10+ years.
Just port the drivers, add some compatibility layers so that half apps work, ask big software vendors to port their apps to the new platform and let Windows fade out slowly so that finally they can create a fully vertically controlling software/hardware based on ARM and compete with Apple.
I grew up with Windows as my daily driver so I feel a bit of nostalgia but after switching over to macOS about a decade ago when I look at Windows it always feels to me like their engineering/design efforts are just alright with getting things 85% correct and then never finishing the job. It's the last 15% where you start seeing attention to detail, treatment of edge cases, and thoughtfulness.
To me it feels like the OS simply doesn't respect the user's time.
Although the Mac OS X “Blue Box” was ugly for a time, the virtualization approach worked and it also created a clear incentive for app developers to get their software updated to run better outside of that constraint.
If this “backwards compatibility” is important, fine: provide that compatibility on an older OS running in a layer. Free up the main OS to finally evolve.
Semi-related: if you enjoy classic Windows UI and feel like going to a nostalgia trip there's a great little game which will make you feel it's the turn of the millennium again - Progressbar95.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its creators in any way, just wanted to share some fun.
I feel you could a whole post also with just the inconsistencies in context menus. I remember a few releases of Windows 10 where already in the first screen right out of OOBE, you would get differently-styled context menus depending on where you clicked.
If you kill dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) or if it crashes in widows 10 you can see the old UI on all windows that are open for maybe a second or so before dwm.exe comes back. (obviously not recommendation on "production" machines)
One more thing missing in the list: MDI (multiple document interface) child windows are styled with Aero basic (i.e. without glass styling) frames, which really look rather ugly when embedded into a Window with a Windows 10 frame.
What I want to know is how can I get that Betta fish on my boot screen!
You missed the manual viewer (open triggered by F1) I think its UI dates back to Vista or so. (the .chm file viewer)
I mostly hate settings in Windows 10 after 15 years of OSX, which are very inconsistent.
If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.
I just want the whole XP UI back. I can stand this new whatever it is
Don't forget the Windows Vista installer.
Windows 10 lacked a cohesive vision for the UI.