Comment by neelc

This was historically the case, it's why despite the article calling out winver, folder properties, the run dialog as being from the win9x -> win2k period, they didn't look remotely as out of place in win7 as win10.

Of course there are limits. iirc Windows 7 RTM had an obviously 3.1 derived file picker make it into the add fonts dialog until it was replaced in SP1 if my memory has the timing right. Despite using win32 widgets which had the correct theming, that didn't look native at all

There is no such thing as canonical “win32 widgets.” There have always been several different UI libraries even for win32. The original win32 styling you get with CreateWindow doesn’t support modern font rendering, high DPI, doesn’t work well with touch, is only software rendering, doesn’t support latest accessibility features, etc.

The newer stuff sits on top of DirectX.

The latest UI framework (XAML/WinUI) sits on top of a better rendering architecture (compositor) that itself wraps DirectX tech.

I guess one challenge with this is that old school Win32 doesn't really support anything resembling automatic / responsive layout. All controls are of a fixed size in a fixed pixel location. This means you can't for example change the default font, add margin or padding or do any other significant changes without essentially breaking all existing applications.

The ecosystem was never uniform. In the 95/2000 days there was a lot of 3.11 UI everywhere, in the 7/8 days a lot of XP UI. Office always had its own UI conventions, often being the playground where new ideas were tested.

It's not so much that microsoft let things go as it was taken from them. When computers became networked we needed ways of easily distributing applications across that network in secure, reliable and always up to date ways. Windows never had a good solution to that (not even today), because every install was fraught with peril, and every app had to roll its own update mechanism. Meanwhile the web was sandboxed and up to date by definition, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for networked software. Anything that could move to the web did move to the web, which opened the door for chromebooks, which in turn fragmented the OS market, which made it uneconomical for companies to invest in a windows native codebase. Microsoft could have stopped this had they leaned hard into the concept of an app store and sandboxing around 2000, and hadn't stumbled so badly when it came to extending windows to mobile.

I'm pretty sure that modernizing the entire windows UI doesn't change a thing for windows market share. But the reason to do it is not because it makes economic sense, it is because they should have pride in the products they make, and want them to be well-made.

> I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share.

I'm having a hard time believing that. While some Mac users who are used to a more integrated user experience might be deterred, I'm not sure that the os's ui esthetics really affect windows adoption. My feeling is that most people who use Windows do so because they're either (a) told to use it or (b) they choose to use it because it's the shortest path to doing what they want to do.

I'm sure Microsoft know this and understand the tradeoffs very well

What market share is left there to gain? Ok 17% Mac OS, maybe 5% would switch to Windows?

> I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share.

Big companies just love to jack around with Windows, and do things like prevent users from changing their desktop backgrounds (in the name of "security," of course), and Microsoft has always bent over backwards to give them the ability to do any stupid thing some corporate IT drone can think of, so they continue to be loved my companies around the globe.

There's a _fundamental_ difference in the way that Microsoft and Apple have approached making an operating system. One treats it like a layer of software in an entire stack that someone else owns and controls, and the other makes PERSONAL devices. And it shows.

And, of course, the Microsoft-slobbering trade press can't imagine a scenario where they don't try to prove that YOU should be running Windows because the numbers -- inflated by the Fortune 1000 -- says it's what "everyone" is running. Meanwhile, more than half the people I know now run NOT-Windows for their personal computing.

Let's break out the corporate purchases from sales data, and then let's talk about actual, personal market share, and whether better UI/UX would help Microsoft in a heads-up battle against macOS or ChromeOS.

For the first half I thought it was sarcasm.

> creates a very low bar for third parties

The bar for third parties was always nonexistent. That was precisely the advantage of Windows which permitted the boom of development for it in the 90s–2000s.

Holding Windows back from gaining on their 90+% 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

Their Office suite may have been internally consistent, but I did a bit of software for Windows 2000 (back when it was the latest version), and I found the UI of Windows (in general) inconsistent, scrollbars would e.g. have subtle difference between applications.

I ended up using Qt for my own work, as I couldn’t figure out what was the official / dominant style to follow.

All this, plus the fact that Win10 has become increasingly unstable for me in the last 6 months (random restarts, nasty performance problems with WSL2 etc.) that it simply isn't worth the money anymore, unless you have some apps that only run on widows (e.g. games :))

    I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share.

I hope you jest. Windows has far bigger problems than the uniformity of their UI - there's the whole forced update thing, the whole "we really need to spy on literally everything you do on our OS" approach, online advertisement built and integrated with the OS (based on the spying) ... these are the major issues that they need to fixed urgently if they wish to retain their userbase. Windows has been a continuing shitshow since Windows 8 ...

From MS' point of view I doubt it is worth thr squeeze. You have to consider that the average user and their grandma make very little revenue for them. They buy a license with their computer and that's mostly it. Pro users, companies are a big part of the Windows revenue and for them, backwards-compatibilty is the biggest sales point. I agree this is super bad and confusing for many users, but the majority of them probably never go past the latest design Win10 screens.

> yet theres no real alternative for most people

I just don't buy that. Everyone I've ever persuaded to buy a Mac or iOS device comes to prefer it to Windows in a couple of weeks, and I stop needing to fix something for them every other month.

This may explain why Microsoft have created so many email clients and none of them 100% work.

  * Microsoft Mail
  * Windows Messaging
  * Outlook Express
  * Microsoft Outlook
  * Windows Mail
  * Windows Live Mail
  * Mail.app

There are also Microsoft Entourage for Mac OS, few different apps for mobile, and at least two web clients, Hotmail and Outlook.com. Did I miss any?

>Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception.

I am not familiar with Windows APIs but I can see this be the truth if MS made it possible for developers to plug inside this dialogs, like a printer driver would plug soem GUI changes in the panels , changing this would break a lot of devices.

Additionally, this is all the more reason why Microsoft should think through before they release a new UI frameworks and instead of releazing and then shortly moving on to a new one. I do not really understand why this cannot be thought through to make it long-lasting without running into alleged backward compatibility issues.

>It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings.

Does logman not working anymore? If not, hasn't it been replaced by PS APIs?

I'm a TreeStyleTab user in Firefox with always >200 Tabs open. But I never got the idea of Tabs in Explorer (or Finder for that matter).

When I use multiple Explorer Views, most of the time I do it, to interact between them. This is not the case for websites.

So for drag and drop interactions, two windows always beat the drag, hover over the other tab until it catches my intend to switch to this tab, and drop it there workflow.

The same goes for copy and paste. Ctrl+c, alt+tab, ctrl+v. I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always.

Generalized tabs accros even different programs is an experiment that has been attempted a few years ago in a few insider builds, but has been quickly abandoned. IMO it was too complex from a UX pov, duplicated some of the use cases of virtual desktops, etc. Maybe had they tried tabs for single applications, it would have succeeded. In this alternate universe we may not have the new Windows Terminal program though (IIRC adding tabs specifically in console.exe was prevented because they were about to start this grand inter-program tab design instead, and Windows Terminal was started after the experiment failed)

It is a power user feature which most users won't will not appreciate. I am using Mac for about 7 years now, and almost never use tabs in Finder.

Wasn't RT just windows 8 with an ARM build target and win32 stuff removed so they could sell cheaper tablets?

So if you wanted an "unlocked" windows RT, couldn't you just have run windows 8?

It is more on the contrary. The registry is one of the most well-thought features of Windows.

Also there is nothing like "bloat". No process needs too loop around or smth like that, so there is literally no way to have a forgotten registry item slowing down your PC.

And last but not least: What are the alternatives? .plist config files like with Apple, scattering around the system?

If I remember correctly there was an internal effort at Microsoft to scrap the registry (Longhorn?) but they decided not to, and probably because a registry is actually a good idea and necessary to get something performant (compared to ini files).

The critique against the Windows registry stems from the Windows 95 days when the registry could become corrupt and repair or reinstall was necessary. However since then the registry works like a database, it has transaction logs and simultaneous writes are atomic. Registry is also strongly typed, not a bunch of strings. Registry can easily be backed up and restored.

> It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.

Do you have any evidence of this? I remember in the XP days the German c't computer magazine tested populating the registry with hundreds MBs of garbage and found no performance impact at all.

How is it worse than having config files scattered around in distro-specific locations?

As other comments point out, there is nothing wrong with the registry itself. On the other hand the editor (regedt) is terrible.

If you drop something, then you need some kind of replacement for that.

I don't see any alternative on where entire OS could be configured other than registry.

So true. Today I must explain to my mother that she needs to press a flat picture (not a button) of three horizontal bars in order to pull up a command list. The list won't be sorted by category, but by a designer or developer's perception of which commands are most used.

In the mid 90s, I could walk my 80-something-year-old grandfather through WordPerfect with ease: "File does basic file operations, like save or print. Edit is for editing, like copying and pasting."

Menu bars work because they're a great feature-discovery tool when done right--with verbs that describe the commands, and with functions grouped by category.

"Modern" UIs don't. Try to explain it: "So, the lines are called a hamburger menu, they're supposed to look like a list of commands. And you can press it, even though it's completely flat. Then you need read the list until you find the command you want."

The Mac GUI's great innovation was combining intuitive visual cues with an consistent, unintrusive, and always-on system for feature discovery (the menu bar).

That’s why I just use Just Perfection extension & remove the top bar. Then you just run budgie-panel or xfce4-panel w/ vala appmenu for the global menu bar on Gnome. Use xfce4 if you need it on 2 or more monitors though - Budgie only supports 1.

Better than KDE imo - you keep sane defaults, simpler configs, & consistent themes.

>[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.

The common example would be Dell/Synaptics adding their own tabs to the old Mouse system dialog.

I think the idea was quite sensible. Keeping the configuration in one place while supporting whatever features the manufacturers might have added e.g. touch pad gestures.

The only reason it's unfortunate is that the new dialogs don't support the old extension mechanism, forcing the old dialogs to be kept around.

Wow! There really are programs which plug into dialogs in this way? Well, that's a new level of compatibility hell. Thanks for the answer.

> If any program tweaks a dialog, say ...

Yes. They should not have allowed this at all in hindsight. Well, too late. :-)

They've made a mess, they should clean it up.

I get it, all practical evidence seems to be that they're completely incompetent and this is impossible and any attempts to clean it up will inexplicably make it worse, but the fact that's the state of affairs at a two trillion dollar company is absolutely ridiculous.

The updates/upgrades on Windows 10 were particularly bad- i was a late adopter and still ran into an unfixable black screen on startup. not good.

So decouple them. Microsoft has annual revenue of $143 billion. Their flagship product should not be a neglected mess.

Ah yes, and maintained almost seamless compatibility with the previous archs for a while.

It's not like they haven't tried it - Windows RT and Windows 10S have largely flopped. You could say this is because of the other changes trying to put the MS store as a required middle man, but both boil down to users rejecting Windows when it doesn't run all their existing software