What you describe about Finder is sadly similar with Windows Explorer. The tipping point was Explorer/Shell32 that came with Windows 2000. It remembered what yo

What you describe about Finder is sadly similar with Windows Explorer. The tipping point was Explorer/Shell32 that came with Windows 2000. It remembered what you personalised for every folder, it had HTML support, it could be customised including the toolbar and the sidebar(s). If you entered a URL it transformed to Internet Explorer. It worked like that from Windows 95 (with ShellUpdate that came for free with IE4, and already integrated known as Win98) and lasted until Windows ME and 2000. WinXP wasn't bad, but several UI decision were bad. And the trend continued with Vista that had a stupid bare bone Explorer that forgot too many settings all the time (lack of love, and the halted complete rewrite in C# that had to be scrapped, and the missing WinFS were probably the reason). Win7 is like Vista but misses the advanced search menu, making the local search even more useless, and WinFS was declared dead. The UI of Win8/10 sucks, though some former undocumented hidden features of Explorer/shell were integrated to the Ribbon-bar. The good thing about pre-Win10 you can replace Explorer.exe with your own favorite shell (file manager plus desktop in one exe). The cool thing about Win32 UI is that it has very good optimisation for low latency, as it had to run on very low spec 1980s PCs. You can interact with the UI even before the UI is rendered on screen. So you can open a menu and navigate around and do some action, all with the keyboard as fast as you want even if the UI is slower on your system. MS got it completely backwards with WinRuntime aka UniversalApp. Opening the start menu in Win10 takes 500ms or so and the lag is very annoying, and opening most apps shows even a opening animation to hide that it takes way to long to get a useable app - open the calc.exe in Win7 and compare it to opening the calc app in Win10 - what a vast difference, what a complete failure and a huge step backward. The best would be if a new MS manager would scrap the Win10 UI development incl UniversalAppFail (starting such an app takes more than 500ms wtf and shows a loading picture), and take the Win10 kernel and start development again taking the Windows 7 Shell/UI and for the Explorer take the Win 2000 or WinXP Explorer as base and start from there.