Windows 95 (and later) always seemed to just miss the mark: they added new things but were just so close to having something that would work much better. It wa

Windows 95 (and later) always seemed to just miss the mark: they added new things but were just so close to having something that would work much better. It was as if they saw useful features to add from other systems but only copied what they could see without really understanding the behaviors that needed to be copied too. Examples... The original Start menu was in a corner of the screen but without the crucial zero pixels of separation from the physical corner, turning what could have been a massive target into a tiny one. (Fixed in XP though.) Menus were sluggish as hell to open, and they lacked hysteresis to make diagonal traversal a lot easier. Also, there was no consideration for how to handle a task that might take awhile, such as locating the names and icons of dozens of items; the menu would not show anything, you’d just wait. Sadly they were experts at efficiently making menus go away so one accidental mouse movement and you start all over. The ordering of frame buttons, “minimize, maximize, close”, on Windows does not clearly separate the most-dangerous action from the least-dangerous action, nor are the actions ordered by similarity. Instead, a very common action on Windows (“Maximize”) is right next to the most dangerous and polar opposite action (“Blow This Away Forever”), with zero pixels of separation. On the Mac, the order is “close, minimize, maximize”: if you mis-hit Minimize on a Mac while moving toward Close, the window will still go away (more or less what you wanted) instead of becoming gigantic and still visible (polar opposite). Also, on a Mac there is significant pixel space between the distinct options so it is harder to mis-click. The ordering of dialog buttons, such as “OK, Cancel”, meant that it was not possible for memory to take over. In some dialogs “OK” was in the position that Cancel would be in, in others it wasn’t. Also, Windows tended to have very generic names (Yes, No, Cancel), probably because entire APIs for opening messages had only those options; this required reading every word of a long-winded message to understand the options, rather than just clicking something obvious like Save. Windows 95+ tend to add hierarchy in lots of places that don’t benefit at all from hierarchy. I hate having to remember some obscure vendor’s name so I can find “Unnecessary Company Name, Inc. >> Unnecessary Product Suite Name >> App Name” in a menu for example, when “App Name” in a flat list is the only sensible option. (Fortunately, Search was a reasonable way to avoid this. Until it became slow and couldn’t actually find things that clearly exist.)