There were some things that Windows 98 did better than the UIs of today, but overall I just don't agree that it was "excellent". I definitely wouldn't want to g

There were some things that Windows 98 did better than the UIs of today, but overall I just don't agree that it was "excellent". I definitely wouldn't want to go back to it, and here are a few reasons why: - Even purely from a UI perspective, I much prefer modern Chrome's flat and minimal UI over Internet Explorer 4, and I think most other people do too. At the time, Microsoft claimed that IE4 was an integral part of Windows 98, so I'm going to consider it as part of the Windows UI rather than just a standalone app :) - The taskbar doesn't scale very well, and once you get more than a dozen or so windows, each entry with the same icon becomes indistinguishable. This was particularly bad because browsers at the time didn't have tabs. As I type this, I have 14 tabs open in various browser windows, and this just wouldn't have fit in a Windows 98 style taskbar. Note that I consider the non-tabbed single document interface ("SDI") to be an integral part of the Windows UI here. Both SDI and MDI (multi-document interface) were part of Microsoft's UI guides, and MDI was even worse than SDI. - The Start menu also doesn't scale very well, and could get very deep, which confused users. It lacked a search function like Windows 10, Mac (via Spotlight) and most Linux DEs today have. - No support for virtual desktops, which Windows 10, Mac and Linux DEs today all have. - Network Neighborhood was slow af, and was confusing for users to configure. Apple's AirDrop has a much better UI for sharing files on a network. - Active Desktop. - At the time, Microsoft was experimenting with integrating the web with Windows, and one of the things they did was put hyperlinks all over the place. They even experimented with changing it so that desktop icons and icons in Windows Explorer were links, and this caused a lot of confusion due to the inconsistency between a single-click vs double-click. Some of the problems here are that we have much more computing power now, and (at least I) tend to keep more things open at a time. There were also numerous Internet UIs that Microsoft was experimenting with at the time (NN, AD, MSN, etc.) and many of them didn't work out.