9 ms·

Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.

nolok 6y ago
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
- arethuza 6y ago
  That tablet interface also made it to the server version - which probably had the worst windows interface ever.
  - kjaftaedi 6y ago
    Personally I've always been slightly amazed that at no point in time did anyone at Microsoft think that making msn.com the default homepage for servers was a bad idea.
    - jychang 6y ago
      Hilariously, Microsoft production servers are also set to the MSN default homepage, even though most forests are firewalled off from the entire internet. So the homepage doesn't even load.
      - giantDinosaur 6y ago
        Not loading is surely preferable.
        netsharc 6y ago
        Didn't some ad server serving msn homepage managed to be exploited to serve malware to old IE versions. So the hapless admin who needs to download a file off the web (with no other browsers installed, and no firewall) would open IE and boom, exploit!
        deadwing0 6y ago
        https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/msn-home-page-drops-more-malware-via-malvertising/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/msn-ho... Is this what you're referring to?
    - nabla9 6y ago
      Personally I feel it's completely understandable. Microsoft has huge market power. It's hard to abandon software you are locked in. More importantly people who suffer from to those interfaces are not in position of power to make switch operating systems. Forcing them to eat what MS feeds them seems like good way to experiment. If experiment fails, you don't have to hurry and repair it.
      - nolok 6y ago
        I agree with you for desktop, but I think you missed the part where he said "for servers", as-in when you install windows server. The default homepage for it should be msdn or bing or whatever, but msn makes zero sense.
        Kwpolska 6y ago
        How many people actually care about a default homepage in IE in Windows Server? And is it worth the time and effort to make that setting dependent on the SKU?
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      You can bet your pants there were legions hair-triggered to resign over this. Weak!
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  There’s always that one %#{£ who says something like: I actually really liked that. Edit: took me way too many brain-cycles to work out the emphasis in this comment.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Sadly the current start menu is far from normal. Normal would a simple menuized view of a folder hierarchy, what we have is some abomination tied into the Windows Store in mysterious ways that cause it to break under a wide variety of circumstances in such a way that an in-place reinstall is the only sure-fire fix.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    I have never been convinced with the folder hierarchy in start menus. Programs get installed in lot of places, what's the mapping between the menu items and the "real" location then ? Linux got this standard arbitrary menu categories thing but in the end people use menus to launch a program so I believe a simple A-Z list with a search box should be enough. Throwing app store stuff in there is not okay though (as in the current windows situation and the previous ubuntu affiliate links in the dash bar).
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      It isn't the relationship between the folder structure presented in the start menu and any actual physical location that's the most valuable part (though with portable applications they can be one and the same!), what's important is the simplicity of it and that the user can easily manipulate it with nothing but a file browser.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      Huh? The start menu folder hierarchy was always its own thing. The start menu folders didn't have any relationship to where anything is installed.
  - Frenchgeek 6y ago
    When I first saw win10's start menu, I promptly removed the tiles (ads, really) as useless fluff then promptly vowed to do everything I can to never use it. My desktop is a mess now, but one of my own doing. (You can imagine what my reaction was when edgy auto-started after an update to tell me the over-engineered Firefox downloader was now "better" than ever. I had to kill the process in order to not see the mandatory new features tour. It did it again after the recent update to make sure I hate it as much as possible.)
- iagovar 6y ago
  Reactos mantains that look&feel, but it's not stable yet and wonder if will ever be.
- slim 6y ago
  stupidest move ever. for a while linux was more familiar to windows users than windows. ballmer got fired for that.
- blauditore 6y ago
  To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now happy with Windows 10. It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
  - cheschire 6y ago
    It didn't help that the initial versions had no button at all and expected the user to know to click in the corner of the screen.
  - washadjeffmad 6y ago
    Another example was GNOME 2.32 to GNOME Shell, which Microsoft later attempted to emulate in 8.x, though with the major conveniences removed - namely, a "classic" fallback mode. Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness. I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.
    - tifadg1 6y ago
      Well I for one do have multiple complains, but I'm impartial now to it's success having switched to KDE years ago. If something happened to KDE I'd switch to Cinnamon. If something happened yet again, I'd continue my search for a desktop-focused DE, but gnome would be the last resort (I do say that as someone who's otherwise quite committed to redhat)
  - MisterTea 6y ago
    > To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that. > A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. > It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
- Joeri 6y ago
  The frustrating part is that when you actually try to use windows 10 on a tablet in tablet mode you find out very quickly how bad it is as a tablet os because of a lot of paper cuts. That is microsoft in a nut shell: lack of following through. Take for example the fluent design, which by itself is a good design, but after three years is still not consistently applied in windows, let alone microsoft’s first party apps. Meanwhile apple has redesigned all of the ui of the os and all first party apps, in one year. That is what following through looks like. It is embarrassing for microsoft how much better apple is at rolling out design changes.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Yup, but GNOME3 is really the best tablet experience around (unless you really need proprietary on-device "apps", as with Android/iPadOS). The Activities overview screen is extremely intuituve and way better than whatever the Windows 8 folks came up with, and the GUI widgets are touch-ready in every GNOME-native app.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Arguably Microsoft would have had more time/energy to devote to bringing first party apps/components to Fluent Design if it didn't keep doing 270 degree turns in Windows 8. It's hard to follow through when customers keep backseat driving and yelling at you to swerve. (Whether or not those were the right decisions, and I'm not implying that listening to customers is necessarily a bad thing, just that you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't complain that Microsoft didn't follow through on the straight path when you complain that they needed to swerve in the first place.)
- overcast 6y ago
  What's worse is that MacOS already started down that path. Just look at Big Sur with all of the bullshit widgets and crap now. How I loathe widgets.
Tade0 6y ago
To me the omnibox is the only way I know how access certain settings. I have no idea where they are located in this maze of categories and subcategories.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  Amen! The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. For me, without the OmniBox Windows would be unusable by now. I consider Windows 2000 to be peak Windows UX. It was all downhill from there.
  - thatlongthrow1 6y ago
    Me, windows 7: *turns off as much indexing and search rubbish as possible. Me, windows 10: "Oh please search box deliver me the local result I need, without your knowledge I would be lost in this wasteland of cobbled together UI design."
- formercoder 6y ago
  Yeah. Before recently switching to windows I’d been on Mac for 10+ years. The latter ~5 of which I’d basically forgotten the dock existed and just used Alfred / command space to type an applications name and launch it. Now on Windows I just use Windows Q and type. I honestly don’t know the last time I used a folder hierarchy.
- loco5niner 6y ago
  Omnibox? What is this (other than the chrome address bar)?
szatkus 6y ago
Only if you use just a mouse. Usually I'll just hit a windows key, type a keyword related to whatever I'm looking for and it's there.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Sometimes... if you put in just the right number of characters so it doesn't search the web instead... but then, it is often the first result even! No, wait, it moved just before I clicked it, fuck.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    And they keep screwing with the right registry incantation to turn off the web search crap. If you're on 2004, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows, DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = DWORD(1) If you're on 1909, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search CortanaConsent = DWORD(0), and BingSearchEnabled = DWORD(0)
lvs 6y ago
I can't wait for the end of this era of whitespace obsession. I'm convinced it was never about design aesthetic, but just a ploy to expand the scrolling distance for legitimate page content within which one can place more advertising.
tgb 6y ago
System settings were easiest in the Vista/7 era. Window Key+"sound" brought up sound settings, so you didn't need to know where they were placed in control panel. Now in Windows 10, doing the same brings up "Sound settings" which is a stripped-down settings bar barely more than a master volume setting. The actual sound settings are hidden in control panel, which doesn't come up when searching for 'sound'. This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook.
- Svperstar 6y ago
  >This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook. Search in Windows 10 is garbage. I install Everything on ever y PC I use for home or work and it does wonders: https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  In Windows 10 if I search for "sound" I see "Sound Control Panel" as the second or third option depending on which machine I tried. Accounts on both machines are opt-in "Dev Mode" so that may influence things, I believe "Dev Mode" turns on more old Control Panel items in search, as that is Microsoft's "Power User" opt-in. Inside the Sound Settings I see almost all of the controls I expect to see from the Sound Control Panel, though they are broken into multiple pages in the way that the old Control Panel was broken into tabs. A lot of the Sound Control Panel is the Devices list, and there are multiple links to the "Manage Sound Devices" page that I see in Sound Settings. The link to the app-specific volume mixer is under Advanced Settings and labeled about you would expect "App volume and device preferences". If that weren't enough I also see on Sound Settings as the second item down under "Related Settings" is "Sound Control Panel" to get back to the one you hoped for if you wind up searching and pulled up the wrong one from the one you preferred. (I don't think that is a Dev Mode thing and always is there.) (Bonus: the best app-specific volume mixer in Windows 10 is the Audio widget in the modern multi-widget Xbox Game Bar which you pull up with Win+G or the Xbox "Home" button on Xbox controllers. If you've never used the Xbox Game Bar or remember only a flat single bar without a variety of widget windows, trying the new Xbox Game Bar is a good idea, even for people that don't necessarily use Windows for gaming some of the Widgets like Audio and Performance are generally useful and faster or as fast to access than their Task Manager or Settings equivalents. Of course, likely to be disabled by group policy on Enterprise systems; it's unfortunate when Power User tools are Gaming focused/branded.)
dheera 6y ago
This webapp trapped my mouse inside the VM. How is that possible? I didn't realize you could trap the user's mouse with (HTML+JS)5.
sizzle 6y ago
Apple's system settings layout remains largely unchanged and is a case study on usable design and function over form. It's a joy to use after experiencing Windows control panel hell and now metro/fabric UI with everything looking like a large rectangular solid color filled button.

nolok 6y ago

You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....

arethuza 6y ago
That tablet interface also made it to the server version - which probably had the worst windows interface ever.
- kjaftaedi 6y ago
  Personally I've always been slightly amazed that at no point in time did anyone at Microsoft think that making msn.com the default homepage for servers was a bad idea.
  - jychang 6y ago
    Hilariously, Microsoft production servers are also set to the MSN default homepage, even though most forests are firewalled off from the entire internet. So the homepage doesn't even load.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
      Not loading is surely preferable.
      - netsharc 6y ago
        Didn't some ad server serving msn homepage managed to be exploited to serve malware to old IE versions. So the hapless admin who needs to download a file off the web (with no other browsers installed, and no firewall) would open IE and boom, exploit!
        deadwing0 6y ago
        https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/msn-home-page-drops-more-malware-via-malvertising/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/msn-ho... Is this what you're referring to?
  - nabla9 6y ago
    Personally I feel it's completely understandable. Microsoft has huge market power. It's hard to abandon software you are locked in. More importantly people who suffer from to those interfaces are not in position of power to make switch operating systems. Forcing them to eat what MS feeds them seems like good way to experiment. If experiment fails, you don't have to hurry and repair it.
    - nolok 6y ago
      I agree with you for desktop, but I think you missed the part where he said "for servers", as-in when you install windows server. The default homepage for it should be msdn or bing or whatever, but msn makes zero sense.
      - Kwpolska 6y ago
        How many people actually care about a default homepage in IE in Windows Server? And is it worth the time and effort to make that setting dependent on the SKU?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    You can bet your pants there were legions hair-triggered to resign over this. Weak!
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
There’s always that one %#{£ who says something like: I actually really liked that. Edit: took me way too many brain-cycles to work out the emphasis in this comment.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Sadly the current start menu is far from normal. Normal would a simple menuized view of a folder hierarchy, what we have is some abomination tied into the Windows Store in mysterious ways that cause it to break under a wide variety of circumstances in such a way that an in-place reinstall is the only sure-fire fix.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I have never been convinced with the folder hierarchy in start menus. Programs get installed in lot of places, what's the mapping between the menu items and the "real" location then ? Linux got this standard arbitrary menu categories thing but in the end people use menus to launch a program so I believe a simple A-Z list with a search box should be enough. Throwing app store stuff in there is not okay though (as in the current windows situation and the previous ubuntu affiliate links in the dash bar).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    It isn't the relationship between the folder structure presented in the start menu and any actual physical location that's the most valuable part (though with portable applications they can be one and the same!), what's important is the simplicity of it and that the user can easily manipulate it with nothing but a file browser.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    Huh? The start menu folder hierarchy was always its own thing. The start menu folders didn't have any relationship to where anything is installed.
- Frenchgeek 6y ago
  When I first saw win10's start menu, I promptly removed the tiles (ads, really) as useless fluff then promptly vowed to do everything I can to never use it. My desktop is a mess now, but one of my own doing. (You can imagine what my reaction was when edgy auto-started after an update to tell me the over-engineered Firefox downloader was now "better" than ever. I had to kill the process in order to not see the mandatory new features tour. It did it again after the recent update to make sure I hate it as much as possible.)
iagovar 6y ago
Reactos mantains that look&feel, but it's not stable yet and wonder if will ever be.
slim 6y ago
stupidest move ever. for a while linux was more familiar to windows users than windows. ballmer got fired for that.
blauditore 6y ago
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now happy with Windows 10. It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
- cheschire 6y ago
  It didn't help that the initial versions had no button at all and expected the user to know to click in the corner of the screen.
- washadjeffmad 6y ago
  Another example was GNOME 2.32 to GNOME Shell, which Microsoft later attempted to emulate in 8.x, though with the major conveniences removed - namely, a "classic" fallback mode. Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness. I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.
  - tifadg1 6y ago
    Well I for one do have multiple complains, but I'm impartial now to it's success having switched to KDE years ago. If something happened to KDE I'd switch to Cinnamon. If something happened yet again, I'd continue my search for a desktop-focused DE, but gnome would be the last resort (I do say that as someone who's otherwise quite committed to redhat)
- MisterTea 6y ago
  > To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that. > A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. > It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
Joeri 6y ago
The frustrating part is that when you actually try to use windows 10 on a tablet in tablet mode you find out very quickly how bad it is as a tablet os because of a lot of paper cuts. That is microsoft in a nut shell: lack of following through. Take for example the fluent design, which by itself is a good design, but after three years is still not consistently applied in windows, let alone microsoft’s first party apps. Meanwhile apple has redesigned all of the ui of the os and all first party apps, in one year. That is what following through looks like. It is embarrassing for microsoft how much better apple is at rolling out design changes.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Yup, but GNOME3 is really the best tablet experience around (unless you really need proprietary on-device "apps", as with Android/iPadOS). The Activities overview screen is extremely intuituve and way better than whatever the Windows 8 folks came up with, and the GUI widgets are touch-ready in every GNOME-native app.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Arguably Microsoft would have had more time/energy to devote to bringing first party apps/components to Fluent Design if it didn't keep doing 270 degree turns in Windows 8. It's hard to follow through when customers keep backseat driving and yelling at you to swerve. (Whether or not those were the right decisions, and I'm not implying that listening to customers is necessarily a bad thing, just that you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't complain that Microsoft didn't follow through on the straight path when you complain that they needed to swerve in the first place.)
overcast 6y ago
What's worse is that MacOS already started down that path. Just look at Big Sur with all of the bullshit widgets and crap now. How I loathe widgets.

Tade0 6y ago

To me the omnibox is the only way I know how access certain settings. I have no idea where they are located in this maze of categories and subcategories.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
Amen! The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. For me, without the OmniBox Windows would be unusable by now. I consider Windows 2000 to be peak Windows UX. It was all downhill from there.
- thatlongthrow1 6y ago
  Me, windows 7: *turns off as much indexing and search rubbish as possible. Me, windows 10: "Oh please search box deliver me the local result I need, without your knowledge I would be lost in this wasteland of cobbled together UI design."
formercoder 6y ago
Yeah. Before recently switching to windows I’d been on Mac for 10+ years. The latter ~5 of which I’d basically forgotten the dock existed and just used Alfred / command space to type an applications name and launch it. Now on Windows I just use Windows Q and type. I honestly don’t know the last time I used a folder hierarchy.
loco5niner 6y ago
Omnibox? What is this (other than the chrome address bar)?

szatkus 6y ago

Only if you use just a mouse. Usually I'll just hit a windows key, type a keyword related to whatever I'm looking for and it's there.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Sometimes... if you put in just the right number of characters so it doesn't search the web instead... but then, it is often the first result even! No, wait, it moved just before I clicked it, fuck.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  And they keep screwing with the right registry incantation to turn off the web search crap. If you're on 2004, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows, DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = DWORD(1) If you're on 1909, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search CortanaConsent = DWORD(0), and BingSearchEnabled = DWORD(0)

lvs 6y ago

I can't wait for the end of this era of whitespace obsession. I'm convinced it was never about design aesthetic, but just a ploy to expand the scrolling distance for legitimate page content within which one can place more advertising.

tgb 6y ago

System settings were easiest in the Vista/7 era. Window Key+"sound" brought up sound settings, so you didn't need to know where they were placed in control panel. Now in Windows 10, doing the same brings up "Sound settings" which is a stripped-down settings bar barely more than a master volume setting. The actual sound settings are hidden in control panel, which doesn't come up when searching for 'sound'. This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook.

Svperstar 6y ago
>This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook. Search in Windows 10 is garbage. I install Everything on ever y PC I use for home or work and it does wonders: https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WorldMaker 6y ago
In Windows 10 if I search for "sound" I see "Sound Control Panel" as the second or third option depending on which machine I tried. Accounts on both machines are opt-in "Dev Mode" so that may influence things, I believe "Dev Mode" turns on more old Control Panel items in search, as that is Microsoft's "Power User" opt-in. Inside the Sound Settings I see almost all of the controls I expect to see from the Sound Control Panel, though they are broken into multiple pages in the way that the old Control Panel was broken into tabs. A lot of the Sound Control Panel is the Devices list, and there are multiple links to the "Manage Sound Devices" page that I see in Sound Settings. The link to the app-specific volume mixer is under Advanced Settings and labeled about you would expect "App volume and device preferences". If that weren't enough I also see on Sound Settings as the second item down under "Related Settings" is "Sound Control Panel" to get back to the one you hoped for if you wind up searching and pulled up the wrong one from the one you preferred. (I don't think that is a Dev Mode thing and always is there.) (Bonus: the best app-specific volume mixer in Windows 10 is the Audio widget in the modern multi-widget Xbox Game Bar which you pull up with Win+G or the Xbox "Home" button on Xbox controllers. If you've never used the Xbox Game Bar or remember only a flat single bar without a variety of widget windows, trying the new Xbox Game Bar is a good idea, even for people that don't necessarily use Windows for gaming some of the Widgets like Audio and Performance are generally useful and faster or as fast to access than their Task Manager or Settings equivalents. Of course, likely to be disabled by group policy on Enterprise systems; it's unfortunate when Power User tools are Gaming focused/branded.)

dheera 6y ago

This webapp trapped my mouse inside the VM. How is that possible? I didn't realize you could trap the user's mouse with (HTML+JS)5.

sizzle 6y ago

Apple's system settings layout remains largely unchanged and is a case study on usable design and function over form. It's a joy to use after experiencing Windows control panel hell and now metro/fabric UI with everything looking like a large rectangular solid color filled button.