21 ms·

State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

501 points by spideymans 5y ago

ToFab123 5y ago
Win 3.1 File Open Dialog can be found in Windows 11 https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocking_that_windows_31_file_open_dialog/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocki...
- aasasd 5y ago
  Afaik the Win3 file dialog gets called up by some old apps that use old APIs. I think I even ran into it in Wine. The analog in Unix apps are GTK's file dialogs, which always look jarring and out-of-place anywhere other than Gnome (and maybe XFCE and KDE, dunno)—making me feel like I stepped into 90s Unix with those Motif-derived concrete slabs. Plus they're un-integrated with non-Linux OSes, missing features. And the dialogs keep being dragged around by GTK apps—open Gimp on Mac or Windows and there you go: GTK dialogs.
nxc18 5y ago
I find it hilarious that even in such a comprehensive post, the author missed some: Some apps are now shipping with “Fluent but inconsistently round”, mostly the ones that use WinUI. Maps is a good example where this is noticeable. You can see some screenshots in link below. https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/3767 https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/3767
adzm 5y ago
What I want to know is how can I get that Betta fish on my boot screen!
aasasd 5y ago
In Win7's control panel I counted ten different kinds of windows—in only MS' own sections, no third-parties (who tend to make the problem worse). Some of navigational widgets weren't used anywhere in the remainder of the OS.
akersten 5y ago
I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be. All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.
- api 5y ago
  Why has there been such a push to nerf UIs? Is it just trying to ape mobile? Mobile UIs are more basic because the screen is so damn small and the use case is more casual.
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    Most use cases for Windows are casual. I don't want to hazard a guess but I'd say easily more than 70% of Windows users may be basic? The type to not go particularly deep into the options and explore these menus and instead leave it up to the experts or get systems configured for them For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough
    - XorNot 5y ago
      For casual users these UIs are catastrophic. Casual users just straight don't change settings - they tend to live with the most insane easily fixable problems. Whereas for me, person who has to give phone support, every version of Windows has made important settings harder to get too, which means I can't muscle memory train casual users about what setting they need to review if the problem recurs. The new UIs are all attempted flash over substance, and idiom breaking - buttons and interactive controls are not clearly highlighted and information density is low.
cutchin 5y ago
I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform. But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state. I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix. With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- paavohtl 5y ago
  As far as I know Project Reunion is not really a UI framework - it's more about refactoring Windows APIs into individual libraries which can be used across different OS versions. This should enable apps targeting all versions of Windows 10 to use the latest stuff, in a similar fashion to polyfills in browsers. This is probably to encourage developers to build software using the new Windows 10 APIs. Which is something they definitely have a problem with - I've been using Windows 10 quite heavily since the first beta and I don't think I've ever seen or used a third party Windows 10 (fluent / modern / metro) application.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    It is a bit more than that, and I bet with Windows 11 announcement we will get a more clear picture on it. It is also a way to bring into Win32 side most of the API that really matter on the UWP side of the fence, most likely (although they are yet to confirm this) as migration path to UWP developers. .NET Native, C++/CX are pretty much dead, and C++/WinRT keeps missing many of the tooling available on C++/CX for XAML applications. So I expect them to migrate the APIs into an OS version independent layer, and then give the mercy shot on UWP apps.
dstaley 5y ago
I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps. [1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.
- aasasd 5y ago
  > retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago I think I've seen computers with more uninterrupted uptime than that, even if servers. Or at least approaching this figure. Perhaps you meant ‘quarter of a millennium’ or something like that.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.
    - aasasd 5y ago
      https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/ https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html
      - Stratoscope 5y ago
vsskanth 5y ago
How is MacOS able to maintain such a consistent UI even with massive changes in their design language ? Is Windows UI not a separate layer or something that they can update ? Or is it that the UI elements somehow get baked into the program at the time you build it, so if you didn't update you are just stuck with that particular version of UI you built the program ?
- trnglina 5y ago
  Built-in Windows controls, like buttons, scroll bars, etc. are updated with each system release. However, they are relatively inflexible, and no one uses WinApi anyway, so most frameworks and apps build their own components, with varying dedication to emulating the "native" style. Built-in controls also don't perform much in the way of layout (I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions?) so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't. My guess is MacOS's consistency comes from some combination of developer incentives, and UI toolkit design.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    > I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions? so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't. I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.
    - freeone3000 5y ago
      Which is the "native" API - win32, MFC/ATL, Form builder, WPF, or MAUI? If you're dealing with HWNDs directly, it's either win32 or MFC/ATL, but those haven't been touched in tens of years in favor of the current .NET APIs.
    - 5y ago
zamadatix 5y ago
I don't think the Fluent+Metro stuff is so different as to be a real consistency issue. Certainly minor inconsistencies that can be easily pointed out in a list but little that makes a typical user think "this is a completely different thing I'm using". The rest of the "old" stuff seems to have been made visually consistent in the 7 era even if the tools themselves originated from different eras with most gaining high DPI support and following the newer theming, again not a consistency issue in itself. There are a few REALLY old dialogs called by ODBC and maybe some others but I can't think of any you run into unless you're intentionally looking to run old software that will call them. So technically 3 but really 2 really noticeable UI environments in day to day. I'm worried with 11 it'll be a repeat of Windows 10 where at the start you're constantly using "yet another UI". At this point it's nearly gotten decent to the point if you aren't a sysadmin (MMC, regedit, task manager, advanced control panel items not nowadays part of Settings) you rarely run into the "old" style stuff with the one exception of File Explorer. Hopefully it doesn't take another 6 years to be saying that about Fluent/Metro stuff being updated to match 11's new look.
elktea 5y ago
speaking of UI inconsistencies - why did the author of this page thing it was a good idea to hijack my page up/down buttons. come on man.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  I really disliked the experience of trying to read that page so much I just chose not to read it. What a surprisingly awful experience - I'd really encourage the author to remove that.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Not just a terrible idea, but it was completely unnecessary. The highjacked PgUp/Dn keys scroll the screenshot galleries horizontally, but so do the left and right arrow keys just like in other image galleries. It did remind me to try a pair of browser shortcuts that I haven't used in probably ten years: Space and Shift+Space. They work!
- Boomerchick 5y ago
  The irony.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I think it's caused by the stock WordPress image gallery widget. I've noticed the same issue in a KDE blog[1] also built with WordPress. [1]: https://pointieststick.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-kde-plasma-5-22-arrives-but-i-bet-youll-want-5-23-once-i-show-you-this/ https://pointieststick.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-kde-plasm...
curiousmindz 5y ago
This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windows 10.
- jolux 5y ago
  As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.
  - qball 5y ago
    >I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets. Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine. They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty. No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Windows 10 lacked a cohesive vision for the UI.
causality0 5y ago
I don't think Microsoft has been truly interested in improving the Windows experience in a long time. I mean, surely if they cared about us you'd be able to right-click on any Notification icon and hit "always show icon and notifications" without having to open two menus to get to that option. It's been a pain in my ass for twenty years.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please? I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them. Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey. Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime. I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible. I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows. Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced. Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications. Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off. For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I mostly hate settings in Windows 10 after 15 years of OSX, which are very inconsistent.
user3939382 5y ago
Sorry for the tangent but: I get really nostalgic looking at the Windows 3.1 icons. I remember using moreicons.dll for shortcuts so long ago that they didn't look out of place. Almost everyone can relate to hearing a song, or a smell, that takes you back to a different time in society and your life, but it's weird to get it from a computer UI. I think it may happen for me because computing has always been such a big part of my life, even since early childhood.
overgard 5y ago
The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  TBH I don't really see how the Settings app is an embarrassment at this point in time. This was definitely true in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 versions, but with the leaps and bounds it's made since, I feel like 'settings app suxx' is a meme that has overstayed its welcome.
  - overgard 5y ago
    I don't sit around configuring my machine so I can't really say if it's gotten better, but I know the past 5 years have taught me too look anywhere but there. There's never been a good reason to have two different overlapping configuration apps.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    I do not have much to do with windows these days, but if you try to cange advanced network interface settings or audio settings beyond selecting a single input, you stil need to find the link to the old panel hidden somewhere. Also, good luck changing WiFi settings from the fluid menu. And lastly, while it always stays responsive, control of the background processes is also lacking. I spent quite some time restarting the download of a system language, just because I started it while having DNS issues (and to fix those... see above). I personally don't mind the older designs being mixed in, especially since most of them look good enough with the updated buttons, but the settings panel is, in its current state, still a sidegrade at best.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    I've used it fairly recently and it still has only the absolutely most common settings you'd want to change. 90% of the settings are still in the control panel. It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.
neelc 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be touched very easily without breaking compatibility, And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect. While desktop Linux/BSD isn't exactly well known for it's UIs, I found GNOME 3/40 to be more consistent UI-wise than Windows 10, being a user of GNOME 3 on FreeBSD at home (which I am typing this comment from), and helping port GNOME 40, while (unsurprisingly) using Windows 10 at $DAYJOB. But then GNOME, KDE, Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.
- meowkit 5y ago
  I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
  - Solocomplex 5y ago
    They tried modernizing with Windows RT, which was actually very smooth and functional if it wasn't so locked down.
    - cheschire 5y ago
      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?
      - qball 5y ago
        >win32 stuff removed Win32 was not removed from Windows RT, but your access to it (if your name wasn't "Microsoft"; because that low-level access was reportedly how they got Office on it) was. And because of Secure Boot, which (unlike x86, for now) is mandated enabled for Windows on ARM systems, you had to wait for an unpatchable security hole in the booting process (which, while it exists, wasn't relevant until past the end of the Surface RT's lifecycle), you couldn't run full Windows 8 or a tablet-first Linux distro.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Seems like there used to more open criticism and suggested improvements of Microsoft Windows on the internet/web. When the company bought out Mark Russinovich that quelled some of it. There was also a website called annoyances.org. Anyone know why it disappeared. This is the last record of it I could find in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20121222074911/http://www.annoyances.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121222074911/http://www.annoya...
dcl 5y ago
It's not just the UI that's inconsistent, it's that the different UI layers can actually present contradictory information. https://i.imgur.com/oNxlUzv.png https://i.imgur.com/oNxlUzv.png
podunkPDX 5y ago
I have so many irritants in the experience of using windows professionally, that I’m not going to waste time discussing it. I will leave you with one observation though. For any given text box in Windows, I have found that CTRL-A may or may not Select All.
tomaszs 5y ago
Funnily as a design developer, i switch off all UI enhancements because they slow down the system. So my system looks almost like Windows 95 confusing people. I think the inconsistency is the price of having a system with so many features. I rather have them than have consistent Windows. Moreover, sometimes updating UI does not go as planned. A regular calculator started like a breeze. After redesigning it in Windows 10 it takes several seconds to load. It is not a time worth spending if you add 2 plus 2. To sum it up, consistent UI is great. But if it comes to my OS i don't care about it too much. More about the speed.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  I remember doing this with my Intel Atom netbook because it had the processing power of a baked potato, but with any modern system (something made in the last 8 years) with GPU acceleration, does it matter? I haven't noticed much of a difference in my Thinkpad with a fourth generation i5. Which is the oldest machine I have Windows installed on.
KORraN 5y ago
Interesting read. There's also "State of the Windows, part 2: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?": https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/state-of-the-windows-part-2-did-windows-10-slow-down-with-each-feature-update/ https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/state-of-the-windo...
EdSchouten 5y ago
I know that Windows Vista still had some Windows 3.x UI elements included. For example, the file picker dialog you’d get when installing a font would be a pretty ancient one. Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime? Screenshot found online (from XP): https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/35b17bed9c542383/faq_xp_winzip_5.gif https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/35b17bed9c542383/faq_xp_winz...
- muterad_murilax 5y ago
  > Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime? It's been updated. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553728
dang 5y ago
Similar thread from earlier today: There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553108 - June 2021 (125 comments)
TrianguloY 5y ago
I will always find it funny that you can use the windows 95 alt+tab switcher by: - Pressing alt (don't release) - Pressing altgr - Releasing altgr - Pressing tab
- whoopdedo 5y ago
  While experimenting with this I also discovered another unexpected quirk or the switcher. AltGr+Tab makes it "sticky". Also, I realized that despite being initially liking the beautiful 3D animated Win+Tab switcher when it was introduced in Vista, I never use it anymore.
albanread 5y ago
If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.
bitL 5y ago
I absolutely hate that if I open control panel, I can only focus on a single thing instead of having multiple windows open. My 64-core PC is not a smartphone, thank you very much!
- bruce343434 5y ago
  yes! modern UI feels so "trapped".
TonyTrapp 5y ago
One more thing missing in the list: MDI (multiple document interface) child windows are styled with Aero basic (i.e. without glass styling) frames, which really look rather ugly when embedded into a Window with a Windows 10 frame.
tgtweak 5y ago
I kind of hate how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to find a familiar management ui in windows today. I find myself using run commands to bring up these UIs more and more. It would be an acceptable tradeoff if these new interfaces added more functionality or visibility but it seems they're just trying to move to the new settings ux and not thinking about adding better function. Try adding a new local user account to latest windows, compare the functionality in new the network interface settings page vs the legacy adapter properties prompt. Seems most of the "this just works" stuff that I respect is from windows 2000 and the NT team. Wish Microsoft would head back that way with a nod to modern usability instead of dumbing things down and worse: changing it every release.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Windows has been on this road for a long time. I did some work on Windows servers in the XP era and it was a continuous hassle that the menus were always different in NT 4, Win 2k, Xp, Vista, and all the different versions of Windows server. Contrast that to command-line admin on Linux that stays the same or the perpetually busted Linux admin GUIs that should just be taken behind the woodshed and shot.
stephc_int13 5y ago
The sad part is that old win32 UI from the win95 era, rendered with a modern style, are the most useable and nicer looking, in my opinion.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Metro/fluent apps always look "broken" to me. Like someone forgot to add styling and that's why a bunch of stuff ends up with some kind of default 3px solid black border. Transient popups (e.g. drop-downs) have some kind of shadow but it just looks weird and broken. Clicking on "cards" (I believe that's what they're called, e.g. a program in the new software manager) animates them but it just looks completely broken and blurry. Windows are resizable but in most cases it seems like the app isn't using an layout, so the contents don't adjust to match. It all feels a lot like a broken webpage in a standalone window. Including no/bad error handling, infinitely hanging indeterminate progress displays, lack of keyboard usability etc. That being said the Windows 10 Win32 styling looks horrendous to me as well. Like BS_FLAT in Windows XP, it never looked good, not in 2005, not in 2021.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    Same. It just doesn't work for my brain. We're looking at pixels on a screen so you need to somehow trick the brain into registering this as an interface and the metro/fluent ones completely fail in this regard. I see something more like a dense information sheet than an interactive interface. Technically it seems broken too. There was a bug in the calculator app where one button was off by 1 pixel. It boggles the mind to imagine how that kind of thing is possible.
  - tgtweak 5y ago
    If did not age well, but it came out a long time ago.
didymospl 5y ago
Semi-related: if you enjoy classic Windows UI and feel like going to a nostalgia trip there's a great little game which will make you feel it's the turn of the millennium again - Progressbar95. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its creators in any way, just wanted to share some fun.
baxuz 5y ago
Don't forget the Windows Vista installer.
PaulHoule 5y ago
The inconsistency doesn’t bother me so much as a lack of immediate responsiveness when I start a program. Sometimes I can wait 30 seconds after clicking on the menu before there is visual indication that the program is really loading. In that time I don’t know if I should click again, reboot the computer, walk away for 5 minutes for the services to settle, or start diagnosing the problem and take remedial action. Part of a ‘computer users bill of rights’ is getting rid of all hourglasses and spinners and always having clear visual indication that progress is being made.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect. Opportunities here.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale. What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait? One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout. If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      there was a contravariant scheme where web became chromeless, everything was ultra cute, flat and abstracted away while the web became more and more sophisticated (js loading, cdn, reactive/components) too back in the days you had more information about the technical details of browsing (and prior to that, some browser exposed GC/ram use as a toolbar button)
PaulHoule 5y ago
I think the tray and notification system is cruel. When I was a kid I saw other kids torment a horse by holding a hand up, getting the horse to turn away, then slapping the horse with the other hand. The tray is always popping up notifications that tell me to click on them but clicking on them does nothing. The notification often covers the UI elements that I need to respond to the notification. There is no way to clear the notification except to wait for the notification to be cleared. It’s cruel, and even more cruel that if the notification isn’t just actively in the way of your work and acting on the notification but the notification frequently disappears before you can act on it and you can’t count on scrolling back and looking at it later.
- worble 5y ago
  If you're using a non-home version of Windows, open the Policy Editor, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings, find "Remove Notifications and Action Center", enable it, and poof! Annoying distractions begone.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications). Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.
Dah00n 5y ago
While i agree that there's a lot of old layers in Windows I must say that I much prefer this to the way Apple does things. In their camp it is like UI designers change things around for no other reason than to have a job (see also: Firefox). I feel like Apple have moved a lot closer to what they used to point fingers at in their commercials about PCs but without gaining any of the strengths. With that said I also think Gnome (and KDE) are light-years ahead of both OS' UI.
thrower123 5y ago
There's just an insane amount of UI and code in Windows. I don't even want to hazard a guess how many millions, maybe billions of lines of code it takes to build Windows 10. Nobody is ever going to go through every dialog and update it to the design language of the week, while allocating the testing and QA resources to make sure it all works, in every language. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's a Uservoice thread I've been following for years as comic relief that demands that Microsoft port all of Visual Studio to Linux and Mac. It's the same thing; people largely have no concept how much hoary old code there is lurking there, or how many man-years their "simple" ask entails.
cprecioso 5y ago
I feel you could a whole post also with just the inconsistencies in context menus. I remember a few releases of Windows 10 where already in the first screen right out of OOBE, you would get differently-styled context menus depending on where you clicked.
noxer 5y ago
If you kill dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) or if it crashes in widows 10 you can see the old UI on all windows that are open for maybe a second or so before dwm.exe comes back. (obviously not recommendation on "production" machines)
sockaddr 5y ago
I grew up with Windows as my daily driver so I feel a bit of nostalgia but after switching over to macOS about a decade ago when I look at Windows it always feels to me like their engineering/design efforts are just alright with getting things 85% correct and then never finishing the job. It's the last 15% where you start seeing attention to detail, treatment of edge cases, and thoughtfulness. To me it feels like the OS simply doesn't respect the user's time.
mekster 5y ago
Why wouldn't MS just start a new OS like they ditched IE? They can't get rid of backward compatibilities and pretending to be moving forward with the pace of walking in snow and everything is just half way done for the past 10+ years. Just port the drivers, add some compatibility layers so that half apps work, ask big software vendors to port their apps to the new platform and let Windows fade out slowly so that finally they can create a fully vertically controlling software/hardware based on ARM and compete with Apple.
makecheck 5y ago
Although the Mac OS X “Blue Box” was ugly for a time, the virtualization approach worked and it also created a clear incentive for app developers to get their software updated to run better outside of that constraint. If this “backwards compatibility” is important, fine: provide that compatibility on an older OS running in a layer. Free up the main OS to finally evolve.
ashneo76 5y ago
I just want the whole XP UI back. I can stand this new whatever it is
nett18 5y ago
You missed the manual viewer (open triggered by F1) I think its UI dates back to Vista or so. (the .chm file viewer)

501 points by spideymans 5y ago

Win 3.1 File Open Dialog can be found in Windows 11 https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocking_that_windows_31_file_open_dialog/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocki...

aasasd 5y ago
Afaik the Win3 file dialog gets called up by some old apps that use old APIs. I think I even ran into it in Wine. The analog in Unix apps are GTK's file dialogs, which always look jarring and out-of-place anywhere other than Gnome (and maybe XFCE and KDE, dunno)—making me feel like I stepped into 90s Unix with those Motif-derived concrete slabs. Plus they're un-integrated with non-Linux OSes, missing features. And the dialogs keep being dragged around by GTK apps—open Gimp on Mac or Windows and there you go: GTK dialogs.

nxc18 5y ago

I find it hilarious that even in such a comprehensive post, the author missed some: Some apps are now shipping with “Fluent but inconsistently round”, mostly the ones that use WinUI. Maps is a good example where this is noticeable. You can see some screenshots in link below. https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/3767 https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/3767

adzm 5y ago

What I want to know is how can I get that Betta fish on my boot screen!

aasasd 5y ago

In Win7's control panel I counted ten different kinds of windows—in only MS' own sections, no third-parties (who tend to make the problem worse). Some of navigational widgets weren't used anywhere in the remainder of the OS.

akersten 5y ago

I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be. All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.

api 5y ago
Why has there been such a push to nerf UIs? Is it just trying to ape mobile? Mobile UIs are more basic because the screen is so damn small and the use case is more casual.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  Most use cases for Windows are casual. I don't want to hazard a guess but I'd say easily more than 70% of Windows users may be basic? The type to not go particularly deep into the options and explore these menus and instead leave it up to the experts or get systems configured for them For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough
  - XorNot 5y ago
    For casual users these UIs are catastrophic. Casual users just straight don't change settings - they tend to live with the most insane easily fixable problems. Whereas for me, person who has to give phone support, every version of Windows has made important settings harder to get too, which means I can't muscle memory train casual users about what setting they need to review if the problem recurs. The new UIs are all attempted flash over substance, and idiom breaking - buttons and interactive controls are not clearly highlighted and information density is low.

cutchin 5y ago

I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform. But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state. I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix. With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paavohtl 5y ago
As far as I know Project Reunion is not really a UI framework - it's more about refactoring Windows APIs into individual libraries which can be used across different OS versions. This should enable apps targeting all versions of Windows 10 to use the latest stuff, in a similar fashion to polyfills in browsers. This is probably to encourage developers to build software using the new Windows 10 APIs. Which is something they definitely have a problem with - I've been using Windows 10 quite heavily since the first beta and I don't think I've ever seen or used a third party Windows 10 (fluent / modern / metro) application.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  It is a bit more than that, and I bet with Windows 11 announcement we will get a more clear picture on it. It is also a way to bring into Win32 side most of the API that really matter on the UWP side of the fence, most likely (although they are yet to confirm this) as migration path to UWP developers. .NET Native, C++/CX are pretty much dead, and C++/WinRT keeps missing many of the tooling available on C++/CX for XAML applications. So I expect them to migrate the APIs into an OS version independent layer, and then give the mercy shot on UWP apps.

dstaley 5y ago

I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps. [1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.

aasasd 5y ago
> retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago I think I've seen computers with more uninterrupted uptime than that, even if servers. Or at least approaching this figure. Perhaps you meant ‘quarter of a millennium’ or something like that.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/ https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html
    - Stratoscope 5y ago

vsskanth 5y ago

How is MacOS able to maintain such a consistent UI even with massive changes in their design language ? Is Windows UI not a separate layer or something that they can update ? Or is it that the UI elements somehow get baked into the program at the time you build it, so if you didn't update you are just stuck with that particular version of UI you built the program ?

trnglina 5y ago
Built-in Windows controls, like buttons, scroll bars, etc. are updated with each system release. However, they are relatively inflexible, and no one uses WinApi anyway, so most frameworks and apps build their own components, with varying dedication to emulating the "native" style. Built-in controls also don't perform much in the way of layout (I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions?) so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't. My guess is MacOS's consistency comes from some combination of developer incentives, and UI toolkit design.
- aasasd 5y ago
  > I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions? so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't. I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Which is the "native" API - win32, MFC/ATL, Form builder, WPF, or MAUI? If you're dealing with HWNDs directly, it's either win32 or MFC/ATL, but those haven't been touched in tens of years in favor of the current .NET APIs.
  - 5y ago

zamadatix 5y ago

I don't think the Fluent+Metro stuff is so different as to be a real consistency issue. Certainly minor inconsistencies that can be easily pointed out in a list but little that makes a typical user think "this is a completely different thing I'm using". The rest of the "old" stuff seems to have been made visually consistent in the 7 era even if the tools themselves originated from different eras with most gaining high DPI support and following the newer theming, again not a consistency issue in itself. There are a few REALLY old dialogs called by ODBC and maybe some others but I can't think of any you run into unless you're intentionally looking to run old software that will call them. So technically 3 but really 2 really noticeable UI environments in day to day. I'm worried with 11 it'll be a repeat of Windows 10 where at the start you're constantly using "yet another UI". At this point it's nearly gotten decent to the point if you aren't a sysadmin (MMC, regedit, task manager, advanced control panel items not nowadays part of Settings) you rarely run into the "old" style stuff with the one exception of File Explorer. Hopefully it doesn't take another 6 years to be saying that about Fluent/Metro stuff being updated to match 11's new look.

elktea 5y ago

speaking of UI inconsistencies - why did the author of this page thing it was a good idea to hijack my page up/down buttons. come on man.

cryptoz 5y ago
I really disliked the experience of trying to read that page so much I just chose not to read it. What a surprisingly awful experience - I'd really encourage the author to remove that.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Not just a terrible idea, but it was completely unnecessary. The highjacked PgUp/Dn keys scroll the screenshot galleries horizontally, but so do the left and right arrow keys just like in other image galleries. It did remind me to try a pair of browser shortcuts that I haven't used in probably ten years: Space and Shift+Space. They work!
Boomerchick 5y ago
The irony.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
I think it's caused by the stock WordPress image gallery widget. I've noticed the same issue in a KDE blog[1] also built with WordPress. [1]: https://pointieststick.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-kde-plasma-5-22-arrives-but-i-bet-youll-want-5-23-once-i-show-you-this/ https://pointieststick.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-kde-plasm...

curiousmindz 5y ago

This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windows 10.

jolux 5y ago
As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.
- qball 5y ago
  >I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets. Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine. They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty. No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Windows 10 lacked a cohesive vision for the UI.

causality0 5y ago

I don't think Microsoft has been truly interested in improving the Windows experience in a long time. I mean, surely if they cared about us you'd be able to right-click on any Notification icon and hit "always show icon and notifications" without having to open two menus to get to that option. It's been a pain in my ass for twenty years.

cookiengineer 5y ago
Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please? I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them. Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey. Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime. I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible. I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows. Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced. Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications. Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off. For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I mostly hate settings in Windows 10 after 15 years of OSX, which are very inconsistent.

user3939382 5y ago

Sorry for the tangent but: I get really nostalgic looking at the Windows 3.1 icons. I remember using moreicons.dll for shortcuts so long ago that they didn't look out of place. Almost everyone can relate to hearing a song, or a smell, that takes you back to a different time in society and your life, but it's weird to get it from a computer UI. I think it may happen for me because computing has always been such a big part of my life, even since early childhood.

overgard 5y ago

The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
TBH I don't really see how the Settings app is an embarrassment at this point in time. This was definitely true in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 versions, but with the leaps and bounds it's made since, I feel like 'settings app suxx' is a meme that has overstayed its welcome.
- overgard 5y ago
  I don't sit around configuring my machine so I can't really say if it's gotten better, but I know the past 5 years have taught me too look anywhere but there. There's never been a good reason to have two different overlapping configuration apps.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  I do not have much to do with windows these days, but if you try to cange advanced network interface settings or audio settings beyond selecting a single input, you stil need to find the link to the old panel hidden somewhere. Also, good luck changing WiFi settings from the fluid menu. And lastly, while it always stays responsive, control of the background processes is also lacking. I spent quite some time restarting the download of a system language, just because I started it while having DNS issues (and to fix those... see above). I personally don't mind the older designs being mixed in, especially since most of them look good enough with the updated buttons, but the settings panel is, in its current state, still a sidegrade at best.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  I've used it fairly recently and it still has only the absolutely most common settings you'd want to change. 90% of the settings are still in the control panel. It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.

neelc 5y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be touched very easily without breaking compatibility, And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect. While desktop Linux/BSD isn't exactly well known for it's UIs, I found GNOME 3/40 to be more consistent UI-wise than Windows 10, being a user of GNOME 3 on FreeBSD at home (which I am typing this comment from), and helping port GNOME 40, while (unsurprisingly) using Windows 10 at $DAYJOB. But then GNOME, KDE, Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.

meowkit 5y ago
I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
- Solocomplex 5y ago
  They tried modernizing with Windows RT, which was actually very smooth and functional if it wasn't so locked down.
  - cheschire 5y ago
    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?
    - qball 5y ago
      >win32 stuff removed Win32 was not removed from Windows RT, but your access to it (if your name wasn't "Microsoft"; because that low-level access was reportedly how they got Office on it) was. And because of Secure Boot, which (unlike x86, for now) is mandated enabled for Windows on ARM systems, you had to wait for an unpatchable security hole in the booting process (which, while it exists, wasn't relevant until past the end of the Surface RT's lifecycle), you couldn't run full Windows 8 or a tablet-first Linux distro.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Seems like there used to more open criticism and suggested improvements of Microsoft Windows on the internet/web. When the company bought out Mark Russinovich that quelled some of it. There was also a website called annoyances.org. Anyone know why it disappeared. This is the last record of it I could find in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20121222074911/http://www.annoyances.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121222074911/http://www.annoya...

dcl 5y ago

It's not just the UI that's inconsistent, it's that the different UI layers can actually present contradictory information. https://i.imgur.com/oNxlUzv.png https://i.imgur.com/oNxlUzv.png

podunkPDX 5y ago

I have so many irritants in the experience of using windows professionally, that I’m not going to waste time discussing it. I will leave you with one observation though. For any given text box in Windows, I have found that CTRL-A may or may not Select All.

tomaszs 5y ago

Funnily as a design developer, i switch off all UI enhancements because they slow down the system. So my system looks almost like Windows 95 confusing people. I think the inconsistency is the price of having a system with so many features. I rather have them than have consistent Windows. Moreover, sometimes updating UI does not go as planned. A regular calculator started like a breeze. After redesigning it in Windows 10 it takes several seconds to load. It is not a time worth spending if you add 2 plus 2. To sum it up, consistent UI is great. But if it comes to my OS i don't care about it too much. More about the speed.

eric__cartman 5y ago
I remember doing this with my Intel Atom netbook because it had the processing power of a baked potato, but with any modern system (something made in the last 8 years) with GPU acceleration, does it matter? I haven't noticed much of a difference in my Thinkpad with a fourth generation i5. Which is the oldest machine I have Windows installed on.

KORraN 5y ago

Interesting read. There's also "State of the Windows, part 2: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?": https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/state-of-the-windows-part-2-did-windows-10-slow-down-with-each-feature-update/ https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/state-of-the-windo...

EdSchouten 5y ago

I know that Windows Vista still had some Windows 3.x UI elements included. For example, the file picker dialog you’d get when installing a font would be a pretty ancient one. Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime? Screenshot found online (from XP): https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/35b17bed9c542383/faq_xp_winzip_5.gif https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/35b17bed9c542383/faq_xp_winz...

muterad_murilax 5y ago
> Is that still the case, or has it been updated in the meantime? It's been updated. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553728

dang 5y ago

Similar thread from earlier today: There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27553108 - June 2021 (125 comments)

TrianguloY 5y ago

I will always find it funny that you can use the windows 95 alt+tab switcher by: - Pressing alt (don't release) - Pressing altgr - Releasing altgr - Pressing tab

whoopdedo 5y ago
While experimenting with this I also discovered another unexpected quirk or the switcher. AltGr+Tab makes it "sticky". Also, I realized that despite being initially liking the beautiful 3D animated Win+Tab switcher when it was introduced in Vista, I never use it anymore.

albanread 5y ago

If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.

bitL 5y ago

I absolutely hate that if I open control panel, I can only focus on a single thing instead of having multiple windows open. My 64-core PC is not a smartphone, thank you very much!

bruce343434 5y ago
yes! modern UI feels so "trapped".

TonyTrapp 5y ago

One more thing missing in the list: MDI (multiple document interface) child windows are styled with Aero basic (i.e. without glass styling) frames, which really look rather ugly when embedded into a Window with a Windows 10 frame.

tgtweak 5y ago

I kind of hate how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to find a familiar management ui in windows today. I find myself using run commands to bring up these UIs more and more. It would be an acceptable tradeoff if these new interfaces added more functionality or visibility but it seems they're just trying to move to the new settings ux and not thinking about adding better function. Try adding a new local user account to latest windows, compare the functionality in new the network interface settings page vs the legacy adapter properties prompt. Seems most of the "this just works" stuff that I respect is from windows 2000 and the NT team. Wish Microsoft would head back that way with a nod to modern usability instead of dumbing things down and worse: changing it every release.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Windows has been on this road for a long time. I did some work on Windows servers in the XP era and it was a continuous hassle that the menus were always different in NT 4, Win 2k, Xp, Vista, and all the different versions of Windows server. Contrast that to command-line admin on Linux that stays the same or the perpetually busted Linux admin GUIs that should just be taken behind the woodshed and shot.

stephc_int13 5y ago

The sad part is that old win32 UI from the win95 era, rendered with a modern style, are the most useable and nicer looking, in my opinion.

formerly_proven 5y ago
Metro/fluent apps always look "broken" to me. Like someone forgot to add styling and that's why a bunch of stuff ends up with some kind of default 3px solid black border. Transient popups (e.g. drop-downs) have some kind of shadow but it just looks weird and broken. Clicking on "cards" (I believe that's what they're called, e.g. a program in the new software manager) animates them but it just looks completely broken and blurry. Windows are resizable but in most cases it seems like the app isn't using an layout, so the contents don't adjust to match. It all feels a lot like a broken webpage in a standalone window. Including no/bad error handling, infinitely hanging indeterminate progress displays, lack of keyboard usability etc. That being said the Windows 10 Win32 styling looks horrendous to me as well. Like BS_FLAT in Windows XP, it never looked good, not in 2005, not in 2021.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Same. It just doesn't work for my brain. We're looking at pixels on a screen so you need to somehow trick the brain into registering this as an interface and the metro/fluent ones completely fail in this regard. I see something more like a dense information sheet than an interactive interface. Technically it seems broken too. There was a bug in the calculator app where one button was off by 1 pixel. It boggles the mind to imagine how that kind of thing is possible.
- tgtweak 5y ago
  If did not age well, but it came out a long time ago.

didymospl 5y ago

Semi-related: if you enjoy classic Windows UI and feel like going to a nostalgia trip there's a great little game which will make you feel it's the turn of the millennium again - Progressbar95. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its creators in any way, just wanted to share some fun.

baxuz 5y ago

Don't forget the Windows Vista installer.

PaulHoule 5y ago

The inconsistency doesn’t bother me so much as a lack of immediate responsiveness when I start a program. Sometimes I can wait 30 seconds after clicking on the menu before there is visual indication that the program is really loading. In that time I don’t know if I should click again, reboot the computer, walk away for 5 minutes for the services to settle, or start diagnosing the problem and take remedial action. Part of a ‘computer users bill of rights’ is getting rid of all hourglasses and spinners and always having clear visual indication that progress is being made.

agumonkey 5y ago
That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect. Opportunities here.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale. What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait? One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout. If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    there was a contravariant scheme where web became chromeless, everything was ultra cute, flat and abstracted away while the web became more and more sophisticated (js loading, cdn, reactive/components) too back in the days you had more information about the technical details of browsing (and prior to that, some browser exposed GC/ram use as a toolbar button)

PaulHoule 5y ago

I think the tray and notification system is cruel. When I was a kid I saw other kids torment a horse by holding a hand up, getting the horse to turn away, then slapping the horse with the other hand. The tray is always popping up notifications that tell me to click on them but clicking on them does nothing. The notification often covers the UI elements that I need to respond to the notification. There is no way to clear the notification except to wait for the notification to be cleared. It’s cruel, and even more cruel that if the notification isn’t just actively in the way of your work and acting on the notification but the notification frequently disappears before you can act on it and you can’t count on scrolling back and looking at it later.

worble 5y ago
If you're using a non-home version of Windows, open the Policy Editor, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings, find "Remove Notifications and Action Center", enable it, and poof! Annoying distractions begone.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications). Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.

Dah00n 5y ago

While i agree that there's a lot of old layers in Windows I must say that I much prefer this to the way Apple does things. In their camp it is like UI designers change things around for no other reason than to have a job (see also: Firefox). I feel like Apple have moved a lot closer to what they used to point fingers at in their commercials about PCs but without gaining any of the strengths. With that said I also think Gnome (and KDE) are light-years ahead of both OS' UI.

thrower123 5y ago

There's just an insane amount of UI and code in Windows. I don't even want to hazard a guess how many millions, maybe billions of lines of code it takes to build Windows 10. Nobody is ever going to go through every dialog and update it to the design language of the week, while allocating the testing and QA resources to make sure it all works, in every language. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's a Uservoice thread I've been following for years as comic relief that demands that Microsoft port all of Visual Studio to Linux and Mac. It's the same thing; people largely have no concept how much hoary old code there is lurking there, or how many man-years their "simple" ask entails.

cprecioso 5y ago

I feel you could a whole post also with just the inconsistencies in context menus. I remember a few releases of Windows 10 where already in the first screen right out of OOBE, you would get differently-styled context menus depending on where you clicked.

noxer 5y ago

If you kill dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) or if it crashes in widows 10 you can see the old UI on all windows that are open for maybe a second or so before dwm.exe comes back. (obviously not recommendation on "production" machines)

sockaddr 5y ago

I grew up with Windows as my daily driver so I feel a bit of nostalgia but after switching over to macOS about a decade ago when I look at Windows it always feels to me like their engineering/design efforts are just alright with getting things 85% correct and then never finishing the job. It's the last 15% where you start seeing attention to detail, treatment of edge cases, and thoughtfulness. To me it feels like the OS simply doesn't respect the user's time.

mekster 5y ago

Why wouldn't MS just start a new OS like they ditched IE? They can't get rid of backward compatibilities and pretending to be moving forward with the pace of walking in snow and everything is just half way done for the past 10+ years. Just port the drivers, add some compatibility layers so that half apps work, ask big software vendors to port their apps to the new platform and let Windows fade out slowly so that finally they can create a fully vertically controlling software/hardware based on ARM and compete with Apple.

makecheck 5y ago

Although the Mac OS X “Blue Box” was ugly for a time, the virtualization approach worked and it also created a clear incentive for app developers to get their software updated to run better outside of that constraint. If this “backwards compatibility” is important, fine: provide that compatibility on an older OS running in a layer. Free up the main OS to finally evolve.

ashneo76 5y ago

I just want the whole XP UI back. I can stand this new whatever it is

nett18 5y ago

You missed the manual viewer (open triggered by F1) I think its UI dates back to Vista or so. (the .chm file viewer)