12 ms·

Windows 11: a survey of text boxes

125 points by sjmulder 5y ago

polyterative 5y ago
My designer eye makes me really feel bad by looking at these all close together
- queuebert 5y ago
  Be honest: Do any of the Windows components in isolation make you feel good either?
quyleanh 5y ago
Is it hard to make all these elements consistent?
- Darmody 5y ago
  They are not going to lose users because of this, so why bother?
  - ziml77 5y ago
    This is certainly why. There's not much value in making them consistent. Hell, I notice these things but don't really think or care much about them. It just doesn't affect my interactions. They all still look like places to enter text, which is the important part of their design.
    - hexa22 5y ago
      Tbh some of these even look better in context. I’m not sure why it even matters that every text box is pixel perfect identical rather than suitable for the environment.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    It’s a part of why they lost me.
    - Darmody 5y ago
      I should've said they won't lose a a meaningful share of users. Most people don't care. They probably don't even notice because they only use third party software on top of Windows.
      - datenarsch 5y ago
        It's not true that most people don't care. Most people absolutely hate it that they have to re-learn Word or Excel or Windows whenever a new version comes out. Just ask any mom or dad. But what can they do about it, really? Nothing.
- jlund-molfese 5y ago
  Windows does have a large visual surface, but so does OS X, and Apple mostly manages to have a consistent UI. I wonder if that's because Microsoft has introduced so many different UI frameworks over the years.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Try to run Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI applications across similar workflows and you will find similar issues. Last week's ATP podcast had a long rant about it.
  - codebolt 5y ago
    And most of them are now deprecated. In fact, on .NET 5, there is no good desktop UI framework at all. It seems to me that if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years, the only way it would still be supported today (i.e. possible to maintain using non-deprecated frameworks) is if it was based directly on the old Win32 API (or the MFC wrapper).
    - dleslie 5y ago
      This is mostly correct, I think. Just imagine all those SilverLight apps that are languishing.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Someday: https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/dotnet/maui
    - sjmulder 5y ago
      > if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years, the only way it would still be supported today ... is if it was based directly on the old Win32 API I thought the same and did just that to see if it holds true: https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake By default you get Windows 95 styling and Windows 3 fonts. You have to opt into 'visual styles' (introduced in XP) with a declaration in the app manifest and have to manually query and use the system font. DPI awareness is also opt in and puts all the work (sizing/positioning, scaling/reloading fonts) on you. But when you do that, it does look fine on Windows 10. Not so much on Windows 11. Some of the widgets have been updated to mimic the new style but when you put it together it looks messy and old fashioned (e.g. fonts + you don't get the new context menus). I'm curious to learn how one would create a 'proper' Windows app without having to reimplement the system's widget styling.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  Based on the last hundred years of Windows releases - apparently the answer is yes.
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
I don't understand why microsoft doesn't have a small team dedicated to look and feel and just bringing it all up to date - all those control panel applets, have they finally been upgraded?
- FirstLvR 5y ago
  they do have, the problem they have never use windows 11
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 5y ago
  No, not really. You get some updated Win32 window classes, theme engine updated for the UWP based stuff (or WinUI if on desktop side) and that's it.
- AmVess 5y ago
  I have no idea why they don't sort this out. Perhaps they feel like it is an issue. Windows 11 has UI elements from every OS back to Windows 3.1. I guess they like the absurdity of stacking various settings behind 2-3 control panels, some of which aren't even linked from one panel to the other.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Costs versus benefits.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    As it looks, it does not cost more than a couple dollars.
- luxuryballs 5y ago
  Instead they have a bunch of small teams dedicated to their own little siloed feature set and then they cobble it all together, that’s my two second analysis of the inconsistencies seen here.
drcongo 5y ago
As someone who hasn't had to use Windows since XP, is anyone able to explain the technicals of how this even happens? I mean, at a complete OS layman's level, one would assume that someone somewhere comes up with the design for how a text input should look across the OS, someone else probably writes the UI code for that, someone else maybe writes the plumbing for it, then _everyone_ uses it whenever they need a text input. What is it about Windows that means this is impossible? Their UIs are like the jumble sale aisle down the middle of Lidl.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Easy, they need to make sure Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, WPF, UWP and WinUI (basically UWP on Win32 without going into details) underlying rendering infrastructure gets aligned with the OS design language. Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32, make some efforts for WinUI 2.0 (UWP) and WinUI 3.0 (the Win32 one) and that's it.
  - sjmulder 5y ago
    > Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32 The Win32 widgets have been updated but apparently they don't want to mess with the metrics, hence those controls are much more compact, don't use rounded corners, etc. Is there any public UI toolkit in Windows now that offers the canonical widgets?
    - ktpsns 5y ago
      Probably third party toolkits such as wxwidgets or Java AWT (the Swing predecessor)?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Kind of, only for WinUI 2.6, the UWP version. The WinUI 3.0 (which is UWP decoupled from OS + UI) is still catching up. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui2/release-notes/winui-2.6 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui2/r... Thing is, for Win32 anyone using bare bones Win32 has to do the work themselves for anything that ins't on the OS anyway. So MFC and Forms get a partiall update via those Win32 changes, while WPF gets nothing due to its own DX rendering stack. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/make-apps-great-for-windows https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/ma...
perryizgr8 5y ago
Sad truth is that nobody cares. Not the users, not the makers. It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to fix this, especially when they are anyway making a new OS. But other considerations take precedence, since nobody really cares if textboxes look alike.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Check WinUI Github repository 2000 issues and mounting, do the same for other UI stacks, not sure where those resources would come from. They even had to restaff Forms and WPF teams, because with UWP they were reallocated to something else.
- crocoduck 5y ago
  They don't care because they have no taste, it's sad that the dominant personal computing platform is utterly tasteless (from a design and technical perspective).
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  For me, this is a blessing in disguise. Modern UI design is to pad everything out with reams of whitespace, hide elements that no longer fit behind a "...", then remove any affordances in the name of "cleanliness". At least some parts of windows reflect a more sane design language from an older era.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  >It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to fix this This isn't true, almost each thing would require at least a UI rewrite to get them up to consistency or you'd just have a task of trying to hack the ten or so UI frameworks to look the same but they wouldn't act or feel the same. I don't think it's impossible but you need a product focused exec who cares enough about it to basically demand a few of the apps or panels be rewritten each version and keep sending it back until it looks right. Has to come from the top because a designer going around and trying to get them to rewrite say Device Manager to make it feel up to date and stop flickering isn't ever going to convince anyone. Of course every step of the way reviewers and your own community are going to be shouting at you for changing 20 year old UIs. It'll be a thankless task until 10 years after it's done when they come to terms with the change and realize they finally have a consistent Windows.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
Maybe I’m just being pedantic, but when an OS uses 4+ different design languages across all the system software, While it has little to no effect on my ability to get work done, I simply prefer looking at a pretty, consistent UI. To be fair, macOS isn’t perfect either, especially with some of the system apps that have become the iOS equivalent running on macOS in the past years. Although I do find macOS to have greater consistency overall than Windows.
- queuebert 5y ago
  Apple's UI design peaked several versions ago, and now it is a slow descent into random design changes for the sake of maintaining the salaries of their designers.
  - 65 5y ago
    I disagree. I was skeptical about Big Sur. I loved the look of the Mountain Lion days, through Sierra, up to Catalina. Big Sur felt like a big difference that I wouldn't like. But, I switched over and have found that Big Sur is actually a nice upgrade visually from Catalina. One thing I really love is the visual indicators in the menu bar. For example, I like the icons when I'm connecting to a Bluetooth device. I also find that Finder is pretty clean and nice to use, among other things. Obviously it's all subjective but I think Big Sur is probably the nicest looking/feeling version of macOS yet. It seems like the "Mountain Lion was the best" way of thinking is mostly just nostalgia.
    - mafalda 5y ago
      I would not call "Mountain Lion was the best" just nostalgia. The UI was more concise and polished in general. Consider the Big Sur sidebar, on some Apps it acts a shortcut list, on other as a tab bar and on others its used to host hierarchical views. It not only does not improve the UX in a functionality, it also breaks the reading flow as we need to look in the toolbar (left to right) and then on sidebar (top-bottom) as Apple is pushing developers to use it. It's not to say that skeuomorphic design was perfect too. Using Mountain Lion in 2021 is going to feel less aesthetic than Big Sur just as using System 8 in 2011 felt. Overall consistency and sizing of Mountain Lion is superior to Big Sur if you consider a keyboard and mouse based OS just as Big Sur is superior if you're used to touch input and modern iOS UI.
anthk 5y ago
Dear Microsoft: Just clone Zukitre giving consistency and a neutral gray-ish scheme to everything. I am not an artist but media producers love the neutral gray and so does everyone else. Light themes are too bright.
- 65 5y ago
  Tell that to news sites. I wish more news sites used containers around their content and had grey backgrounds. ESPN and NPR are two examples of news sites that use containers with grey backgrounds and I think they're both really nice to read. Not some blinding amount of pure white like most news sites.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
We live in the world of web apps and electron now, UI consistency is dead and buried because they killed it. Windows's UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern developers.
- blackhaz 5y ago
  Apple has killed UI consistency too. New iOS and tvOS are just a mess of endless half-broken features in a pathetic attempt to satisfy every possible use case out there. Jobs would have used napalm on the whole UI/UX team.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Maybe. Jobs also introduced some rather outrageous UI (IMHO) when he returned to Apple.
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      I think a difference with Jobs at the helm though was yes, he let some really terrible UI's get into production, but he also had no problem axing them when he finally accepted they were awful. The problem we're seeing now is nobody is willing to rollback bad ideas.
- cies 5y ago
  The UI consistency of most Linux distros is better out of the box. 2021 the year of the Linux desktop? /s
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Ironically Linux's relative consistency is in part due to the long standing complaint about how inconsistent it was, which motivated developers to create ways to have unified theming across toolkits. Meanwhile, the rest of the world went full derp and decided that UI consistency is for boring people who like to actually get things done with a computer.
jcelerier 5y ago
paging for the next time someone complains about cross-platform solutions not following the OS design guidelines exactly
dleslie 5y ago
Windows hasn't had a consistent look and feel since Windows 95; even Win95 OSR2 brought some Active Desktop widgets and browser integration into explorer, which broke the uniformity of the UI.
- kwanbix 5y ago
  Windows 2000 was pretty consistent.
  - luxuryballs 5y ago
    DOS was boss for consistency.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Not true. CUA-compliant software was somewhat consistent, but they were rare. Many simply implemented a half assed toolkit each with a different behaviour and appearance
    - timw4mail 5y ago
      In what way? Every single program had to make its own interface. Even in text mode, there are tons of hacks to make interfaces look different, and not much has changed with more modern CLI programs.
GiorgioG 5y ago
I'm still pissed they haven't fixed Windows Explorer's "Open with..." popup since they Metro-ified it. It used to be you could type-to-select from the list of apps...now I have to use the mouse to scroll down.
icegreentea2 5y ago
The hyper consistent UI guidelines of the 80s and 90s were born in an era when we had to convince grown human beings to use these brand new (to them) systems without feeling too embarrassed about being awful at it. Today, and perhaps for decades to come, by the time someone touches a PC, they've been screwing around on phones and tablets. They live their lives on the internet and apps, where "standard looking" often implies "cheap and knock-off", and long term consistency often implies "stale and old". They already know that nothing is consistent, and things aren't always what they seem. Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. It's fun to pick on the textboxes, but it doesn't matter. It won't stop anyone from being productive and happy using the software.
- sjmulder 5y ago
  > Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. You'd think having one blessed toolkit and implementing things there, once, takes much fewer resources than doing it half-heartedly over and over again.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  > They already know that nothing is consistent, and things aren't always what they seem. Knowing that doesn't make it easier to use.
userbinator 5y ago
Windows Terminal colour dialog My response upon seeing that was "WTF! That looks ridiculously amateurish!" It almost feels like it's trolling me. Even the labels somehow manage to have a different size of font than the rest of the dialog, something a noob in the 90s using Visual Basic drag-and-drop to create dialogs would not produce without expending (considerable) additional effort. Ironically, Win32 has had a much more full-featured and standard dialog for choosing colours since Windows 3.x: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlgbox/color-dialog-box https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlgbox/color-...
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Wow I’d at least hope for a preview of the color I’m “choosing”.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    In Windows Terminal? You do get that. https://i.imgur.com/nSJlAy0.png https://i.imgur.com/nSJlAy0.png Personally, I like this better simply because it has the RGB representation in hex which is so much easier to copy and paste than dealing with 3 individual textboxes.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      Ah ok, I admittedly haven’t used Windows terminal much as of yet, I thought the screenshot shown in the article was majority of the dialog.
ho_schi 5y ago
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/design-principles https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu... Didn't worked well? The UI on Windows is problematic since Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't maintain actually the libraries for the UI, they just add new libraries. And developers learned that on Windows you can do whatever you want. * Win32 (C, requires experience but reliable?) * Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++, Win32) * WTL (C++, Win32) * Windows Forms (.net) * Windows Presentation Foundation (.net) * WinUI (C#, C++) Please tell me if you forgot a UI library provided by Microsoft? Gtk tries to make Gtk2, Gtk3 and Gtk4 look somewhat same and integrated applications of GNOME feel rather same. Similar for Qt and KDE and for Apple. Honestly, Firefox and LibreOffice doesn't fit perfectly. This is also the reason for Epiphany, which is using Gtk natively. https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/themes/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... I miss a HIG for TUI (*curses). The behavior of CLI applications is partially defined by GNU (-l, --long, -L) but of rourse requires reading the manual: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLin...
- marcodiego 5y ago
  It is a shame that GNOME has no manpower to quickly update all of its apps whenever HIG changes. Nevertheless, consistency in GNOME apps has been much better than default windowls for a long time.
- RealStickman_ 5y ago
  Firefox has improved a lot in recent versions in regards to following the system theme on Linux. LibreOffice is still meh. I have a friend who uses Manjaro and a lot of buttons in LO are basically invisible with the default theme.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  You forgot ATL, and the WinRT evolution since Windows 8. As for Gtk and Qt, don't throw rocks when the roof is made of thin glass. All Gtk+ versions require major rewrites and now they even dropped Glade, with the replacement coming who knows when. Qt, is now focusing on QML instead of C++ Widgets and also requires rewrites across versions.
garaetjjte 5y ago
Even font rendering is inconsistent: notice how Win32 widgets use subpixel antialiasing but the modern ones don't.
albertopv 5y ago
And they say linux desktop environments UI is inconsistent...
raydev 5y ago
As a longtime iOS engineer trying to prototype something on Windows, I did not realize how good I've had it while working with UIKit. I just want Microsoft to give me the one true Blessed Way to write Windows apps. Instead it seems like there are 5 true Blessed Ways, and if I want something performant I need to use 20 year old APIs? I was going to dig in to GDI+ for fast text styling performance but saw an offhand comment in some forum today that you can use DirectX for performant text rendering. How do people discover this information under normal circumstances?
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  They might be the fanciest or laden with trendy buzzwords, but when it comes to building functional, pleasant to use apps, UIKit and AppKit are still hard to beat. If they became deployable on other platforms (Android and Windows/Linux, respectively) I don’t think I’d ever use anything else.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Meanwhile on macOS, Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI, each with its own set of issues. We discover this information like everyone else, conference talks, blog posts, books and developer documentation.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    Carbon and Catalyst didn't really overlap. And Catalyst is just for porting iPad apps.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Many educated iOS devs see Catalyst as entry in macOS development instead of learning new frameworks, no porting required.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        They complained about lack of guidance from Microsoft. Guidance from Apple is Catalyst is for porting.

125 points by sjmulder 5y ago

polyterative 5y ago

My designer eye makes me really feel bad by looking at these all close together

queuebert 5y ago
Be honest: Do any of the Windows components in isolation make you feel good either?

quyleanh 5y ago

Is it hard to make all these elements consistent?

Darmody 5y ago
They are not going to lose users because of this, so why bother?
- ziml77 5y ago
  This is certainly why. There's not much value in making them consistent. Hell, I notice these things but don't really think or care much about them. It just doesn't affect my interactions. They all still look like places to enter text, which is the important part of their design.
  - hexa22 5y ago
    Tbh some of these even look better in context. I’m not sure why it even matters that every text box is pixel perfect identical rather than suitable for the environment.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  It’s a part of why they lost me.
  - Darmody 5y ago
    I should've said they won't lose a a meaningful share of users. Most people don't care. They probably don't even notice because they only use third party software on top of Windows.
    - datenarsch 5y ago
      It's not true that most people don't care. Most people absolutely hate it that they have to re-learn Word or Excel or Windows whenever a new version comes out. Just ask any mom or dad. But what can they do about it, really? Nothing.
jlund-molfese 5y ago
Windows does have a large visual surface, but so does OS X, and Apple mostly manages to have a consistent UI. I wonder if that's because Microsoft has introduced so many different UI frameworks over the years.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Try to run Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI applications across similar workflows and you will find similar issues. Last week's ATP podcast had a long rant about it.
- codebolt 5y ago
  And most of them are now deprecated. In fact, on .NET 5, there is no good desktop UI framework at all. It seems to me that if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years, the only way it would still be supported today (i.e. possible to maintain using non-deprecated frameworks) is if it was based directly on the old Win32 API (or the MFC wrapper).
  - dleslie 5y ago
    This is mostly correct, I think. Just imagine all those SilverLight apps that are languishing.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Someday: https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/dotnet/maui
  - sjmulder 5y ago
    > if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years, the only way it would still be supported today ... is if it was based directly on the old Win32 API I thought the same and did just that to see if it holds true: https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake By default you get Windows 95 styling and Windows 3 fonts. You have to opt into 'visual styles' (introduced in XP) with a declaration in the app manifest and have to manually query and use the system font. DPI awareness is also opt in and puts all the work (sizing/positioning, scaling/reloading fonts) on you. But when you do that, it does look fine on Windows 10. Not so much on Windows 11. Some of the widgets have been updated to mimic the new style but when you put it together it looks messy and old fashioned (e.g. fonts + you don't get the new context menus). I'm curious to learn how one would create a 'proper' Windows app without having to reimplement the system's widget styling.
whalesalad 5y ago
Based on the last hundred years of Windows releases - apparently the answer is yes.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

I don't understand why microsoft doesn't have a small team dedicated to look and feel and just bringing it all up to date - all those control panel applets, have they finally been upgraded?

FirstLvR 5y ago
they do have, the problem they have never use windows 11
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 5y ago
No, not really. You get some updated Win32 window classes, theme engine updated for the UWP based stuff (or WinUI if on desktop side) and that's it.
AmVess 5y ago
I have no idea why they don't sort this out. Perhaps they feel like it is an issue. Windows 11 has UI elements from every OS back to Windows 3.1. I guess they like the absurdity of stacking various settings behind 2-3 control panels, some of which aren't even linked from one panel to the other.
coldacid 5y ago
Costs versus benefits.
- hulitu 5y ago
  As it looks, it does not cost more than a couple dollars.
luxuryballs 5y ago
Instead they have a bunch of small teams dedicated to their own little siloed feature set and then they cobble it all together, that’s my two second analysis of the inconsistencies seen here.

drcongo 5y ago

As someone who hasn't had to use Windows since XP, is anyone able to explain the technicals of how this even happens? I mean, at a complete OS layman's level, one would assume that someone somewhere comes up with the design for how a text input should look across the OS, someone else probably writes the UI code for that, someone else maybe writes the plumbing for it, then _everyone_ uses it whenever they need a text input. What is it about Windows that means this is impossible? Their UIs are like the jumble sale aisle down the middle of Lidl.

pjmlp 5y ago
Easy, they need to make sure Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, WPF, UWP and WinUI (basically UWP on Win32 without going into details) underlying rendering infrastructure gets aligned with the OS design language. Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32, make some efforts for WinUI 2.0 (UWP) and WinUI 3.0 (the Win32 one) and that's it.
- sjmulder 5y ago
  > Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32 The Win32 widgets have been updated but apparently they don't want to mess with the metrics, hence those controls are much more compact, don't use rounded corners, etc. Is there any public UI toolkit in Windows now that offers the canonical widgets?
  - ktpsns 5y ago
    Probably third party toolkits such as wxwidgets or Java AWT (the Swing predecessor)?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Kind of, only for WinUI 2.6, the UWP version. The WinUI 3.0 (which is UWP decoupled from OS + UI) is still catching up. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui2/release-notes/winui-2.6 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui2/r... Thing is, for Win32 anyone using bare bones Win32 has to do the work themselves for anything that ins't on the OS anyway. So MFC and Forms get a partiall update via those Win32 changes, while WPF gets nothing due to its own DX rendering stack. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/make-apps-great-for-windows https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/ma...

perryizgr8 5y ago

Sad truth is that nobody cares. Not the users, not the makers. It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to fix this, especially when they are anyway making a new OS. But other considerations take precedence, since nobody really cares if textboxes look alike.

pjmlp 5y ago
Check WinUI Github repository 2000 issues and mounting, do the same for other UI stacks, not sure where those resources would come from. They even had to restaff Forms and WPF teams, because with UWP they were reallocated to something else.
crocoduck 5y ago
They don't care because they have no taste, it's sad that the dominant personal computing platform is utterly tasteless (from a design and technical perspective).
AlexandrB 5y ago
For me, this is a blessing in disguise. Modern UI design is to pad everything out with reams of whitespace, hide elements that no longer fit behind a "...", then remove any affordances in the name of "cleanliness". At least some parts of windows reflect a more sane design language from an older era.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
>It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to fix this This isn't true, almost each thing would require at least a UI rewrite to get them up to consistency or you'd just have a task of trying to hack the ten or so UI frameworks to look the same but they wouldn't act or feel the same. I don't think it's impossible but you need a product focused exec who cares enough about it to basically demand a few of the apps or panels be rewritten each version and keep sending it back until it looks right. Has to come from the top because a designer going around and trying to get them to rewrite say Device Manager to make it feel up to date and stop flickering isn't ever going to convince anyone. Of course every step of the way reviewers and your own community are going to be shouting at you for changing 20 year old UIs. It'll be a thankless task until 10 years after it's done when they come to terms with the change and realize they finally have a consistent Windows.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

Maybe I’m just being pedantic, but when an OS uses 4+ different design languages across all the system software, While it has little to no effect on my ability to get work done, I simply prefer looking at a pretty, consistent UI. To be fair, macOS isn’t perfect either, especially with some of the system apps that have become the iOS equivalent running on macOS in the past years. Although I do find macOS to have greater consistency overall than Windows.

queuebert 5y ago
Apple's UI design peaked several versions ago, and now it is a slow descent into random design changes for the sake of maintaining the salaries of their designers.
- 65 5y ago
  I disagree. I was skeptical about Big Sur. I loved the look of the Mountain Lion days, through Sierra, up to Catalina. Big Sur felt like a big difference that I wouldn't like. But, I switched over and have found that Big Sur is actually a nice upgrade visually from Catalina. One thing I really love is the visual indicators in the menu bar. For example, I like the icons when I'm connecting to a Bluetooth device. I also find that Finder is pretty clean and nice to use, among other things. Obviously it's all subjective but I think Big Sur is probably the nicest looking/feeling version of macOS yet. It seems like the "Mountain Lion was the best" way of thinking is mostly just nostalgia.
  - mafalda 5y ago
    I would not call "Mountain Lion was the best" just nostalgia. The UI was more concise and polished in general. Consider the Big Sur sidebar, on some Apps it acts a shortcut list, on other as a tab bar and on others its used to host hierarchical views. It not only does not improve the UX in a functionality, it also breaks the reading flow as we need to look in the toolbar (left to right) and then on sidebar (top-bottom) as Apple is pushing developers to use it. It's not to say that skeuomorphic design was perfect too. Using Mountain Lion in 2021 is going to feel less aesthetic than Big Sur just as using System 8 in 2011 felt. Overall consistency and sizing of Mountain Lion is superior to Big Sur if you consider a keyboard and mouse based OS just as Big Sur is superior if you're used to touch input and modern iOS UI.

anthk 5y ago

Dear Microsoft: Just clone Zukitre giving consistency and a neutral gray-ish scheme to everything. I am not an artist but media producers love the neutral gray and so does everyone else. Light themes are too bright.

65 5y ago
Tell that to news sites. I wish more news sites used containers around their content and had grey backgrounds. ESPN and NPR are two examples of news sites that use containers with grey backgrounds and I think they're both really nice to read. Not some blinding amount of pure white like most news sites.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

We live in the world of web apps and electron now, UI consistency is dead and buried because they killed it. Windows's UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern developers.

blackhaz 5y ago
Apple has killed UI consistency too. New iOS and tvOS are just a mess of endless half-broken features in a pathetic attempt to satisfy every possible use case out there. Jobs would have used napalm on the whole UI/UX team.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Maybe. Jobs also introduced some rather outrageous UI (IMHO) when he returned to Apple.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    I think a difference with Jobs at the helm though was yes, he let some really terrible UI's get into production, but he also had no problem axing them when he finally accepted they were awful. The problem we're seeing now is nobody is willing to rollback bad ideas.
cies 5y ago
The UI consistency of most Linux distros is better out of the box. 2021 the year of the Linux desktop? /s
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Ironically Linux's relative consistency is in part due to the long standing complaint about how inconsistent it was, which motivated developers to create ways to have unified theming across toolkits. Meanwhile, the rest of the world went full derp and decided that UI consistency is for boring people who like to actually get things done with a computer.

jcelerier 5y ago

paging for the next time someone complains about cross-platform solutions not following the OS design guidelines exactly

dleslie 5y ago

Windows hasn't had a consistent look and feel since Windows 95; even Win95 OSR2 brought some Active Desktop widgets and browser integration into explorer, which broke the uniformity of the UI.

kwanbix 5y ago
Windows 2000 was pretty consistent.
- luxuryballs 5y ago
  DOS was boss for consistency.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Not true. CUA-compliant software was somewhat consistent, but they were rare. Many simply implemented a half assed toolkit each with a different behaviour and appearance
  - timw4mail 5y ago
    In what way? Every single program had to make its own interface. Even in text mode, there are tons of hacks to make interfaces look different, and not much has changed with more modern CLI programs.

GiorgioG 5y ago

I'm still pissed they haven't fixed Windows Explorer's "Open with..." popup since they Metro-ified it. It used to be you could type-to-select from the list of apps...now I have to use the mouse to scroll down.

icegreentea2 5y ago

The hyper consistent UI guidelines of the 80s and 90s were born in an era when we had to convince grown human beings to use these brand new (to them) systems without feeling too embarrassed about being awful at it. Today, and perhaps for decades to come, by the time someone touches a PC, they've been screwing around on phones and tablets. They live their lives on the internet and apps, where "standard looking" often implies "cheap and knock-off", and long term consistency often implies "stale and old". They already know that nothing is consistent, and things aren't always what they seem. Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. It's fun to pick on the textboxes, but it doesn't matter. It won't stop anyone from being productive and happy using the software.

sjmulder 5y ago
> Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. You'd think having one blessed toolkit and implementing things there, once, takes much fewer resources than doing it half-heartedly over and over again.
pseudalopex 5y ago
> They already know that nothing is consistent, and things aren't always what they seem. Knowing that doesn't make it easier to use.

userbinator 5y ago

Windows Terminal colour dialog My response upon seeing that was "WTF! That looks ridiculously amateurish!" It almost feels like it's trolling me. Even the labels somehow manage to have a different size of font than the rest of the dialog, something a noob in the 90s using Visual Basic drag-and-drop to create dialogs would not produce without expending (considerable) additional effort. Ironically, Win32 has had a much more full-featured and standard dialog for choosing colours since Windows 3.x: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlgbox/color-dialog-box https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlgbox/color-...

the_only_law 5y ago
Wow I’d at least hope for a preview of the color I’m “choosing”.
- ziml77 5y ago
  In Windows Terminal? You do get that. https://i.imgur.com/nSJlAy0.png https://i.imgur.com/nSJlAy0.png Personally, I like this better simply because it has the RGB representation in hex which is so much easier to copy and paste than dealing with 3 individual textboxes.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Ah ok, I admittedly haven’t used Windows terminal much as of yet, I thought the screenshot shown in the article was majority of the dialog.

ho_schi 5y ago

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/design-principles https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu... Didn't worked well? The UI on Windows is problematic since Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't maintain actually the libraries for the UI, they just add new libraries. And developers learned that on Windows you can do whatever you want. * Win32 (C, requires experience but reliable?) * Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++, Win32) * WTL (C++, Win32) * Windows Forms (.net) * Windows Presentation Foundation (.net) * WinUI (C#, C++) Please tell me if you forgot a UI library provided by Microsoft? Gtk tries to make Gtk2, Gtk3 and Gtk4 look somewhat same and integrated applications of GNOME feel rather same. Similar for Qt and KDE and for Apple. Honestly, Firefox and LibreOffice doesn't fit perfectly. This is also the reason for Epiphany, which is using Gtk natively. https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/themes/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... I miss a HIG for TUI (*curses). The behavior of CLI applications is partially defined by GNU (-l, --long, -L) but of rourse requires reading the manual: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLin...

marcodiego 5y ago
It is a shame that GNOME has no manpower to quickly update all of its apps whenever HIG changes. Nevertheless, consistency in GNOME apps has been much better than default windowls for a long time.
RealStickman_ 5y ago
Firefox has improved a lot in recent versions in regards to following the system theme on Linux. LibreOffice is still meh. I have a friend who uses Manjaro and a lot of buttons in LO are basically invisible with the default theme.
pjmlp 5y ago
You forgot ATL, and the WinRT evolution since Windows 8. As for Gtk and Qt, don't throw rocks when the roof is made of thin glass. All Gtk+ versions require major rewrites and now they even dropped Glade, with the replacement coming who knows when. Qt, is now focusing on QML instead of C++ Widgets and also requires rewrites across versions.

garaetjjte 5y ago

Even font rendering is inconsistent: notice how Win32 widgets use subpixel antialiasing but the modern ones don't.

albertopv 5y ago

And they say linux desktop environments UI is inconsistent...

raydev 5y ago

As a longtime iOS engineer trying to prototype something on Windows, I did not realize how good I've had it while working with UIKit. I just want Microsoft to give me the one true Blessed Way to write Windows apps. Instead it seems like there are 5 true Blessed Ways, and if I want something performant I need to use 20 year old APIs? I was going to dig in to GDI+ for fast text styling performance but saw an offhand comment in some forum today that you can use DirectX for performant text rendering. How do people discover this information under normal circumstances?

kitsunesoba 5y ago
They might be the fanciest or laden with trendy buzzwords, but when it comes to building functional, pleasant to use apps, UIKit and AppKit are still hard to beat. If they became deployable on other platforms (Android and Windows/Linux, respectively) I don’t think I’d ever use anything else.
pjmlp 5y ago
Meanwhile on macOS, Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI, each with its own set of issues. We discover this information like everyone else, conference talks, blog posts, books and developer documentation.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Carbon and Catalyst didn't really overlap. And Catalyst is just for porting iPad apps.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Many educated iOS devs see Catalyst as entry in macOS development instead of learning new frameworks, no porting required.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      They complained about lack of guidance from Microsoft. Guidance from Apple is Catalyst is for porting.