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Microsoft accidentally revealed a UI design prototype for the next Windows
- zepearl 4y agoWow, with all those ads that page has hardly enough space left for the few chunks of the article... => it's funny to watch.
- Yaa101 4y agoWhat adds? I haven' t seen adds in eons... browses with NoScript
- Yorch 4y agoSo the concept of Windows 12 is to keep digging into the anti-functionality design of Windows 11.
- rolenthedeep 4y ago"my son's weird girlfriend uses a Linux, I'm pretty sure it looks like this"
- devinmcafee 4y agoThis appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons, this is exactly how OSX has the dock configured. Also the system info in the top right. I wonder if the team over at Microsoft is trying to match the look and feel of OSX in order to shorten the gap between the two operating systems and reduce friction of switching between the two.
- smoldesu 4y agoHonestly this more reminds me of the floating panels in KDE Plasma: https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-5-25-beta-is-here-with-floating-panels-new-customization-options-and-more https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-5-25-beta-is-here-with-floa...
- baeaz 4y agoIf I had to guess, I would say that the designers who have been in charge of Windows for years are twenty-something year olds who have never used Windows in their lives.
- seritools 4y agoSince the Win11 taskbar "redesign" I'm also 100% convinced of that. They also don't use mouse and keyboard it seems (touchpad/touchscreen only).
- cm2187 4y agoThat was also my guess given the massive flaws they never bothered to fix. Like search is unusable in windows. Clearly they are not consuming their own product.
- opan 4y agoRather than copying macOS, phone UIs come to mind. Your bar at the top with info, dock at the bottom of the homescreen with shortcuts. It's felt like phones were taking over for a while. You could perhaps argue that iOS and Android UI design was influenced by older Mac OS versions originally, I guess.
- wildrhythms 4y agoMy thoughts exactly. Scale the whole thing down and you have a tablet friendly UI forced upon desktop users. Yuck!
- fxtentacle 4y agoI think they just have no ideas of their own and cloning macOS is a reasonable default choice.
- dmitriid 4y ago> This appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons, It looks worse because for no reason at all they have a gap at the bottom. You can bet that it will be click-through, so you have to actually aim with your mouse instead of just bringing the mouse down tho the bottom.
- allears 4y agoWhy, oh why, must MS invent a new UI for every version? They all turn out half-baked, and are never around long enough to get completely debugged and polished.
- Sakos 4y agoI think about how great the UI could be if they just kept iterating the original instead of coming up with new shit every time and it makes me mad. It's been a lost decade in UI design for Windows and it's only become worse.
- to11mtm 4y agoWhich is a bit of a shame IMO. I'm a bit of an apologist for windows 8.1 and the 'Start Screen', even if the Store and WinUI apps were kinda gross. Sure, the start screen was a whole screen rather than a bar. But it was easy enough to organize into something useful, as opposed to the Win10 start menu which just feels too busy with a bunch of small tiles littering the screen.
- Sakos 4y agoI hated the 8.1 start screen, but I think even that could have been turned into something really cool and useful. The fact that they never iterated on that either is just mind-boggling. Only a company as entrenched and wealthy as Microsoft can afford to expend that much effort and then throw it all out a few years later, just to start over from scratch again.
- hulitu 4y agoYeah, it looks like a pandemic. Someone comes with a terrible UI (Google's material design) and next you look everybody takes it as the future.
- nocture 4y agoBecause new batch of PMs are joining and they all have promotion cycles they want to do well at
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago"We want it to look like MacOS, but without any consistency and keeping some system components that were written for Windows XP, but we haven't bothered to update yet." "It will require the lastest processors and 32 GB of RAM because OEMs need to sell computers and all of the windows components are using Electron (or similar memory-hungry web UIs)." "Teams and Loop will be fully integrated to enable maximum synergy for organizations and pro-sumers." "MSN and News will also be fully integrated to help keep users informed about current events, their favorite celebrities, and great deals that are availble when they shop with Edge and search with Bing."
- tgv 4y agoYou write it as a joke, but I recently got myself a PC with Win11Pro. First glance: brand new UI. Until you open some specific settings, or choose "more options" from a context menu, then it's Windows 10. Then you need to tweak something else, and it's suddenly it's Windows XP. And when you go to something in the device/hardware area, you're confronted with a dialog that hasn't changed since NT.
- CamperBob2 4y agoThe people who remember how the low-level stuff works are long gone. Through a combination of received wisdom and good old-fashioned operant conditioning, the devs who are left don't dare touch any of it. It's third-rail code.
- jacooper 4y agoThe more option menu is just a joke, they really couldn't bother to just fully migrate it? For all its failures, the linux desktop has one of the best if not the best design consistency out there
- rcxdude 4y agoYeah, Windows would be 100% better if they just picked one UI design approach and actually made everything work through it.
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
- Kukumber 4y agoalways more and more vertical space wasted 16:9 is the most popular aspect ratio on desktop, there is no valid reason to waste more vertical space that's poor UX
- robinsonb5 4y agos/popular/common/ I sometimes wish portrait oriented 4:3 monitors had become the dominant form.
- Jorengarenar 4y agoIn that particular case I'd say words "popular" and "common" are interchangeable.
- bombcar 4y agoI’m a bit surprised phones haven’t cause verticle 9:16 to become a bit more common.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago9:16 is too tall and therefore tiresome shite. Source: I've been using some monitors like that. It's 2:3 or 3:4 or 4:5, otherwise your neck is going to hurt. But hey, I embraced wide screens by using multi-column layouts, you should try them some time.
- bombcar 4y agoI have two ultrawides and two 4k (both 16:9 but one in portrait) along with the MacBook Pro screen - it’s nice. The key is not maximizing windows.
- nunodonato 4y agoThat's why I love Ubuntu. Keep that dock on the left, maximize vertical space. (Too bad the default GTK is a bit to loose on the padding)
- vsskanth 4y agoThey can change it to whatever as long as it's fully consistent and doesn't have menus from Windows 95. At this point I don't even know if it's possible.
- bombcar 4y agoAt this point I’d take the consistency of everything reverting to win95
- pjerem 4y agoI installed Windows 95 in a VM for fun and nostalgia recently and it struck me how consistent it was. Sure the colors and styles aged but wherever you were, buttons were buttons, settings boxes were setting boxes, windows were windows, task bar was a task bar, toolbars were toolbars … Frankly, I’d argue that changing most settings is easier in windows 95. It wasn’t perfect but it was a solid UX base with a lot of logical concepts to evolve from.
- Braini 4y agoThis ^. Its remarkable how well thought out and consistent the UI was. Been here since Win3.0 and the Win95/NT4/Win2k UI, more or less up to Windows 7 is really good even if certainly some things could be improved. Starting with 8 its just an utter mess old man yelling.
- pcurve 4y agoI thought Windows 95 menu bar was quite functional once you got used to it. https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/08/24/win95start_648.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/08/24/win95start_648.jpg
- zaptrem 4y agoUntil you accidentally overshot by a single pixel and your entire foldout of menus disappeared, forcing you to spend time going through the whole tree again (unless my memory is failing me).
- XorNot 4y agoSeeing this makes me so happy that Cinnamon on Linux exists and is what I use for work now (Windows is now a glorified gaming console to me).
- redml 4y agoits not even king of gaming anymore, proton has taken care of that
- quink 4y agoWhat should we put in the most dominant top left position? Why, that’s easy, the fucking weather. Except you know it’s not going to be the weather. It will be, mark my words, a portal for advertising and sponsored content, the revenue maker in the very top left corner. If there’s a better metaphor for an insipid lack of relevancy at all times, the weather couldn’t possibly be a more suitable fit.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoWasn't weather report on TV always a glorified ad space, unless it was an appendix to news?
- PeterStuer 4y agoIt is realy important for them because it will gently force you to provide them with the exact geolocation of your non wifi connected desktop.
- dleslie 4y agoI bet if I throw the cursor to the bottom it will miss the icons, making it less usable for non touch users.
- askiiart 4y agoThrowing the cursor to the bottom-left and top-right were one of my favorite design features in Windows... Not anymore I guess, at least for the bottom-left.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoIf they're going to block off ~20-30 pixels on the top of the screen I'd really prefer to have the option to put something more useful than weather and an omnipresent search field there. I know they're not to everyone's taste but it wouldn't hurt to have an option to replace those with a global menubar for example, because I don't need to know the weather that often and a hotkeyed search ala Spotlight, Alfred, or Microsoft's own PowerToys Run is better than a search field that's starting me in the face all the time, but a way to escape the Curse of the Hamburger Menu would be wonderful.
- solarkraft 4y agoMicrosoft's obsession with the current weather feels like someone resorted to desperate measures fill their "wasted space" quota.
- dmitriid 4y agoBesides the gap [1] I see they keep cluttering the title bar with completely random functionality to keep you guessing where the hell can I click and drag the window. This new breed of dribble-raised "designers" should be fired en-masse, but sadly they've taken over the entire industry [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34131483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34131483
- sys_64738 4y agoWas it really accidental or was this the plan all along to gauge response to the change?
- solarkraft 4y agoI'm guessing the latter. Which is why shitting on it may actually still change it!
- piersj225 4y agoIs this a good time to ask if anyone has some good reasons to upgrade to windows 11? ( other than getting security updates past 2025) - I would love to hear them :)
- gumboza 4y agoNo. I un-upgraded the machine I upgraded after 2 weeks. It was unbearable. Just sold it on eBay before Christmas. Only own a MacBook Pro now.
- pjerem 4y agoThe new tiling window management, when it works, is a nice tiling WM for non-nerds. Everything else is worse. I cannot see any other change from W10 that is not a downgrade, when it's not outright features or settings that disappear totally for reasons. They managed to make the start menu even worse than the W10 one which was already utmost garbage inherited from 8. At this point I’m even questioning wether they became mad of if they just want to insult users.
- rightbyte 4y agoGetting new forced updates is one of the greatest drawbacks of Win11 compared to say Win7. Security is just the excuse to push user hostile feutures down our throats by remote code execution from MS servers.
- PenguinCoder 4y agoWindows 7 was peak Windows. Sane enough defaults, power user settings still accessible _and respected_, didn't have ads or run electron everything. If MS would've stopped fucking changing everything, but increasing security instead, it would still be king and not losing market share. Instead we have this Win 11 bullshit, forced down your throat everything, because MS knows better than YOU. While it continues to be bloated and doesn't do what you want or actually need.
- kyleee 4y agoI also came to quite like the aero UI. Indeed Win 7 was a delight
- pygar 4y agoIt looks like they want to replace the desktop metaphor over time. I bet Windows will eventually resemble a fullscreen MS Teams.
- nerdjon 4y agoI can't wait to have this live alongside the last 6 Windows new UI languages in various incomplete ways (7? Can go pre-XP anymore?) I don't understand Microsoft insistence on introducing a brand new design language this often. Just make one and consolidate everything under it. Also... holy hell does that scream Mac with the icons on the top right and the dock that isnt a dock on the bottom.
- rolenthedeep 4y agoJust open device manager, or regedit. You'll be right back in windows 98
- jitl 4y agoAll the phones look like that now, too
- petilon 4y agoMicrosoft is a new company since Satya Nadella took over. But one thing hasn't changed: shameless, mindless copying. If they copied well then that would be one thing. But they don't copy well either. In Windows 10 (and 11 too) if you resize a window by dragging the bottom border, the bottom of the window does not quite touch the taskbar: there is a few pixels of gap, which is just a waste. I didn't understand why they did that... until I realized that's because MacOS has that too. If a chimpanzee views a person perform a series of superfluous actions, along with one single necessary action, in order to obtain a piece of food, the chimpanzee will skip the superfluous action, and perform only the necessary one. In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones [1]. Microsoft isn't being as smart as a chimpanzee in their copying. [1] https://youtu.be/JwwclyVYTkk https://youtu.be/JwwclyVYTkk
- solarkraft 4y agoFurther yet, most companies trying to be like Apple copy the superfluous actions but not the necessary one. You get the wasted space, but not the "doesn't crash and glitch around all the time".
- gumboza 4y agoApologies for this alcohol fuelled rage comment but for fucks sake Microsoft just stop redesigning shit and finish the last 11 redesigns of windows, fix all the cruft hanging out everywhere and start giving a crap about your clients from a security and attention perspective. We are not cows to be milked for upsells, telemetry and ad revenue. We are also not caged animals to experiment on. We are paying customers who need a professional grade operating system that isn't a tragic waste of cash, time, resources, compute, bandwidth and attention. And no Windows 11 is not it. Nadella was treated like the second coming of Jesus on here a few years back. Turns out he's another one trick capitalist trying to push up revenue of a dying turd by sprinkling glitter on it and selling it to you monthly while pocketing whatever he can make out of your data.
- hulitu 4y ago> We are not cows to be milked for upsells, telemetry and ad revenue. We are also not caged animals to experiment on. Microsoft would like to disagree. They don't care about fixing bugs or ensuring consistency. They only care that telemetry keeps flowing.
- allendoerfer 4y agoSo Windows 10/11 is supposed to have a finished look at this point? Just polish the damn thing and finish what you started with WSL1 instead of suddenly adding advertisement popups and sports news into a released product and creating new superficial design changes and notification features for the casual user in each and every version. I as many others am required to use this for work, because you have already won so many platforms, the most recent being Teams. Why not just polish it, so we actually WANT to use it, so casual users would join us, too? Isn't that exactly what Apple did with the Mac?
- jiggawatts 4y agoAhh… the new Notepad. It used to be a ~60kb executable that worked even on open files, enormous log files, or on servers on their last legs due to memory exhaustion. The new version takes a solid second to start up, can’t open a one gigabyte text file in under a minute, and can’t even align tabs and spaces despite using a fixed-width font. It’s the simplest text editor that is so slow that its menus visibly stutter and lag if you simply move your mouse. If Gates was still in charge he’d have summarily fired that entire team. If you want nice things, you can’t have nice people in charge.
- leeches 4y agoTotally killed the Taskbar. Funny that they’ve gradually been transforming the best part of Windows UI into the worst part of MacOS UI.
- solarkraft 4y agoI somewhat like the macOS dock. But eventually, on KDE, with all the freedom in the world, I realized that it just makes sense to have everything integrated. Maybe they realized during a QA meeting that it was too good for their standards.
- 5tefan 4y agoGot a new Laptop. Runs Win 11. UI ugly as hell and doesn't make much sense. Impressive feat to find ways to further downgrade from there.
- solarkraft 4y agoMy god, Microsoft. I used to be a Windows hater for the longest time, emulating the macOS dock on my Linux desktop. I still don't like Windows but have eventually realized that the task bar just makes sense. Guess that's why it needs to be made worse! First the start button shifting depending on how many apps you have pinned, now the whole task bar in the middle of the screen. I can only congratulate. Maybe they could try placing it diagonally.
- ksec 4y agoI am wondering, if making it more macOS like may not prevent people switching to Mac, but will accelerate the trend since it is ( on the surface ) similar.
- durnygbur 4y ago"How much RAM it will need?" Yes. "How much telemetry it will use?" Yes.
- andrewstuart 4y agoThe Windows that would get me excited would be one stripped down to its absolute minimum, only one way to do things, all the old garbage and centuries of attics and basements cleared out. A modular operating system that could run in old machines and new, with the registry removed. I wonder if the best windows won’t turn out to be SteamOS. I switched to MacOS after many many years of windows and one of the things I love about macOS is all the configuration is in one place, stuff isn’t duplicated in multiple user interfaces, there’s only one UI style for macOS, not random bits of UI cruft accumulated over 30 years randomly appearing everywhere. macOS knows what it is. Windows seems to have had a lifetime of personal identity crisis.
- Thorentis 4y agoA Mac OS clone without the same level of polish or consistency. Gross. I switched to Linux Mint years ago using Cinamon as the DE. Many aspects inspired by Windows, which sadly peaked nearly 30 years ago. Windows will have a very low value proposition soon with the way Proton (Linux gaming) is going.
- IYasha 4y agoI hope those cut-proof rounded corners won't require more than 2 gigs of VRAM? Oh, who am I lying to... I don't care, I'm on KDE :D (and Win7 in dual-boot)
- grandpoobah 4y agoAs a person who primarily uses Windows, I want my Mac's dock to be more like the taskbar. Not the other way round.