5 ms·

Maybe I'm just getting old, but Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design. The menu bar

by biofox 2y ago

Maybe I'm just getting old, but Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design. The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps. I didn't have to contend with four different version of the file browser to open a file, or "Show more options" on right-click to get a non-idiot-proof context menu. Icons were high contrast, there were text descriptions and tools tips (instead of cryptic grey-on-grey icons), short-cut combinations were actually included in the menus, and almost every application had a help file! Can we go back to that, please?

ktosobcy 2y ago
> The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps. Thank the "web-devs"... instead of having native looking apps that use OS controls/widgets they want to push dumb html/css/js to "unlease their creativity"... I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you. I want all my apps to use the same widgets and paradigme and look the same...
- DCH3416 2y ago
  Yeah but look how _cool_ those css effects look. What, people actually use keyboards to navigate?
- vundercind 2y ago
  I try not to think about the collective time and frustration lost to companies wanting their native apps to be "on brand" and cross-platform consistent rather than native. A bunch of extra work to make it that way. A bunch of extra work to maintain it, any place dumb "look and feel" shit like specially-animated buttons or whatever made it fragile. Then on the other side, 99% of the time it's worse to use than if they'd at least mostly stuck with native widgets, so wastes time and causes frustration among users, and then there's the special case of that for accessibility, which is often a true shit-show. All because the marketing suite can't stand not getting their fingers in something. I want to see the fucking study that says having the buttons on iOS the same shape as the ones on the website adds any number of dollars to the bottom line. C'mon, this is important enough to spend a bunch of money on, slow development, and also make UX worse, must have a good reason for it, right? Surely it's not just an exec who's never done the actual job pushing things for vanity purposes, or a variety of roles padding their portfolios, or needing to market this to toddler-like C-suiters inside the company on some damn powerpoint, right? LOL.
  - layer8 2y ago
    It’s all such a waste of human life time, an actual tragedy.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they did in, say, the '90s. Hell, fast food chains, too. It's like some time in the '00s marketing departments across the board received a much greater mandate and I've got this funny feeling that only some of that, and maybe not most of it, is really justified by added value in dollar terms. But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.
    - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
      I feel the same way, I feel despair when I think about all of the time wasted for such trivial bullshit. But then I'm told I'm being dramatic and to get back to my Jira stories. Line must go up, huh?
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    While I do think native controls are the better choice, I disagree that companies even though it's harder. They do it mostly because it's easier: write once in JS, push to web, mobile and electron on desktop and be done with it.
- exe34 2y ago
  > I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you. Amen.
- dmit 2y ago
  Exactly! Let's go back to the times when things were consistent! Remember when you couldn't tell AIM from ICQ from MSN Messenger from Skype because they looked and behaved consistently? Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    I think they were referring to internal consistency? Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.
    - Dwedit 2y ago
      "Layered Windows" is how an application can have a window which is not the typical rectangular shape, such as the "Head" skin for Windows Media Player. That would be the "crazy things" that apps were allowed to do.
      - andrewshadura 2y ago
        That's just a mask applied to the window, app were always allowed to do that on Windows and still are.
- myself248 2y ago
  Exactly! We spent years training reflexes and keyboard shortcuts, only to have window borders change appearance (and get thinner!), menus rearrange, controls vanish unless moused-over, etc. It's an insult.
zamadatix 2y ago
I doubt we'll see as tight consistency again but the cause and effect more being Windows XP released 6 years after the taskbar debuted in Windows whereas now there is closer to 30 years of stuff expecting to still run the same as it did back then rather than a change of goals. I still wouldn't mind if it were a bit better on the consistency anyways though...
fourfour3 2y ago
Honestly, Windows 2000 UI with the right click menu on the start button from Windows 10 onwards would be a near perfect Windows UI for me! I know the 3D effects are considered dated now, but I found them very useful from a separation PoV.
mikepurvis 2y ago
Windows 2000 was this for me, but it's true that you could opt out of the bubble gum skin and get a more conventional look from XP if you preferred that.
- layer8 2y ago
  This was still largely true with Windows 7. Starting with Windows 8 the UI story really went to hell.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Okay, that's good to know. I was a Mac user from 2007 to 2018, so I missed the entirety of the Windows 7/8 generation— going directly from XP to 10.
    - layer8 2y ago
      10 was a bit of an improvement over 8, so at least you skipped the worst with 8. I haven’t had the heart to install 11 yet though.
      - mikepurvis 2y ago
        Like most filthy casuals, I don't think I'm a particularly "deep" user of the OS. It's basically background chrome for web browsers and terminal windows into WSL and SSH sessions. To the extent that the OS does anything at all, I'm usually just mildly annoyed, like it signing be out of my work VPN or forgetting how my monitors are arranged. Or eating the battery when it should be sleeping (though I understand there's been some historical finger-pointing between Dell and Microsoft about whose actual fault those issues are).
DCH3416 2y ago
> Icons were high contrast Seriously. Who demonized having legible color icons in exchange for blurry grayscale icons?
- layer8 2y ago
  Ironically, having to support high-DPI displays destroyed having nice icons.
  - DCH3416 2y ago
    That's true. Right up until you look at Haiku and its vector icons. But I get it. Everyone has to look the same.
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    I think that’s true. I recently installed Windows 2000, also for nostalgia, and marveled at the icons. I like the Windows 3.11 (not so much the 3.0) icons even more. They have such a charm and special style that only works through their low pixel count, but if you would pixelate icons today it would just look gimmicky and out of place with the rest of the OS.
    - DCH3416 2y ago
      It depends on the design of the icon. You generally can't scale Windows 3.1 graphics to higher resolutions without it looking like it's lacking details. The charm was with what you couldn't see and your mind could fill in the blanks.
      - anyfoo 2y ago
        Yep, that’s what I mean. Art comes from restriction, and the designers at Microsoft did really charming stuff with what they had to work with. I still vividly remember such simple but delightful things as the Excel icon, or the icon of a stylized 386 processor for the System category in Control Panel.
tetris11 2y ago
This may be the nostalgia factor, but XP was genuinely one of the best operating systems I've ever run. I had the "Student Edition" and you could trim down all the services to the point that you would have a running OS using just 18 processes. Linux at the time could not compete with that. (Of course, things have changed a lot since then).
- exe34 2y ago
  When was this? I used VectorLinux on a 600MHz celeron with 64MB RAM for a year at uni, and I could tell you what every process was doing there - everything else had to go.
  - written-beyond 2y ago
    Blog post please
    - exe34 2y ago
      I don't really blog, and I've forgotten all the juicy details at this point. It was an old thinkpad that just barely booted up windows ME and then couldn't do anything useful. VectorLinux was a really great match for it, I think they claimed to have fiddled with the kde libraries at the source level and ripped out a bunch of things to make it all snappier - I don't know to what extent that's true, but that crappy little laptop allowed me to run firefox, openoffice, skype, matlab and latex (not all at the same time - at most two) for my first year of uni.
      - written-beyond 2y ago
        Hearing about these esoteric Linux distros and their lore is always interesting. I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.
        2y ago
biddendidden 2y ago
> Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design. Ever used Win 7? Way better, and not a candy UI.
- evoke4908 2y ago
  Aero is like the definition of candy
  - layer8 2y ago
    Not of candy (like XP), but of eye candy maybe.
- fourteenfour 2y ago
  What? I really like Win 7 but it is for sure one of the best early examples of a "candy" ui. The close button looks like a jolly rancher and everything is glassy looking. If you are talking about "eye-candy" it also stretches far into that territory with title bar blurs, drop shadows and transparency effects across the OS.
josephscott 2y ago
This, especially if you turned off the extra UI bits, under performance options.
theamk 2y ago
Sure, just get any of the lightweight linuxes. Classical toolbar, good contrast, captions... Some apps do have inconsistent shortcuts, but many don't. I type this comment from old Ubuntu Mate system, but my next system is going to be Debian-based.
mipsi 2y ago
My inner voice of Nostalgia just whispered: All the gorgeous pixels gone with the wind.
throwawee 2y ago
You're looking at it through rose tinted lenses. I remember it getting blasted for its Fisher Price theme and ugly new Start Menu and Control Panel redesigns. Remember the search dog? If Microsoft had a champion of UI consistency I think it'd be Windows 2000, but I wouldn't know from experience. I was given a Windows ME prebuilt.
GeekyBear 2y ago
For me, Windows 2000 and Classic MacOS were high water mark of UI design. After that, change for the sake of change started ti creep in and then accelerated. Windows XP had the Luna UI with its Fisher Price color scheme and OSX moved to the lickabke Aqua UI.

by biofox 2y ago

ktosobcy 2y ago

> The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps. Thank the "web-devs"... instead of having native looking apps that use OS controls/widgets they want to push dumb html/css/js to "unlease their creativity"... I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you. I want all my apps to use the same widgets and paradigme and look the same...

DCH3416 2y ago
Yeah but look how _cool_ those css effects look. What, people actually use keyboards to navigate?
vundercind 2y ago
I try not to think about the collective time and frustration lost to companies wanting their native apps to be "on brand" and cross-platform consistent rather than native. A bunch of extra work to make it that way. A bunch of extra work to maintain it, any place dumb "look and feel" shit like specially-animated buttons or whatever made it fragile. Then on the other side, 99% of the time it's worse to use than if they'd at least mostly stuck with native widgets, so wastes time and causes frustration among users, and then there's the special case of that for accessibility, which is often a true shit-show. All because the marketing suite can't stand not getting their fingers in something. I want to see the fucking study that says having the buttons on iOS the same shape as the ones on the website adds any number of dollars to the bottom line. C'mon, this is important enough to spend a bunch of money on, slow development, and also make UX worse, must have a good reason for it, right? Surely it's not just an exec who's never done the actual job pushing things for vanity purposes, or a variety of roles padding their portfolios, or needing to market this to toddler-like C-suiters inside the company on some damn powerpoint, right? LOL.
- layer8 2y ago
  It’s all such a waste of human life time, an actual tragedy.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they did in, say, the '90s. Hell, fast food chains, too. It's like some time in the '00s marketing departments across the board received a much greater mandate and I've got this funny feeling that only some of that, and maybe not most of it, is really justified by added value in dollar terms. But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.
  - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
    I feel the same way, I feel despair when I think about all of the time wasted for such trivial bullshit. But then I'm told I'm being dramatic and to get back to my Jira stories. Line must go up, huh?
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  While I do think native controls are the better choice, I disagree that companies even though it's harder. They do it mostly because it's easier: write once in JS, push to web, mobile and electron on desktop and be done with it.
exe34 2y ago
> I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you. Amen.
dmit 2y ago
Exactly! Let's go back to the times when things were consistent! Remember when you couldn't tell AIM from ICQ from MSN Messenger from Skype because they looked and behaved consistently? Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  I think they were referring to internal consistency? Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.
  - Dwedit 2y ago
    "Layered Windows" is how an application can have a window which is not the typical rectangular shape, such as the "Head" skin for Windows Media Player. That would be the "crazy things" that apps were allowed to do.
    - andrewshadura 2y ago
      That's just a mask applied to the window, app were always allowed to do that on Windows and still are.
myself248 2y ago
Exactly! We spent years training reflexes and keyboard shortcuts, only to have window borders change appearance (and get thinner!), menus rearrange, controls vanish unless moused-over, etc. It's an insult.

zamadatix 2y ago

I doubt we'll see as tight consistency again but the cause and effect more being Windows XP released 6 years after the taskbar debuted in Windows whereas now there is closer to 30 years of stuff expecting to still run the same as it did back then rather than a change of goals. I still wouldn't mind if it were a bit better on the consistency anyways though...

fourfour3 2y ago

Honestly, Windows 2000 UI with the right click menu on the start button from Windows 10 onwards would be a near perfect Windows UI for me! I know the 3D effects are considered dated now, but I found them very useful from a separation PoV.

mikepurvis 2y ago

Windows 2000 was this for me, but it's true that you could opt out of the bubble gum skin and get a more conventional look from XP if you preferred that.

layer8 2y ago
This was still largely true with Windows 7. Starting with Windows 8 the UI story really went to hell.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Okay, that's good to know. I was a Mac user from 2007 to 2018, so I missed the entirety of the Windows 7/8 generation— going directly from XP to 10.
  - layer8 2y ago
    10 was a bit of an improvement over 8, so at least you skipped the worst with 8. I haven’t had the heart to install 11 yet though.
    - mikepurvis 2y ago
      Like most filthy casuals, I don't think I'm a particularly "deep" user of the OS. It's basically background chrome for web browsers and terminal windows into WSL and SSH sessions. To the extent that the OS does anything at all, I'm usually just mildly annoyed, like it signing be out of my work VPN or forgetting how my monitors are arranged. Or eating the battery when it should be sleeping (though I understand there's been some historical finger-pointing between Dell and Microsoft about whose actual fault those issues are).

DCH3416 2y ago

> Icons were high contrast Seriously. Who demonized having legible color icons in exchange for blurry grayscale icons?

layer8 2y ago
Ironically, having to support high-DPI displays destroyed having nice icons.
- DCH3416 2y ago
  That's true. Right up until you look at Haiku and its vector icons. But I get it. Everyone has to look the same.
- anyfoo 2y ago
  I think that’s true. I recently installed Windows 2000, also for nostalgia, and marveled at the icons. I like the Windows 3.11 (not so much the 3.0) icons even more. They have such a charm and special style that only works through their low pixel count, but if you would pixelate icons today it would just look gimmicky and out of place with the rest of the OS.
  - DCH3416 2y ago
    It depends on the design of the icon. You generally can't scale Windows 3.1 graphics to higher resolutions without it looking like it's lacking details. The charm was with what you couldn't see and your mind could fill in the blanks.
    - anyfoo 2y ago
      Yep, that’s what I mean. Art comes from restriction, and the designers at Microsoft did really charming stuff with what they had to work with. I still vividly remember such simple but delightful things as the Excel icon, or the icon of a stylized 386 processor for the System category in Control Panel.

tetris11 2y ago

This may be the nostalgia factor, but XP was genuinely one of the best operating systems I've ever run. I had the "Student Edition" and you could trim down all the services to the point that you would have a running OS using just 18 processes. Linux at the time could not compete with that. (Of course, things have changed a lot since then).

exe34 2y ago
When was this? I used VectorLinux on a 600MHz celeron with 64MB RAM for a year at uni, and I could tell you what every process was doing there - everything else had to go.
- written-beyond 2y ago
  Blog post please
  - exe34 2y ago
    I don't really blog, and I've forgotten all the juicy details at this point. It was an old thinkpad that just barely booted up windows ME and then couldn't do anything useful. VectorLinux was a really great match for it, I think they claimed to have fiddled with the kde libraries at the source level and ripped out a bunch of things to make it all snappier - I don't know to what extent that's true, but that crappy little laptop allowed me to run firefox, openoffice, skype, matlab and latex (not all at the same time - at most two) for my first year of uni.
    - written-beyond 2y ago
      Hearing about these esoteric Linux distros and their lore is always interesting. I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.
      - 2y ago

biddendidden 2y ago

> Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design. Ever used Win 7? Way better, and not a candy UI.

evoke4908 2y ago
Aero is like the definition of candy
- layer8 2y ago
  Not of candy (like XP), but of eye candy maybe.
fourteenfour 2y ago
What? I really like Win 7 but it is for sure one of the best early examples of a "candy" ui. The close button looks like a jolly rancher and everything is glassy looking. If you are talking about "eye-candy" it also stretches far into that territory with title bar blurs, drop shadows and transparency effects across the OS.

josephscott 2y ago

This, especially if you turned off the extra UI bits, under performance options.

theamk 2y ago

Sure, just get any of the lightweight linuxes. Classical toolbar, good contrast, captions... Some apps do have inconsistent shortcuts, but many don't. I type this comment from old Ubuntu Mate system, but my next system is going to be Debian-based.

mipsi 2y ago

My inner voice of Nostalgia just whispered: All the gorgeous pixels gone with the wind.

throwawee 2y ago

You're looking at it through rose tinted lenses. I remember it getting blasted for its Fisher Price theme and ugly new Start Menu and Control Panel redesigns. Remember the search dog? If Microsoft had a champion of UI consistency I think it'd be Windows 2000, but I wouldn't know from experience. I was given a Windows ME prebuilt.

GeekyBear 2y ago

For me, Windows 2000 and Classic MacOS were high water mark of UI design. After that, change for the sake of change started ti creep in and then accelerated. Windows XP had the Luna UI with its Fisher Price color scheme and OSX moved to the lickabke Aqua UI.