6 ms·

Raymond Chens blog and book (The Old New Thing) is an absolute delight! I always had a big respect for how intuitive the Windows 95 GUI is, and reading his des

by dusted 2y ago

Raymond Chens blog and book (The Old New Thing) is an absolute delight! I always had a big respect for how intuitive the Windows 95 GUI is, and reading his description of the thoughts and methods behind its inception, it's no surprise that it became so good. It seems like Microsoft was extremely pragmatic and reasonable in many of their endeavors back then. It's a wonder how it degenerated into the absolute unit of sh*t that is modern Windows (even if the filesystem and kernel is arguably a lot better, everything on top seems to be developed by an army of interns)

rqtwteye 2y ago
Army of interns should about right. I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum. But yes, Windows 95 to Windows 2000 were a huge jump in usability. From Windows 8 on and the “Metro” interface they threw it all away.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum I get the same feeling from Google's android and Pixels. Lots of neat features keep getting added, but the SW and HW issues that end up in the final product make it seem like an incredibly amateurish effort for such a wealthy company hiring top talent.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    I think they rotate the interns every year. That will explain the GUI^WUX advances. /s
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      UI/UX keep getting shittier over time is an industry wide phenomenon not a Google exclusive one. To me everything kinda peaked in late 2000's and has been on a downwards slope ever since the mobile became the dominant platform so everything from desktop PCs to cars had to look and function like a phone.
      - treve 2y ago
        Perhaps controversial but I think the ability to ship continuously is also a factor. You just have to pass and fix the things with the most complaints after. A holistic view on the general user experience will never make it to the top of a pile now.
        rqtwteye 2y ago
        I think yearly releases were much better. I feel a lot of sites and software now have constant change you can’t keep up with and often the change doesn’t really improve anything. Reddit would be a good example. I constantly have buttons disappear and rep appear or move around. Same in YouTube. Much friction for no benefit.
  - JohnClark1337 2y ago
    Also a product of the mentality that you get ahead in your career by adding new features, not by maintaining existing features. Maintenance is boring and the new kids straight out of college don't want to do the boring thing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
andai 2y ago
>filesystem is a lot better In my tests it was 6-7x slower than on Linux (in VirtualBox on Windows). I assume by better you mean more features? On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code. Granted it doesn't take much time but there's this recurring thing of "my computer being forced to do things I do not want it to do." I also — and this is my favorite, or perhaps least favorite one — ran Windows XP inside VirtualBox (on Windows 10). When you press Win+E in XP, an Explorer window is shown to you. It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay. Meanwhile on the host OS (10), there is about half a second of delay, at which point a window is drawn, but then you can enjoy a little old school powerpoint animation as you watch each UI control being painted one by one. (Don't get me started on the start menu!) Twenty years of progress!
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Twenty years of progress! Well, it does have more ports normally open and starts connecting to MS as soon as possible, so yes, it is a progress. /s
- jraph 2y ago
  > I assume by better you mean more features? I would guess better on current Windows than on Windows 95. I don't know about faster, but NTFS is most probably more reliable than FAT32. And also more features of course, and fewer limitations. At least the file size limit (4 Gb) and ownership / rights metadata (ACL).
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Depends how you use it. If you are handling a stupendous number of small files (say doing an npm build) then metadata operations are terribly expensive on Windows because it is expensive to look up security credentials. Maven is not too different from npm in how it works except instead of installing 70,000 small files it installs 70 moderate sized JAR files that are really ZIP files that encase the little files. It works better in Windows than npm. Npm got popular and they had to face down the problem that people would try building the Linux kernel under WSL and get awful times. Microsoft knows it has to win the hearts and minds of developers and they believe in JS, TS and Visual Studio code so they’ve tried all sorts of half-baked things to speed up file I/O for developers.
cpursley 2y ago
Interesting take, I feel like the current iteration of the Windows UI is actually really good. Microsoft seems to be continually tweaking and improving it.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  With heavy tweaking, 11 is okay... but the standard right click menu is a disaster for power users. And many other settings like the start menu they destroyed.
  - EricE 2y ago
    Open Shell has been a first install for me since Windows 7.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Tweaking, yes. Improving, not so much. If anything, things have been regressing lately - for example, we were able to make taskbar vertical ever since it became a thing in Win7, and it makes perfect sense to do so on any landscape-oriented display for most efficient use of display space. The new redesigned taskbar in Win11 killed that option outright.
red_admiral 2y ago
I've heard tales of when working at MS was the job everyone in "dev" aspired to, like for Google and the like in their heyday.
Sylamore 2y ago
I know at one point Microsoft and IBM both invested significantly in studying UX research. It doesn't feel like that's happening or if it is, I guess I must be drifting out of touch with what's considered intuitive in user interfaces. It's not just MS either, I feel like the ability to discover what you can do in an app/site any more is hidden by aesthetic choices over functional ones. I remember being pulled into user surveys and usability studies while wandering the mall back in the day and being given series of tasks to accomplish on various iterations of a windows GUI (in the Windows 9x era) while they observed, and then paid $100 for my time for each one I participated in.
- int_19h 2y ago
  These kinds of studies are still very much there at MS, and not just for Windows. The problem, in my experience, is that when some manager really wants to do something, they'll find a way to justify that with a study. Pretty much every UX decision that ended up being universally panned later had some study or another backing it as the best thing since sliced bread.

by dusted 2y ago

rqtwteye 2y ago

Army of interns should about right. I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum. But yes, Windows 95 to Windows 2000 were a huge jump in usability. From Windows 8 on and the “Metro” interface they threw it all away.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum I get the same feeling from Google's android and Pixels. Lots of neat features keep getting added, but the SW and HW issues that end up in the final product make it seem like an incredibly amateurish effort for such a wealthy company hiring top talent.
- hulitu 2y ago
  I think they rotate the interns every year. That will explain the GUI^WUX advances. /s
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    UI/UX keep getting shittier over time is an industry wide phenomenon not a Google exclusive one. To me everything kinda peaked in late 2000's and has been on a downwards slope ever since the mobile became the dominant platform so everything from desktop PCs to cars had to look and function like a phone.
    - treve 2y ago
      Perhaps controversial but I think the ability to ship continuously is also a factor. You just have to pass and fix the things with the most complaints after. A holistic view on the general user experience will never make it to the top of a pile now.
      - rqtwteye 2y ago
        I think yearly releases were much better. I feel a lot of sites and software now have constant change you can’t keep up with and often the change doesn’t really improve anything. Reddit would be a good example. I constantly have buttons disappear and rep appear or move around. Same in YouTube. Much friction for no benefit.
- JohnClark1337 2y ago
  Also a product of the mentality that you get ahead in your career by adding new features, not by maintaining existing features. Maintenance is boring and the new kids straight out of college don't want to do the boring thing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

andai 2y ago

>filesystem is a lot better In my tests it was 6-7x slower than on Linux (in VirtualBox on Windows). I assume by better you mean more features? On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code. Granted it doesn't take much time but there's this recurring thing of "my computer being forced to do things I do not want it to do." I also — and this is my favorite, or perhaps least favorite one — ran Windows XP inside VirtualBox (on Windows 10). When you press Win+E in XP, an Explorer window is shown to you. It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay. Meanwhile on the host OS (10), there is about half a second of delay, at which point a window is drawn, but then you can enjoy a little old school powerpoint animation as you watch each UI control being painted one by one. (Don't get me started on the start menu!) Twenty years of progress!

hulitu 2y ago
> Twenty years of progress! Well, it does have more ports normally open and starts connecting to MS as soon as possible, so yes, it is a progress. /s
jraph 2y ago
> I assume by better you mean more features? I would guess better on current Windows than on Windows 95. I don't know about faster, but NTFS is most probably more reliable than FAT32. And also more features of course, and fewer limitations. At least the file size limit (4 Gb) and ownership / rights metadata (ACL).
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Depends how you use it. If you are handling a stupendous number of small files (say doing an npm build) then metadata operations are terribly expensive on Windows because it is expensive to look up security credentials. Maven is not too different from npm in how it works except instead of installing 70,000 small files it installs 70 moderate sized JAR files that are really ZIP files that encase the little files. It works better in Windows than npm. Npm got popular and they had to face down the problem that people would try building the Linux kernel under WSL and get awful times. Microsoft knows it has to win the hearts and minds of developers and they believe in JS, TS and Visual Studio code so they’ve tried all sorts of half-baked things to speed up file I/O for developers.

cpursley 2y ago

Interesting take, I feel like the current iteration of the Windows UI is actually really good. Microsoft seems to be continually tweaking and improving it.

heraldgeezer 2y ago
With heavy tweaking, 11 is okay... but the standard right click menu is a disaster for power users. And many other settings like the start menu they destroyed.
- EricE 2y ago
  Open Shell has been a first install for me since Windows 7.
int_19h 2y ago
Tweaking, yes. Improving, not so much. If anything, things have been regressing lately - for example, we were able to make taskbar vertical ever since it became a thing in Win7, and it makes perfect sense to do so on any landscape-oriented display for most efficient use of display space. The new redesigned taskbar in Win11 killed that option outright.

red_admiral 2y ago

I've heard tales of when working at MS was the job everyone in "dev" aspired to, like for Google and the like in their heyday.

Sylamore 2y ago

I know at one point Microsoft and IBM both invested significantly in studying UX research. It doesn't feel like that's happening or if it is, I guess I must be drifting out of touch with what's considered intuitive in user interfaces. It's not just MS either, I feel like the ability to discover what you can do in an app/site any more is hidden by aesthetic choices over functional ones. I remember being pulled into user surveys and usability studies while wandering the mall back in the day and being given series of tasks to accomplish on various iterations of a windows GUI (in the Windows 9x era) while they observed, and then paid $100 for my time for each one I participated in.

int_19h 2y ago
These kinds of studies are still very much there at MS, and not just for Windows. The problem, in my experience, is that when some manager really wants to do something, they'll find a way to justify that with a study. Pretty much every UX decision that ended up being universally panned later had some study or another backing it as the best thing since sliced bread.