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Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)
- kristopolous 11mo agoWindows 1 had hamburger menus, originally from Xerox Star. Kinda cool
- adastra22 11mo agoI cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.
- spankibalt 11mo agoIt is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
- somat 11mo agoIt was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
- dpark 11mo agoYes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible. It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
- shmeeed 11mo ago> I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth. cough Liquid Glass cough
- tomrod 11mo agoDark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
- sedatk 11mo agoBlue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.
- adastra22 11mo agoThat is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
- dpark 11mo agoOf course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
- ahartmetz 11mo agoI hated XP's style at the time, too, and switched to the classic style. I also hated the look of Vista and 7, but they weren't my problem anymore because I'd switched to Linux.
- CableNinja 11mo agoThe upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it. Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
- dpark 11mo agoWas it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
- saratogacx 11mo agoAt launch you had 3 themes (blue, green, and silver) as well as classic where you had all the customization of Win2k's settings. Later on (SP3-ish) you got a zone orange/dark theme which was nice. To do more you either used WindowBlinds or just grabbed a patched UxTheme32.dll which would accept unsigned theme files. Once you did that you had an almost silly number of options to try out from various web sites.
- b-karl 11mo agoI started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu… Also reminds me of the layers of UI versions still present in Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754
- derleyici 11mo ago8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
- zootboy 11mo agoBut this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
- dijit 11mo agoWindows 11 is far from the best at that though. It doesn’t even look good. I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic. If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
- mghackerlady 11mo agoone thing I think windows 11 does well is the icon design. The kinda glassy look they have is the perfect middle ground between the glossy hyperrealistic icons of yesteryear and the bland lifeless minimalist icons that became common after ios 7
- CuriousRose 11mo agoTaste is objective. It is only subjective among the tasteless. The OS has a purpose to be efficient and pleasant - anything that interferes with either is not a matter of taste, but a matter of poor execution. Sure we have preferences, but truly beautiful things are hard to consider they are only so due to a matter of preference, and not objectivity.
- derleyici 11mo agoFair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
- sneakinsnake 11mo agoCooked take.
- nehalem 11mo agoTo me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.
- bloppe 11mo agoWindows 8 was a pretty big overhaul. But I agree with the author it was a most unwelcome overhaul.
- hilti 11mo agoTotally agree! Although I‘m a Mac user for a long time, I still remember that I got work done using Windows 2000. I‘d buy a license and switch back to Windows if we could get the productivity of this UI. Typing this on iOS with Liquid Glass that drives me nuts
- reddalo 11mo agoI think Windows XP did a pretty good job for the home market, making Windows appear friendly and easy to use to a wide audience (and without too many style inconstistencies). Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
- consp 11mo ago
- moooo99 11mo agoWindows 11 < Windows 10? Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
- zigzag312 11mo agoStart menu in I Windows 11 is quite bad. One things that really annoys me is how little space the start menu has for pinned shortcuts.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoYou also can no longer drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win 11, and they refuse to fix it or provide a viable alternative. It's a dealbreaker for me, and the single thing that has prevented me from updating.
- deltoidmaximus 11mo agoDoes it have any noteworthy features at all? The only one I can think of is the android emulation, which arrived late and then had support canceled. The reason its existence seems to be to kick any non-TPM supporting hardware out of the pool but they forgot even put any cheese on the rattrap.
- adithyassekhar 11mo ago11 is indeed pretty good looking. Once you use it 10 feels so clunky.
- reddalo 11mo ago11 is a step in the right direction for a modern consistent look of Windows. But there's still a long way to go; they still haven't managed to put all the system settings in a single app. And I wonder if they'll ever be able to get rid of the Control Panel; too many legacy applications need it.
- galad87 11mo agoI assume there is a reason for leaving out Windows Me.
- nevada_scout 11mo agoFrom the article: > Note: I am skipping Windows Millennium Edition (Me) because while it had changes under the hood, visually it is pretty much Windows 98 Third Edition.
- hiccuphippo 11mo agoI remember it had a default black bar with a gradient and bold yellow text for the title. Found a video of it: https://youtu.be/nVZW8i9-92U https://youtu.be/nVZW8i9-92U
- steve1977 11mo agoWe don't talk about Windows Me.
- ANNOFlo 11mo agoAs someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun! Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
- bigstrat2003 11mo agoI didn't grow up with Vista and I loved the look too. IMO it was by far the best looking version of Windows they ever produced. Win7 was pretty good too, though I preferred the look of Vista. The transparency on stuff looked (and still looks) really awesome.
- sedatk 11mo ago> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP. Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
- jumpocelot 11mo agoI think Windows XP should have shipped with the Watercolor theme, although Luna does a better job of setting it apart from previous versions
- karhuton 11mo agoGive the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot. It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices. Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components. The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great. I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations. - Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window: These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
- sedatk 11mo agoI agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
- thefz 11mo agoI still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
- dpark 11mo agoComing from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true. Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
- RankingMember 11mo agoSo much so that one of the first things I do in fresh 10 and 11 installs is turn off all the transitions/whiz-bang visual effects to try to get back to the pure snappy functionality of that era of Windows.
- neilalexander 11mo ago30 years ago, Microsoft was writing books that were hundreds of pages long detailing not just how to build effective and consistent user interfaces but also with explanations from user-centric research as to why those things mattered. Every user interface component carefully considered and rationalised, every reusable pattern carefully reinforced, all to build a desktop where interactive elements look interactive, skills learned in one application pretty reliably carry across to others, and avoiding dead ends that result in user panic. Windows 2000 was the last vaguely-consumer-oriented Microsoft operating system that was built with any of those lessons in mind. Everything they have developed since then has strayed further and further from those principles. With Windows 11 and their "modern" application lineup, it is like they have absolute amnesia about ever having done any of this. It is clear as day that nobody inside Microsoft has ever gone back and read one of those books in the last decade or two, nor is there any evidence that they spend any amount of time researching and testing their products with real users or trying to understand the ways that users get stuck or fatigued. All of the user interface consistency is gone thanks to the half-dozen competing/failed UI toolkits and webview-driven applications scattered everywhere. Visual cues and interactivity hints are either gone or are no longer reliable. You can't even tell when something in Windows will allow you to drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste or even what new and horrifying form the Open/Save/Print dialogs are going to take in any given application. "Disastrous" isn't a strong enough word for it.
- rchard2scout 11mo agoIn hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something.
- dijit 11mo agoI agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time. I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility. Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
- strongpigeon 11mo agoI think there is a lot that was well done in the Vista UI, but I find the gradients on the buttons and the task bar to be too hard.
- xixixao 11mo agoI like the “did it improve or regress” angle. I hope it’s not controversial if I say that in the Apple world, Liquid Glass is, if not the first, certainly the worst regression. And I think this could have been predicted if you agreee with OP about Vista.
- reddalo 11mo agoLiquid Glass is such a horrible regression. I'm holding onto my Sequoia for the time being (and maybe I'll then switch to Linux). I think the best version of macOS was High Sierra. After that, everything started becoming bloated and inconsistent.
- SpecialistK 11mo agoIn context, (Snow) Leopard was almost definitely the peak. Windows users were struggling with Vista (UAC, DWM, and Windows Update taking up an entire CPU core (of which most people had only 1) or the security issues of XP. Meanwhile Mac users had already been through the growing pains and now had a stable, pretty, powerful OS.
- dag11 11mo agoI'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10. The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
- wink 11mo agoI am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range). I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
- tracker1 11mo ago8.1 was slightly better, but most people I know that used it, used one of the start menu replacements that looked/felt more like Win7.
- hbn 11mo agoWindows 8 was fine if you used StartIsBack which just added the Windows 7 start menu back and you could happily ignore the big stupid fullscreen start menu that yanked you away from your desktop. But at that point, yeah no point in upgrading. Interestingly whoever made StartIsBack is still developing a start menu replacement for Windows 11 (called StartAllBack for some reason), and it's made my usage far more tolerable. You can also get a normal file explorer again, with the normal native right click menu that doesn't hide a bunch of stuff behind a "more options" option
- deltoidmaximus 11mo agoIn some ways 8.1 was better than 10. You could still control the updates and uninstall the or block telemetry updates. Unfortunately, a lot of hardware makers abandoned making driver updates for it before it even went out of support (unlike Windows 7 where they often kept making minor updates even after it was out of support) I never used it really myself. The original UI wasn't what I'd ever want out of a PC but the impending stench of the Windows Store was what drove me off of Windows at that point. I have an 8.1 VM in my unraid server that only exists to run an older radeon driver that allows the GPU to turn off to near 0 watts idle when the hardware isn't in use. Windows 10 broke the subsystem that these drivers used and AMD never got this feature working on 10.
- paulmooreparks 11mo agoI remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.
- dpark 11mo agoMine said “Über”, which seemed very clever to me for some reason.
- shmeeed 11mo agoHaha, I totally forgot about that. Pretty sure mine said "Win95"/"Win98". Sadly though, this kind of hacks doesn't satisfy me the same way it did 30 years ago, when I had all the time in the world to tinker. It's the same story with things you can customize, today I rarely bother spending more than a few seconds on clicking around to choose the next best thing.
- donkeylazy456 11mo agoremember that there are still classic theme bois out there. 9x/2k is the best theme.
- cubefox 11mo agoI really hated the depressing grey GUI of Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me. It looks like working in a dull grey concrete office with a grey PC and grey monitor while wearing a grey tie. I get that Windows XP and 8 look too colorful for many people (I like them), but Vista & Co, with their glass design, managed to avoid colors while still not making everything a drab grey.
- cubefox 11mo agoThis begs the general question: why were PCs (and monitors, keyboards, mice etc) always sold in ugly grey, for decades? Before they finally relented and switched to black?
- vrighter 11mo agoBring back the 2000s transparency in the hardware. Transparent phone (nokia 3310, of course), transparent PC, transparent everything!
- CableNinja 11mo agoDont forget the transparent landline phone, alarmclock, and tvs!
- Tanoc 11mo agoI would do unsavory things to get a matching keyboard, mouse, and monitor in translucent plastic akin to an Atomic Purple Gameboy Color. I've tried retrofitting an iMac G3 multiple times, but they're so old now that taking them apart literally breaks them because the plastic's too brittle.
- gainda 11mo agonot an expert, but i vaguely recall that certain colors can make plastics weaker - maybe it was the case here for a while until technology improved
- tracker1 11mo ago
- steve1977 11mo agoThey say "I am skipping over all versions of Windows NT" and then proceed to rate XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11. * Also 2000, but at least they seemed to be aware that this too was Windows NT.
- Kerrick 11mo ago"Windows NT" the brand, not "Windows" with NT the kernel.
- patapong 11mo agoOne underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast. Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless. I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
- coldpie 11mo ago> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast. Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).
- manoDev 11mo agoMSFT peaked at Windows 2000.
- generalizations 11mo agoWas anyone surprised? This follows the classic pattern. - XP was good - vista was bad - 7 was good - 8 was bad - 10 was good - 11 is .....drumroll please.... bad.
- onemoresoop 11mo agoWindows 11 is bad but will only get worse with AI updates.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago- XP was good - vista was bad - 7 was good - 8 was a disaster - 10 was worse - 11 is even worse It's a downward spiral.
- hbn 11mo agoI think it's generous to say anything after 7 was good. 8 was just so offensively bad with getting rid of the start menu and replacing it with a fullscreen tablet UI, 10 was celebrated for backtracking on that. But it was also famous for shoving bullshit like Candy Crush into everyone's start menu. I haven't forgotten that.
- kykat 11mo agoI'm pretty sure that Windows 8.1 didn't have a start menu at all, just a windows button that opened that full screen metro launcher
- stronglikedan 11mo agoAnd yet somehow it was faster and more accurate than the Win 10/11 start menus, where you're lucky if it doesn't pop in something else right as you hit enter after typing an app name, opening the completely wrong app/webpage/etc. It's always one step forward and two steps back with MS.
- SeanDav 11mo agoI hate the flat, borderless, barely visible scroll bar mess that is Windows 11. Just try to determine where one window starts and another ends with multiple overlapping windows open, especially in dark mode. Windows UI peaked at Windows 7 and has been steadily in a race to the bottom ever since. Windows 11 is going to be the final straw that prompts me to relegate it to a game playing or only-use-because-I-must secondary OS. Linux, here I come - if only I could decide which flavour...
- tracker1 11mo agoBeen pretty happy with the PopOS Cosmic series so far.
- luckys 11mo agoI use Fedora Workstation. It's boring and less customizable than other distros out of the box, but I like it like that. I pretty much just add the extension 'dash to panel' and call it a day. Microsoft has their own plans for where they want to go with Windows and it certainly is not catering to their users. The same could be said from most big companies I guess -- all about lock-in, value extraction, planned obsolescence. I see Valve/Steam as one of the few exceptions, probably because they are not publicly traded.
- wackget 11mo agoGiving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.
- dagmx 11mo agoJust because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs. Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.
- chasing0entropy 11mo agoWindows 11 usability is garbage compared to Windows 10. Windows 10 already had multiple desktops, docking(which does need app to augment), sandboxing, and the start menu worked. Further win 10 does not gimp the OS if not activated, doesn't require an online account, and has an identical update mechanism to win11. There is nothing superior or even functionally 'new' in Windows 11 besides compute burning eye candy and embedded backdoored encryption If Windows 7 had multi core enhancement, driver downloading, and updated libraries it would still be a superior OS from a weight of resources perspective.
- dagmx 11mo agoNone of your points are relevant to the article at hand which is about the visual design of the OSs.
- amarant 11mo agoGP has a point tho. The article ranks vista over XP, and that's just ludicrous. Even Microsoft has admitted that vista was hot garbage. It's even become a slang expression: a app can have a "Vista moment", meaning they released a version that was completely unusable and a stark regression from previous versions. Meanwhile XP is widely regarded to have been the best windows version ever. The only version that even compares in terms of popularity is 7. I get the feeling the author of the post hasn't actually used any of the older versions of windows, and was ranking solely based on some screenshots they found online. There's no other reasonable explanation for rating vista higher than XP.
- tfrutuoso 11mo agoXP, a regression? closes tab.
- tracker1 11mo agoWin2k was one of my favorite OSes of all time... I know there were a lot of security holes in the way some things were done, but it all just mostly fit well together in a relatively consistent way. The last version of windows with nearly this level of consistency. LiteStep on Win2K was amazingly good. XP really looked like a Fisher Price toy... I liked the Media Center theme (as well as derivatives) so much more as part of that release. Windows 7 was probably the best start menu of Windows' history, and Win10/11's taskbar enhancements (not the centering default) are pretty great as well. I'm hoping this gets better/similar in COSMIC.
- abhiyerra 11mo agoI loved how consistent it was. Just peak Microsoft UI for me. Don’t know what happened after that but it all went to hell.
- jhack 11mo agoOh cool, someone else that appreciates Windows 2000 more than XP. There are dozens of us!
- js8 11mo agoIMHO it would be more interesting to compare UI/UX of something like MS Office. That traces the evolution of the GUI pretty well.
- tveyben 11mo agoWhy do you want to remove the scrollbar on a website - you never know how long the ‘page’ is… - I really hate those UX decisions
- fleabitdev 11mo agoIf you set out to build a practical UI from first principles using 1995 technology, I think you'd end up with something a lot like Windows 95. It's like a checklist of all the things we should be doing. Luminance contrast is used to create a hierarchy of importance. Most backgrounds are medium grey, so that all text and icons are low-importance by default. Text fields, dropdowns, check boxes and radio buttons are black-on-white: a subtle call to action. Window, button and scrollbar edges always include pure white or pure black. Active toggle buttons have a light grey background, sacrificing the "3D shading" metaphor in the name of contrast. Most colour is limited to two accents: pale yellow and navy blue. Small splashes of those colours are mixed together in icons to make them recognisable at a glance. Deactivated icons lose all colour. The grey, yellow and blue palette is highly accessible for colour-blind people, and the yellow and blue accents also occupy unique points in the luminance space (the yellow sits between white and grey, the blue sits between grey and black). Despite all of this restraint, the designers weren't afraid of high contrast and high saturation; white text on a navy blue background shows up very sparingly, always as a loud "YOU ARE HERE" beacon. The designers understood that navigation is more important than anything else. The graphics are strictly utilitarian, with no unnecessary texture or visual noise. The entire UI is typeset using just two weights of 9px MS Sans Serif. The only skeuomorphic elements are some program and folder names, a tiny resizing grip at the corner of each window, and a simple simulation of depth when push buttons are clicked. 3D edges are used to make the scene layout easier to parse, not to make it look physical or familiar. Related components are almost always visually grouped together, using borders, filled rectangles and negative space. (I suspect the designers would have used fewer borders and more fills if the palette of background colours had been a little larger.) Dark and light backgrounds are freely mixed in the same UI, which requires both white and black text to be present. The depth of recursion (boxes in boxes in boxes...) is fairly shallow. Homogeneous collections of components are always enclosed in a strong border and background, which enables sibling components to be displayed with no borders at all between them. All of these tasteful design choices were fragile, because you can only preserve them if you understand them. Windows XP made the background colours lighter, which reduced the available dynamic range of luminance cues; it tinted many backgrounds and components yellow or blue, which made chrominance more noisy; it introduced gradient fills and gradient strokes, which were less effective at grouping components; it added soft shading to icons, which made their shapes less distinct; and so on. Almost every change broke something, and so after just one major revision of the UI, most of the magic was already gone.
- okanat 11mo agoWindows 7 and Vista unified almost all of the control panel. Windows had pretty good design language then and the other Microsoft software used native frameworks that shared it. Moreover neither Vista nor 7 removed features or dumbified the settings when the switch happened. Compare that with the half-arsed switch that started from 8 and still continues today with 11. Windows 11 actively removes features and implements the system programs with multiple clunky UI frameworks. While chasing the whatever techbro trend, Microsoft jumped into multiple design trends. Win 11 Settings, Excel, OneNote, Teams, core utilities like Disk Cleanup each of these use a different UI language. I do understand slowly upgrading certain components but newer and actively maintained apps using different UX, come on. Each of their UI frameworks are suffering from lack of maintenance. For example, WinUI 3 still draws white symbol on white background for window controls and the bug exist in many Microsoft apps including Powertoys and their showcase apps. 11 actively forces users to use Powershell to do almost any medium level customization where 7 had nice UIs for advanced network configuration, extra Bluetooth functions (you could proxy calls on Win 7 over BT, now you have to have a MS account). Either the author lacks taste or just judges things very shallowly.
- funnybeam 11mo agoFrom memory I believe it was windows 7 that broke the taskbar - before that you could put it on any side of the screen and also embed folders on it. I used to have it on the left side of the screen with my actual documents folder (not “My Documents” which even then was full of other crap) embedded in it. Kind of like vertical tabs in the browser, but better I was really annoyed when they took that functionality away for no apparent reason. Win 7 was the start of the slide for me, windows steadily got worse with them removing more and more functionality. Was it seven that removed all the customisation you used to be able to do as well and replaced it with much more limited themes?
- zzo38computer 11mo agoI happen to like the Windows 1.0 appearance and I think it is not so ugly.
- oldgradstudent 11mo agoI was working in customer support for one of the first ISPs in my country when the switch from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 happened. Windows 95 was a massive jump in usability. Regular people simply do no understand the overlapping windows metaphor. When a windows disappears behind another they are often completely helpless. The taskbar was a life saver.
- zeeeeeebo 11mo agoWindows 11 is just walmart brand macOS, they peaked at Windows 7.
- cedar-v 11mo ago[dead]
- randomtoast 11mo agoJust invert this ranking and then it should fit.
- compsciphd 11mo agoI think Microsoft missed the boat with windows 8 in a manner that could have fundamentally changed computing and significantly undercut the ipad ecosystem. Apple has bifurcated the ipad and desktop ecosystems (till today), while Microsoft with windows 8s felt that were would be no desktops in the future and everything would be tablet/touch based. Instead of writing mouse/keyboard friendly apps, developers would just write touch friendly apps. This failed. What Microsoft could have done with windows 8 was create an environment that enabled developers to write apps that worked optimally in both touch and keyboard/mouse environments. Take a windows surface tablet, and place it in a dock, and all your running apps automatically switch to keyboard/mouse friendly mode. detach it from the dock, and all your apps automatically switch to touch friendly mode. Instead we are still left in a world with a bifurcation. Even most (all?) major web browsers on windows (chrome, edge, firefox) don't do touch friendly that nicely. Some aren't so bad, but no where near as touch friendly as one sees for purpose built touch UIs.
- derrikcurran 11mo agoSomething I've always found mildly interesting is the general perception of the Windows 8 start menu changes. Folks often talked about the start menu being "removed" in Windows 8 and "re-added" in 8.1. Thing is though, it was never really removed. It mainly just went full screen and then back to a small menu in the corner. The actual functionality didn't change much. While I didn't like it, I wasn't nearly as bothered as others seemed to be. I was just kind of like, "Oh, it's full screen now. Meh."
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoThey forgot Windows Millenium Me the most awful version I ever used.