8 ms·

Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

142 points by jandeboevrie 4mo ago

shevy-java 4mo ago
Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement. Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser never told me that; it just silently failed to download anything, I could not choose any local file for file upload. I only found out eventually, but when I found out, the fix was easy, but still, the question is why such things break silently. This is simply incredibly poor engineering and design, and that happens on linux too. That way they'll never achieve linux desktop of the year. The decision makers here are just horribly bad at designing anything. The whole GTK team fell victim to this, now that it is a GNOMEy toolkit only. When we ever get one-toolkit-that-fixes-everything (well ...), hopefully they are really allowing only mega-smart people who can think objectively and try to IMPROVE things rather than regress or take away functionality willy-nilly style (as the GNOMEy devs do).
- wolfi1 4mo ago
  evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammals
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    Biological evolution has indeed lead much more frequently to simplified, streamlined structures good for a single purpose, which had evolved from more complex and more versatile structures, than to more complex structures that had evolved from simple structures. The latter kind of evolution events, while very rare, had a greater importance by being the origin of various kinds of very successful living beings. Your example shows that because evolution proceeds through random search through the space of solutions, inside the neighborhoods of the starting point, followed by the choice of the best solution among the candidates, it frequently fails to find a global optimum, but it remains stuck on a local optimum. However, octopuses were not before mammals. Both octopuses and mammals had appeared around the middle of the Mesozoic, but this is not really relevant for their eyes, which already existed in much older ancestors, hundreds of millions of years earlier. Cephalopods and vertebrates with complex eyes already existed during the Ordovician. Chordates with complex eyes might have already existed quite early during the Cambrian, most likely before the separation between cephalopods and other mollusks, at a time when mollusks must have had only simple eyes that could detect light and perhaps the shape of shadows, but which could not form images. When cephalopods separated from the other mollusks, they did this by evolving the ability to swim, instead of being forced to crawl on the bottom like most mollusks. (Swimming was achieved by filling their shell with a gas, which made it buoyant, while the other mollusks were held on the bottom by the weight of the shell.) Chordates have also separated from their ancestors by evolving the ability to be fast swimmers (the elastic and incompressible dorsal chord reduced the energetic cost of anguilliform swimming in comparison with that for worm-like bodies that need to contract a muscular layer in order to prevent the shortening of the body when it is flexed). This is likely to not be a coincidence, so the evolution of complex eyes in chordates and cephalopods is likely to be linked with the evolution of swimming in both groups, which made important the detection of objects located in various directions, while for a bottom crawler it could have been sufficient to sense when a shadow appeared due to something coming above it.
  - fifticon 4mo ago
    I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.
  - fifticon 4mo ago
    I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all.. One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
    - lunar_rover 4mo ago
      > One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?" You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        Same thing Windows did. Did anyone like it?
        noisem4ker 4mo ago
        Hardly anyone, and in fact they eventually brought back the "up one level" toolbar button.
        breakingcups 4mo ago
        I do! I love skipping back 4 folders in one go.
- janci 4mo ago
  I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!
  - formerly_proven 4mo ago
    Win32 has good news for you!
  - Kwpolska 4mo ago
    You need a separate UI to handle things like entering the file name and filtering for appropriate files. Windows was designed so that the same file browser component is used in the Explorer and in open/save dialogs (but with Windows 7-era UI), but on Linux, which file manager should GTK use? GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      GTK being GIMP ToolKit and not GNOME ToolKit, I hear they frequently annoy the GNOME team by not deleting features that GNOME wants to delete.
    - janci 4mo ago
      I'd love if that UI was part of the file manager. totalcmd.exe or Finder.app or mc or Krusader etc.
    - 1718627440 4mo ago
      > GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME. It is. I happily use a GTK desktop environment and it is not GNOME.
- edoloughlin 4mo ago
  One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file... (Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
  - bombela 4mo ago
    plus the filter search is very slow. plus the async race conditions if you click or keyboard enter too quickly.
- kenjackson 4mo ago
  How is this not an improvement?
reddalo 4mo ago
I think Windows 9x was peak Windows. Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen. But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive. The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron. Edit. See OP's previous article here, he managed to capture what I was trying to say in more details, with nice screenshots: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html
- xuhu 4mo ago
  Products have to change in a visible way so people know they're new.
  - Aldipower 4mo ago
    Same with running shoes, and they get worse too..
    - sandermvanvliet 4mo ago
      I’ve been buying the same model of Brooks (the Ghost one) for _years_ because they fit well for me and while they release a refresh every other year or so they feel the same to me when I buy a new pair. Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit
- flohofwoe 4mo ago
  This is because back in the 90s GUI development was still driven by hard research, not by "emotions" (e.g. actually sitting very diverse groups of people in front of computers, asking them to perform specific tasks and then analysing where exactly they got stuck or became confused). IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
- pegasus 4mo ago
  > Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen. I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back. One problem I see is that while the UI itself has been simplified, incidental complexity has crept in other ways. Most importantly, the OSes themselves as software systems have clearly grown ponderous and unwieldy so that today they are more bugs and more of those bugs can be subtle and surprising. Also, there is less uniformity in UX across apps (and UI frameworks).
tentacleuno 4mo ago
I imagine that the database for the online file association service for Windows XP has been lost to time, but for those who remember it: was it any good? It seems like quite a good idea now -- if I remember correctly, Windows as of current seems to suggest a generic Bing search, which brings up all the spam "What extension is XXX?" sites. That could have changed; I haven't really used Windows after 11's debut.
- reddalo 4mo ago
  If I recall correctly, it was pretty bad. It used to open Internet Explorer on this page: http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={ext} http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={e... where {ext} was the extension. Suggestions were vague and they only made sense with well-known filetypes. There's a screenshot of how it looked here: https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg
  - formerly_proven 4mo ago
    Today that page would be titled "Microsoft Windows Copilot File Associations" The more things change, the more they stay the same.
  - varun_ch 4mo ago
    this might be the only place where a redirection to bing provides a much better UX than what was there previously!
- jamesfinlayson 4mo ago
  I thought in the deep dark paste it used to take you to filext.com but it's been probably 20 years since I intentionally clicked on the link.
- izacus 4mo ago
  I don't remember it ever finding anything. Similar to the find driver dialog (until Win10 or so).
vivid242 4mo ago
I like your Windows postings, please don’t stop!
rkcr7 4mo ago
[flagged]
donatj 4mo ago
I wish this was more of a full tour than a random sampler of Windows versions. For instance I feel like Windows Me introduced the online search but it's been like... 26 years... since I've used it. > Now there's a big gap. I don't have access to anything between Windows XP and Windows 10. So, Windows 10 (2015) is next I'm guess these are just what the author already had set up. They're not really difficult to find or set up in a VM...
- wffurr 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 4mo ago
    You're right of course, but a comment like this is a bit on the mean side, so probably best avoided. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
amadeuspagel 4mo ago
> Sadly, I don't know anymore what kind of web service that was. I don't know that either, but I remember there were websites specifically for that purpose, where you could look up a file extension and what program to open it with.
Dwedit 4mo ago
Something went horribly wrong on my computer and it takes about 2 minutes for that dialog to load.
netsharc 4mo ago
raplayer.exe is stirring up some nostalgia...
brewmarche 4mo ago
I wonder why in Windows 10 and 11 there is no obvious way to cancel this dialog. You can press Esc, but there are no buttons to do it.
- discostrings 4mo ago
  It also closes when you click/tap outside the dialog, unlike most other Windows dialogs. I actually can't think of another Windows dialog with the same level of functionality that behaves this way. I'm pretty sure it was introduced in Windows 8 along with swipe gestures from the sides of the screen (like the "charms bar") with the tablet use case in mind and with little consideration given to the mouse experience.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
petee 4mo ago
On Win 11, if you disable the Vibe Notepad it refuses to let you associate .txt files to any program, and popups an error. Instead you have to go turn off a specific file association toggle elsewhere (as i recall) only then you can you reassign it
airstrike 4mo ago
Good post but those images are way too small for me to see anything without having to open a new tab or navigate away, neither of which is fun to do when there are 10+ images
- bombela 4mo ago
  Click on the picture to open the full size version. Click history back to get back to the text. I noticed I am afraid of clicking without opening new tab today because so many times the UX is broken and loses it's spatial position.
1970-01-01 4mo ago
They finally made a CLI version of it a decade ago and it works exactly as it should when setting up a new system with a script. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/assoc https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
Krssst 4mo ago
Fun fact: on modern Windows, if you uninstall modern notepad using the Settings app to get the old one, you won't be able to associate .txt files with notepad.exe without a registry trick: https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-type-with-notepad-legacy-in-windows-11 https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-typ...
- hulitu 4mo ago
  Modern Windows has big problems with file associasions: default to web browser, sometimes asks, sometimes it chooses a random program (for images). Old Windows (9x, 2k, XP, 7) was better.
  - HappySweeney 4mo ago
    A bunch of links open a hardcoded browser (like help links within Visual Studio). Executives have OKRs to meet.
1bpp 4mo ago
What were the internal politics at Microsoft at the time that resulted in the .NET branding being pushed more aggressively than Copilot today, everywhere from the login screen to file associations?
- nailer 4mo ago
  Not ex-Microsoft, please answer if you are, but fear of Java becoming a universal runtime.
stavros 4mo ago
Windows has had a few of these "look online" options for decades now, to look up unknown extensions, to find drivers for unrecognised devices, etc. Not a single time in the many, many years of using Windows did any of those ever find anything useful for me. I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.
rkagerer 4mo ago
This is such a typical pattern of enshittification from Microsoft. Something Windows 3.1/95/2000/XP made easy - adding a File Type Association - became increasingly contorted over time. If I recall correctly, in Windows 7 they removed the File Types Manager and you had to either edit the registry directly to adjust existing associations, or resort to a third party app. By Windows 10 even simply creating a new association for an unrecognized extension seems to require more clicks and scrolling down to a hidden option. I would love to meet the mastermind morons behind this himan-unfriendly UI and give them a piece of my mind.
nailer 4mo ago
I swear they used to have a feature which offered to find a program that would open that type of file from the internet - it NEVER worked, but they did have the feature.

142 points by jandeboevrie 4mo ago

Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement. Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser never told me that; it just silently failed to download anything, I could not choose any local file for file upload. I only found out eventually, but when I found out, the fix was easy, but still, the question is why such things break silently. This is simply incredibly poor engineering and design, and that happens on linux too. That way they'll never achieve linux desktop of the year. The decision makers here are just horribly bad at designing anything. The whole GTK team fell victim to this, now that it is a GNOMEy toolkit only. When we ever get one-toolkit-that-fixes-everything (well ...), hopefully they are really allowing only mega-smart people who can think objectively and try to IMPROVE things rather than regress or take away functionality willy-nilly style (as the GNOMEy devs do).

wolfi1 4mo ago
evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammals
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  Biological evolution has indeed lead much more frequently to simplified, streamlined structures good for a single purpose, which had evolved from more complex and more versatile structures, than to more complex structures that had evolved from simple structures. The latter kind of evolution events, while very rare, had a greater importance by being the origin of various kinds of very successful living beings. Your example shows that because evolution proceeds through random search through the space of solutions, inside the neighborhoods of the starting point, followed by the choice of the best solution among the candidates, it frequently fails to find a global optimum, but it remains stuck on a local optimum. However, octopuses were not before mammals. Both octopuses and mammals had appeared around the middle of the Mesozoic, but this is not really relevant for their eyes, which already existed in much older ancestors, hundreds of millions of years earlier. Cephalopods and vertebrates with complex eyes already existed during the Ordovician. Chordates with complex eyes might have already existed quite early during the Cambrian, most likely before the separation between cephalopods and other mollusks, at a time when mollusks must have had only simple eyes that could detect light and perhaps the shape of shadows, but which could not form images. When cephalopods separated from the other mollusks, they did this by evolving the ability to swim, instead of being forced to crawl on the bottom like most mollusks. (Swimming was achieved by filling their shell with a gas, which made it buoyant, while the other mollusks were held on the bottom by the weight of the shell.) Chordates have also separated from their ancestors by evolving the ability to be fast swimmers (the elastic and incompressible dorsal chord reduced the energetic cost of anguilliform swimming in comparison with that for worm-like bodies that need to contract a muscular layer in order to prevent the shortening of the body when it is flexed). This is likely to not be a coincidence, so the evolution of complex eyes in chordates and cephalopods is likely to be linked with the evolution of swimming in both groups, which made important the detection of objects located in various directions, while for a bottom crawler it could have been sufficient to sense when a shadow appeared due to something coming above it.
- fifticon 4mo ago
  I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.
inigyou 4mo ago
at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.
- fifticon 4mo ago
  I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all.. One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
  - lunar_rover 4mo ago
    > One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?" You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Same thing Windows did. Did anyone like it?
      - noisem4ker 4mo ago
        Hardly anyone, and in fact they eventually brought back the "up one level" toolbar button.
      - breakingcups 4mo ago
        I do! I love skipping back 4 folders in one go.
janci 4mo ago
I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!
- formerly_proven 4mo ago
  Win32 has good news for you!
- Kwpolska 4mo ago
  You need a separate UI to handle things like entering the file name and filtering for appropriate files. Windows was designed so that the same file browser component is used in the Explorer and in open/save dialogs (but with Windows 7-era UI), but on Linux, which file manager should GTK use? GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    GTK being GIMP ToolKit and not GNOME ToolKit, I hear they frequently annoy the GNOME team by not deleting features that GNOME wants to delete.
  - janci 4mo ago
    I'd love if that UI was part of the file manager. totalcmd.exe or Finder.app or mc or Krusader etc.
  - 1718627440 4mo ago
    > GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME. It is. I happily use a GTK desktop environment and it is not GNOME.
edoloughlin 4mo ago
One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file... (Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
- bombela 4mo ago
  plus the filter search is very slow. plus the async race conditions if you click or keyboard enter too quickly.
kenjackson 4mo ago
How is this not an improvement?

reddalo 4mo ago

I think Windows 9x was peak Windows. Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen. But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive. The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron. Edit. See OP's previous article here, he managed to capture what I was trying to say in more details, with nice screenshots: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html

xuhu 4mo ago
Products have to change in a visible way so people know they're new.
- Aldipower 4mo ago
  Same with running shoes, and they get worse too..
  - sandermvanvliet 4mo ago
    I’ve been buying the same model of Brooks (the Ghost one) for _years_ because they fit well for me and while they release a refresh every other year or so they feel the same to me when I buy a new pair. Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit
flohofwoe 4mo ago
This is because back in the 90s GUI development was still driven by hard research, not by "emotions" (e.g. actually sitting very diverse groups of people in front of computers, asking them to perform specific tasks and then analysing where exactly they got stuck or became confused). IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
pegasus 4mo ago
> Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen. I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back. One problem I see is that while the UI itself has been simplified, incidental complexity has crept in other ways. Most importantly, the OSes themselves as software systems have clearly grown ponderous and unwieldy so that today they are more bugs and more of those bugs can be subtle and surprising. Also, there is less uniformity in UX across apps (and UI frameworks).

tentacleuno 4mo ago

I imagine that the database for the online file association service for Windows XP has been lost to time, but for those who remember it: was it any good? It seems like quite a good idea now -- if I remember correctly, Windows as of current seems to suggest a generic Bing search, which brings up all the spam "What extension is XXX?" sites. That could have changed; I haven't really used Windows after 11's debut.

reddalo 4mo ago
If I recall correctly, it was pretty bad. It used to open Internet Explorer on this page: http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={ext} http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={e... where {ext} was the extension. Suggestions were vague and they only made sense with well-known filetypes. There's a screenshot of how it looked here: https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg
- formerly_proven 4mo ago
  Today that page would be titled "Microsoft Windows Copilot File Associations" The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- varun_ch 4mo ago
  this might be the only place where a redirection to bing provides a much better UX than what was there previously!
jamesfinlayson 4mo ago
I thought in the deep dark paste it used to take you to filext.com but it's been probably 20 years since I intentionally clicked on the link.
izacus 4mo ago
I don't remember it ever finding anything. Similar to the find driver dialog (until Win10 or so).

vivid242 4mo ago

I like your Windows postings, please don’t stop!

rkcr7 4mo ago

[flagged]

donatj 4mo ago

I wish this was more of a full tour than a random sampler of Windows versions. For instance I feel like Windows Me introduced the online search but it's been like... 26 years... since I've used it. > Now there's a big gap. I don't have access to anything between Windows XP and Windows 10. So, Windows 10 (2015) is next I'm guess these are just what the author already had set up. They're not really difficult to find or set up in a VM...

wffurr 4mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 4mo ago
  You're right of course, but a comment like this is a bit on the mean side, so probably best avoided. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

amadeuspagel 4mo ago

> Sadly, I don't know anymore what kind of web service that was. I don't know that either, but I remember there were websites specifically for that purpose, where you could look up a file extension and what program to open it with.

Dwedit 4mo ago

Something went horribly wrong on my computer and it takes about 2 minutes for that dialog to load.

netsharc 4mo ago

raplayer.exe is stirring up some nostalgia...

brewmarche 4mo ago

I wonder why in Windows 10 and 11 there is no obvious way to cancel this dialog. You can press Esc, but there are no buttons to do it.

discostrings 4mo ago
It also closes when you click/tap outside the dialog, unlike most other Windows dialogs. I actually can't think of another Windows dialog with the same level of functionality that behaves this way. I'm pretty sure it was introduced in Windows 8 along with swipe gestures from the sides of the screen (like the "charms bar") with the tablet use case in mind and with little consideration given to the mouse experience.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

petee 4mo ago

On Win 11, if you disable the Vibe Notepad it refuses to let you associate .txt files to any program, and popups an error. Instead you have to go turn off a specific file association toggle elsewhere (as i recall) only then you can you reassign it

airstrike 4mo ago

Good post but those images are way too small for me to see anything without having to open a new tab or navigate away, neither of which is fun to do when there are 10+ images

bombela 4mo ago
Click on the picture to open the full size version. Click history back to get back to the text. I noticed I am afraid of clicking without opening new tab today because so many times the UX is broken and loses it's spatial position.

1970-01-01 4mo ago

They finally made a CLI version of it a decade ago and it works exactly as it should when setting up a new system with a script. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/assoc https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Krssst 4mo ago

Fun fact: on modern Windows, if you uninstall modern notepad using the Settings app to get the old one, you won't be able to associate .txt files with notepad.exe without a registry trick: https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-type-with-notepad-legacy-in-windows-11 https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-typ...

hulitu 4mo ago
Modern Windows has big problems with file associasions: default to web browser, sometimes asks, sometimes it chooses a random program (for images). Old Windows (9x, 2k, XP, 7) was better.
- HappySweeney 4mo ago
  A bunch of links open a hardcoded browser (like help links within Visual Studio). Executives have OKRs to meet.

1bpp 4mo ago

What were the internal politics at Microsoft at the time that resulted in the .NET branding being pushed more aggressively than Copilot today, everywhere from the login screen to file associations?

nailer 4mo ago
Not ex-Microsoft, please answer if you are, but fear of Java becoming a universal runtime.

stavros 4mo ago

Windows has had a few of these "look online" options for decades now, to look up unknown extensions, to find drivers for unrecognised devices, etc. Not a single time in the many, many years of using Windows did any of those ever find anything useful for me. I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.

rkagerer 4mo ago

This is such a typical pattern of enshittification from Microsoft. Something Windows 3.1/95/2000/XP made easy - adding a File Type Association - became increasingly contorted over time. If I recall correctly, in Windows 7 they removed the File Types Manager and you had to either edit the registry directly to adjust existing associations, or resort to a third party app. By Windows 10 even simply creating a new association for an unrecognized extension seems to require more clicks and scrolling down to a hidden option. I would love to meet the mastermind morons behind this himan-unfriendly UI and give them a piece of my mind.

nailer 4mo ago

I swear they used to have a feature which offered to find a program that would open that type of file from the internet - it NEVER worked, but they did have the feature.