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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

• 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).
  • vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
    "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." If you take today's interfaces to an extreme, you would get a white sheet. Very clean, but unusable. I wouldn't call interfaces "clean" where users increasingly have trouble figuring out what's clickable, how to scroll, move or resize a window.
  • chmod775 4mo ago
    > I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Have you been in nature recently? We've evolved to deal with very busy pictures and parse relevant information from them. New UIs often don't have relevant information - like what is clickable or scrollable - and that's a problem. It used to be that grandpa couldn't find a button with his poor eyesight, since everything was cramped and too tiny on the small screens we used to have. Nowadays the clickable label is hidden behind a tiny hamburger menu that you can't tell apart from a mere stylistic flourish on the massive screens we keep mostly empty. Now neither of us can find the button. That's progress? Every time I open an old application I breathe a sigh of relief because I can feel the cognitive load decreasing. Not having to put myself in the headspace of the designer to figure out what random geometric shape happens to be interactive is like taking a vacation.
• jameshart 4mo ago
  Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have. Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a find across a whole document or getting a word count took time. Remember windows used to have an hourglass cursor? You used to have to watch that thing flip and empty multiple times when doing things like emptying the recycle bin. Windows 9x was typically not running on a permanently networked computer. The computer wasn’t running a bunch of background network tasks like checking for updates or polling your email - generally it was just being slow because it could barely cope with running more than one program at once.
  • j1elo 4mo ago
    Thanks for reviving the reality of it. I saw the hourglass icon so many times, that I am able to picture all of its frames in my mind. Windows 9x might have been close to peak UI design (for me I'd say Windows 2000 is the sweet spot, and I always configured "Classic Style" on Windows XP and 7), but 95/98 was not responsive. And that's when it wasn't crashing.
  • SanjayMehta 4mo ago
    Word 2.0 forever made me distrust Microsoft with an error: "File too large to save." It was on a 20Mb hard drive, and the file was small enough to fit on a 1.44Mb floppy. Turns out it was an obscure defect in Word: if you had quick save on, and the last page had a diagram or image, it would choke. Quick save or fast save - I forget what it was called. This would append deltas to your file, I think.
    • inigyou 4mo ago
      That is true, but the discussion here is about speed, not reliability.
      • SanjayMehta 4mo ago
• pjmlp 4mo ago
  Nah, that goes to either Windows 2000 or Windows 7.
  • SanjayMehta 4mo ago
    Windows 2000 Professional was peak Windows for me. Skipped XP etc thanks to mac. Then 7 for a while.
  • DrBazza 4mo ago
    This is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did. Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista. They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.
    • pjmlp 4mo ago
      If only .NET was actually everywhere like Swift on Apple, or Java/Kotlin on Google land. Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.
  • GeekyBear 4mo ago
    Windows 2000 was the last version of the Windows NT lineage with Dave Cutler in charge of everything. His no-nonsense attitude towards fixing known bugs was sorely missed in later versions as Windows quality began its decline.
• narag 4mo ago
  I think Windows 9x was peak Windows. I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state. XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success. Many despised the colorful UI, I actually like it. They started moving things around, but annoyances were fixable. Microsoft has adopted more of a "my way or the highway" attitude since.
  • reddalo 4mo ago
    Yes, maybe XP was the sweet spot between ease of use and ability to revert back to a "classic" Windows interface. It also had many multimedia features for burning CDs, editing videos, etc..
  • bee_rider 4mo ago
    XP was quite ugly though. 98 or whatever was the best looking, but 7 was probably best overall (because they’d at least somewhat improved the UI and the system was generally more stable and modern). (FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).
  • afzalive 4mo ago
    Wasn't 2000 the first NT architecture on desktop? 2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.
    • Narishma 4mo ago
      What do you mean by 'on desktop'? NT has always had both server and workstation versions.
  • BirAdam 4mo ago
    People also forget… XP had more than the one tonka-toy theme from Frog Design. There were several themes. Some appealed to my visual tastes, some didn’t… but I do think they were well designed, which is more than I can say for most UI design today.
• prmoustache 4mo ago
  I'd replace 9x by windows 2000. It was the only decent windows. 9x were BSOD crashfest, 2000 was stable as NT but without the enshittification of XP (ugly default themes, stuff above calling internet services with zero value). I think what you describe as responsive are 2 things: 1. absence of animations. I don't know about windows but on linux DE you can disable them, it feels snappier but more raw and I think most people still prefer the animations. 2. Visual and audio clues. Back in the days we were on spinning disks so anytime you'd click on somethimg you would hear the disk moaning in pain and see that disk led blinking. You knew that something was happening, even if it took a long time. When SSD were introduced, everything became instant and silent for a few years, it was pure bliss. Then over the last decade apps continued growing and growing in size and as fast as they were SSDs and NVME started not feeling that fast because so much stuff had to be loaded into memory. Nowadays many apps are still starting much faster than before but the biggest one still take a substantial time. Worse, we have lost all visual and audio clues that something is happening.
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    It's interesting how many people don't like the XP theme. I think it was cool, it was productive yet colorful, but I have to wonder if that's just because it arrived when I was at a certain life stage, the same way I had no problem with the COVID lockdown. We used XP in high school computer class the whole time I was there.
    • BirAdam 4mo ago
      It was change. People don’t like change.
      • nailer 4mo ago
        It was directional and trendy - which meant it was short lasting. Like building your UI based on floaty 3D shapes 5 years ago, except these days it's much easier to change when you start to look silly.
      • inigyou 4mo ago
• GeekyBear 4mo ago
  I find this take (from the guy who wrote the Windows task manager while at Microsoft) to be evenhanded. > Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60