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.
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.
> 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).
OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."
Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.
Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is ... you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app
I agree this is underappreciated but I believe it started in Vista and has worked pretty much the same way ever since, including in Windows 11. I acknowledge that start menu search in general is more bloated now and thus feels less snappy on slower machines. Still, for me, the specific use case you described has worked great for nearly 20 years even on modest PCs. I wonder why my experience doesn't match yours.
> 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.
Me too! Aero was great. I also miss being able to make the taskbar truly black. It looked really nice coupled with a black wallpaper on an OLED display. Now you have to choose from a preset color palette. The reduced customizability of Windows 11 is frustrating.
On fast machines the latency is low enough I don’t complain… but the point about search results shifting is very much a problem. Often times searching a builtin windows feature will fail to show the correct result without some weird switching around of the wording. E.g try searching for “turn windows features on or off”.
That was exactly the same behaviour in Windows 7 though; it wasn't exactly novel. At least Windows 7 searched your apps, and documents all at once. Windows 8 limited you to just apps. Windows 8 was a huge step down in usability.
I don't even bother using the start menu to sleep my PC anymore. I used to hit Win, then navigate with arrow keys to sleep, but at one point an update broke it so you couldn't navigate to the power menu with arrow keys. I don't know if it's fixed now, but regardless it's way faster to hit
8 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!
It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
Here's the problem: your reply is factually correct, but it doesn't address the GP's overarching complaint - the start menu is simply not performant. And since the code powering the start menu is closed source, it is not possible to perform a benchmark to see if the react native portion of the start menu is to blame or if it is something else.
It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.
I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it.
I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.
I got so frustrated with how slow the file explorer got after my work laptop updated. Turns out the new UI is just shell extensions, if you add registry keys to redirect them to non-existent paths you get the old file explorer back.
They also don't run animations in a separate process since Windows 10 which means that under high load everything lags. In Windows 8.1 everything was buttery smooth thanks to DirectUI. macOS and iOS also run animations separately.
Isn't this how pretty much every evolution of windows design has worked? at least from what I remember the windows 10 ui is built on top of aero (though admittedly I don't use windows and have never interacted with it for anything serious)
This is even more insane than I thought. Truly madness. Everybody involved with that should be fired and sent to the moon as an experiment on how long does the human body survive naked on both the dark side and the bright side of the moon. At least we will learn something from those experiments.... (it's a joke but the point stands. Those people shouldn't ever be allowed to touch computers.)
As someone who as attempted to use React Native for Windows, I can tell you that the "native" XAML doesn't make things any better. If it was using web technologies I wouldn't need to manually modify RNSVG to fix segfaults when an SVG goes offscreen.
Lying to "prove" a point and basing discourse on lies gets us nowhere. Windows start menu is not slow because of React. We should correct common misconception more often.
Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
Most likely saving Windows developers from learning programming. They are just javascript monkeys because that is what Microsoft is hiring these days and you can't trust monkeys with native C++. The thing would leak memory and explode immediately if those idiots tried to write native code. So in the name of hiring cheap idiots that can't program we all have to put up with this slow, bloated garbage.
There is no universe in which I should see lag between a click and a menu appearing in File explorer, taskbar or anywhere in the OS. Not on a machine with 8 idling cores.
MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here.
What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way.
This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
You do have to wonder what the hell the people in charge of the Windows UI are thinking. They seem to have got it so badly wrong. But so has Apple in macos.
I'm not sure the cost would be significantly worse than all the half-assed abandoned efforts so far... and it would result in the first consistent UX in Windows since Win2k.
one 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
Fair 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.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.
New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.
If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.
If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.
Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.
I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.
Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.
That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
To add to your list, if you open the start menu and type “add or remove” it will not bring up the add or remove programs section in the settings menu. It will only give an internet search. To uninstall a program you have to literally open the settings menu and search for the right section. In win 10 all you had to do was type “add” and it was the default selection.
I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?
My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.
And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.
In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.
Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
I haven’t given Microsoft a dime since Windows 7. Users who buy a computer have the OS preinstalled. Millions of people never activate it. The product is effectively free.
It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.
Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.
What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.
The software on the computer would cost more if it was ad-free and consumers have made the clear choice that they prefer not to pay for OS updates. We know this because the updates used to cost money. Apple was charging over $100 just for a point release, and they charged hundreds for updates to bundled software like iLife and iWork.
Everyone would love it if the NFL had zero ads but most NFL fans wouldn’t pay $XXX/month to watch the games.
OEMs pay pennies on the dollar for Windows and in some cases $0, the retail license is $200 but you can buy a mini PC for the same cost with a legitimate Windows license.
I dislike ads as much as the next person and use Linux myself for my main machine, but I’m not completely lacking in pragmatism on this subject. Commercial operating systems fund their development through paid services and App Store revenue sharing.
I think the status quo is relatively reasonable and, again, I find the commercialization to be very easy to dismiss and disable.
We are spending more time debating this subject than it took me to disable all forms of advertising in Windows.
Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…
Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off
5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?
Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
> I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did.
If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.
> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.
Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.
Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.
After this discussion I looked it up and the original sources that made a claim that the Windows 11 start menu is written in react aren’t even confirmed accurate, and allegedly the components involving react are using react native for windows and are therefore compiled to native code - no web views are involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
So even this base assumption that a slow heavy bloated experience is on offer is just hearsay. The only section that uses React is the allegedly recommended section, the one that can be disabled entirely with a single settings toggle.
Anyway, again, the 5-10 second screenshot thing, I’ve been testing it live and could never get it to be slower than 2 seconds between invoking the shortcut key to file on the disk. Keeping in mind that this includes me physically reacting as quickly as possible to click after the shortcut keys to initiate the capture. It’s about one second between clicking capture and observing the file appear in file explorer. My CPU is 5 years old, my RAM is DDR4, and I use an off brand nvme SSD, for your reference.
I will also add to this that the main competitor to Windows, macOS, adds an intentional delay to their screen capture where the screenshots aren’t added to disk until after the little preview disappears or is manually dismissed. In Windows the preview notification and file being written to disk happen simultaneously, and the system automatically copies the image to clipboard which Apple doesn’t do, saving further time.
Your network share issue could be something misconfigured at your work, I have no way to verify whether that’s something your IT department messed up. My personal Windows and Linux systems are both connected to my SMB shares at all times through their graphical file managers and I don’t notice any difference in performance.
Last rebuttal: your finder experience in Macintosh classic (System 3.0 when the 512k debuted) is fast because there’s no multitasking, when you are at the desktop of a Macintosh the only application open is Finder and it’s already in RAM. Open any other application and then close it. You’ll notice a relatively long delay (10 seconds in my testing, although I don’t have real hardware) after closing the application before the desktop and finder are responsive again. You can try this on your preferred Macintosh emulator online.
I care that it's made with React/React Native or other garbage web frameworks. By definition adding layers between native C/C++ Native Win32 will make it slower and use more RAM.
Stop justifying laziness and mediocrity. Microsoft does this just so they can hire cheap javascript monkeys out of colleges. AKA people who shouldn't be writing code and the reason a chat application now uses 1GB of RAM and nobody seems to care or understand why such waste is both bad and stupid.
It is supposedly still mostly Windows native XAML. Allegedly, even the components that use react are using react native for windows and are therefore not rendering any sort of resource-wasting web view.
I wrote my own react native phone app and it’s only a 30MB download. Your random comparison to a bulky chat app with an extensive feature list (the most popular culprits like Slack and Discord are not written in React Native, by the way) consuming a GB of RAM is irrelevant. Have you measured the start menu consuming 1GB of RAM? Unless you have, your argument is a whataboutism.
If you think it’s bad that Microsoft is using stuff that makes it easy for them to develop windows you should explain to me how it would be better for them to have extreme difficulty in making improvements like how the old control panel basically couldn’t be updated with any reasonable development cadence for decades while macOS ran circles around Windows for their clean settings experience, versus the new settings pane that Microsoft can actually iterate on and improve.
You can criticize the new settings panel for maybe not having 100% of what you want in it but you can’t criticize being a scary nightmare for novice users like the old version.
It is in the users’ benefit if Microsoft can actually hire people who are real humans and not just myths.
I am wasting my time, you are arguing in bad faith. I have installed windows 7 in a VM and everything takes less RAM not just the start menu and for most things it performs much much better. Start menu actually searches my files instantly, not with delay, not presenting web results, not presenting wrong results. It's doing its job.
Task manager opens immediately. Windows Explorer the same.
Those applications and the OS were written by real humans, not by myths. With your terribly bad argument it seems those OSes never happened since it required "extreme difficulty". No, it didn't require Einsteins. It required non-monkey coders.
You say you wrote your own react native phone app and it only takes 30MBs. So what? You forgot the most important part: what does it do? If it's a basic text editor then yes it's extremely bloated garbage.
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
The new context menu is so awful. There is zero reason in this day and age for a context menu to take multiple seconds to pop up. They didn't even really improve on it in any meaningful way.
To 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.
I 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.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously, at all. It's a pretty unserious surface level critique of past GUIs based on 2025 standards. It's a bit like ranking the Coolest Looking Batman's - there's not really an honest metric outside of ones personal favorite.
Windows 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.
What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:
> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."
yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.
GP 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.
Vista wasn't that bad from purely OS side. On a VM it runs pretty stable.
However, Microsoft made a huge change to how the OS and drivers worked. If you still use Windows, you are still benefitting from some of the changes.
However HW vendors usually ship rather broken drivers, it was doubly bad since Vista overhauled the driver interface. By the time all vendors fixed their shitty and badly tested drivers we already had 7. It is also partly Microsoft's fault since they had absolute chaos in Vista development due to shitty hacks on top of hacks that was the consumer OS (XP).
Similarly Vista was very heavy for its contemporary average hardware. By the time HW caught up, 7 was released.
Agreed. Something has to be wrong with you if you were to prefer Windows 11 to basically anything else. GNOME 3, Ubuntu's whatever desktop environment, KDE, Omarchy, macOS, Windows 8-10 - it's all more consistent, easier to grasp and also looks better than Windows 11.
I'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!
I 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.
In 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.
Windows 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
They actually backported this start menu to Windows RT which makes it even less sense considering Windows RT was mainly used on tablets and the start screen is better for these devices.
> 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.
Win2k 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.
I 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.
30 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.
I don't even mind WebView or otherwise flatter material design choices... but so many implementations fail at even that... If you actually read through the material design guidelines it makes a lot of sense. But then so many UI toolkits and programs that are allegedly following this are just plain not.
So 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.
Coming 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.
Does 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.
You 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.
I 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…
In 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.
I 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. :|
Give 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Haha, 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.
I 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.
As 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.
I 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.
Windows 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.
From 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?
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.
In 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.
And 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.
I 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...
I 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.
It 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!
It 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.
Yes 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).
I 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.
The 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)
At 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.
11 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.
Something 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."
> 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.
If 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.
I 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.
All those versions had customizable color themes, which windows has gradually weakened to almost nothing. There was nothing stopping you from rocking hotdog stand back then except your own good taste and the bleeding from your eyes.
I liked it although that was maybe because Windows 2000 was a great OS. Having seen the awful mess the Unix vendors made of CDE/Motif, 2000 felt more professional.
This 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?
I 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.
I 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."
Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.
A truly astounding regression in functionality!
I truly hate it! Why not use Raycast or Alfred?
Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.
Bind it yourself?
Also I'm pretty sure default Gnome and KDE include emojis in their "start" menu search, which is its own kind of annoying.
KDE has Super+.
A Shell (the UNIX one not the Windows term), is basically nothing other than this, with more features added.
microsoft powertoys has this feature
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is ... you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app
I agree this is underappreciated but I believe it started in Vista and has worked pretty much the same way ever since, including in Windows 11. I acknowledge that start menu search in general is more bloated now and thus feels less snappy on slower machines. Still, for me, the specific use case you described has worked great for nearly 20 years even on modest PCs. I wonder why my experience doesn't match yours.
> 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.
Me too! Aero was great. I also miss being able to make the taskbar truly black. It looked really nice coupled with a black wallpaper on an OLED display. Now you have to choose from a preset color palette. The reduced customizability of Windows 11 is frustrating.
On fast machines the latency is low enough I don’t complain… but the point about search results shifting is very much a problem. Often times searching a builtin windows feature will fail to show the correct result without some weird switching around of the wording. E.g try searching for “turn windows features on or off”.
That was exactly the same behaviour in Windows 7 though; it wasn't exactly novel. At least Windows 7 searched your apps, and documents all at once. Windows 8 limited you to just apps. Windows 8 was a huge step down in usability.
Yes the start menu is now very slow with the web stuff enabled.
If you disable it, it becomes snappy again. Pretty crazy to me that Microsoft allows the default option to be that slow
I don't even bother using the start menu to sleep my PC anymore. I used to hit Win, then navigate with arrow keys to sleep, but at one point an update broke it so you couldn't navigate to the power menu with arrow keys. I don't know if it's fixed now, but regardless it's way faster to hit
Win+x -> u -> s
Bonus is this goes back to like Windows 95 (albeit there was no Sleep option back then).
When I'm forced to use Windows, I now use Powertoys Run. So I press Alt-Space, then type the name of the app.
It works SO much better than the abomination that the Start Menu has become...
You can even type "%appname" to focus an already running app.
8 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!
It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
Here's the problem: your reply is factually correct, but it doesn't address the GP's overarching complaint - the start menu is simply not performant. And since the code powering the start menu is closed source, it is not possible to perform a benchmark to see if the react native portion of the start menu is to blame or if it is something else.
It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.
I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it.
I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.
https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565
I got so frustrated with how slow the file explorer got after my work laptop updated. Turns out the new UI is just shell extensions, if you add registry keys to redirect them to non-existent paths you get the old file explorer back.
They also don't run animations in a separate process since Windows 10 which means that under high load everything lags. In Windows 8.1 everything was buttery smooth thanks to DirectUI. macOS and iOS also run animations separately.
Isn't this how pretty much every evolution of windows design has worked? at least from what I remember the windows 10 ui is built on top of aero (though admittedly I don't use windows and have never interacted with it for anything serious)
This is even more insane than I thought. Truly madness. Everybody involved with that should be fired and sent to the moon as an experiment on how long does the human body survive naked on both the dark side and the bright side of the moon. At least we will learn something from those experiments.... (it's a joke but the point stands. Those people shouldn't ever be allowed to touch computers.)
As someone who as attempted to use React Native for Windows, I can tell you that the "native" XAML doesn't make things any better. If it was using web technologies I wouldn't need to manually modify RNSVG to fix segfaults when an SVG goes offscreen.
> And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
Being technically correct doesn't make it any less annoying, unfortunately.
Lying to "prove" a point and basing discourse on lies gets us nowhere. Windows start menu is not slow because of React. We should correct common misconception more often.
Could you write us a nice blog post or article with performance metrics to prove this?
You might be correct but at this point your statement is as much a lie as the parent.
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The language is not the problem.
It isn't, it's the attitude and type of developer it's created
Don't kwow why you're getting downvoted, seems like a reasonable comment to me.
I agree, JavaScript and all it has enabled is a curse.
If one wanted the good bits of JavaScript I'm sure there are languages they were copied from that could be used instead.
> JShit doesn't belong anywhere
Or, as I prefer to call it, Kiddiescript.
At least mine was insulting in a punny way
With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
It’s not web but react native.
Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
Most likely saving Windows developers from learning programming. They are just javascript monkeys because that is what Microsoft is hiring these days and you can't trust monkeys with native C++. The thing would leak memory and explode immediately if those idiots tried to write native code. So in the name of hiring cheap idiots that can't program we all have to put up with this slow, bloated garbage.
There is no universe in which I should see lag between a click and a menu appearing in File explorer, taskbar or anywhere in the OS. Not on a machine with 8 idling cores.
> So in the name of hiring cheap idiots that can't program we all have to put up with this slow, bloated garbage.
Irony is they're not cheap hires, either.
MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here.
What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way.
This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
It's a nice thought but think of the cost!
You do have to wonder what the hell the people in charge of the Windows UI are thinking. They seem to have got it so badly wrong. But so has Apple in macos.
I'm not sure the cost would be significantly worse than all the half-assed abandoned efforts so far... and it would result in the first consistent UX in Windows since Win2k.
But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
Windows 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.
Taste 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.
one 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
Fair 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.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.
New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.
If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.
If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.
Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.
I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.
Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.
That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
To add to your list, if you open the start menu and type “add or remove” it will not bring up the add or remove programs section in the settings menu. It will only give an internet search. To uninstall a program you have to literally open the settings menu and search for the right section. In win 10 all you had to do was type “add” and it was the default selection.
Wow, I hadn't realised it could do video as well. I installed a separate app for that purpose the other day.
Just tested on my very anaemic 5 year old laptop, it loaded in about 2/3 seconds.
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I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
Win+Shift+S. It launches the snipping tool. Its been a feature for over a decade.
FWIW, my print screen button does exactly the same thing, literally; it's opening the snipping tool in "select a region to screenshot" mode.
This is a setting in Snipping Tool (called "Use the Print screen key to open Snipping Tool").
When I encounter this bug, Win-Shift-S behaves identically (i.e. doesn't work).
Especially since it can open with selecting the area to screenshot and not have to manually crop it in Paint or be sending a 4K image to someone.
You can use winutil to replace the new start menu with the old one. I think the option is in "advanced tweaks".
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?
My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.
And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.
In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.
Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
> My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.
You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.
I haven’t given Microsoft a dime since Windows 7. Users who buy a computer have the OS preinstalled. Millions of people never activate it. The product is effectively free.
It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.
Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.
What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.
Preinstalled OS doesn't mean free OS. You already paid for it when you bought the computer. You shouldn't see ads. Ever.
The software on the computer would cost more if it was ad-free and consumers have made the clear choice that they prefer not to pay for OS updates. We know this because the updates used to cost money. Apple was charging over $100 just for a point release, and they charged hundreds for updates to bundled software like iLife and iWork.
Everyone would love it if the NFL had zero ads but most NFL fans wouldn’t pay $XXX/month to watch the games.
OEMs pay pennies on the dollar for Windows and in some cases $0, the retail license is $200 but you can buy a mini PC for the same cost with a legitimate Windows license.
I dislike ads as much as the next person and use Linux myself for my main machine, but I’m not completely lacking in pragmatism on this subject. Commercial operating systems fund their development through paid services and App Store revenue sharing.
I think the status quo is relatively reasonable and, again, I find the commercialization to be very easy to dismiss and disable.
We are spending more time debating this subject than it took me to disable all forms of advertising in Windows.
You forgot about the spyware. It's not just the advertising....
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Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…
Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off
5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?
Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
> I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did.
If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.
> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.
Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.
Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.
After this discussion I looked it up and the original sources that made a claim that the Windows 11 start menu is written in react aren’t even confirmed accurate, and allegedly the components involving react are using react native for windows and are therefore compiled to native code - no web views are involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
So even this base assumption that a slow heavy bloated experience is on offer is just hearsay. The only section that uses React is the allegedly recommended section, the one that can be disabled entirely with a single settings toggle.
Anyway, again, the 5-10 second screenshot thing, I’ve been testing it live and could never get it to be slower than 2 seconds between invoking the shortcut key to file on the disk. Keeping in mind that this includes me physically reacting as quickly as possible to click after the shortcut keys to initiate the capture. It’s about one second between clicking capture and observing the file appear in file explorer. My CPU is 5 years old, my RAM is DDR4, and I use an off brand nvme SSD, for your reference.
I will also add to this that the main competitor to Windows, macOS, adds an intentional delay to their screen capture where the screenshots aren’t added to disk until after the little preview disappears or is manually dismissed. In Windows the preview notification and file being written to disk happen simultaneously, and the system automatically copies the image to clipboard which Apple doesn’t do, saving further time.
Your network share issue could be something misconfigured at your work, I have no way to verify whether that’s something your IT department messed up. My personal Windows and Linux systems are both connected to my SMB shares at all times through their graphical file managers and I don’t notice any difference in performance.
Last rebuttal: your finder experience in Macintosh classic (System 3.0 when the 512k debuted) is fast because there’s no multitasking, when you are at the desktop of a Macintosh the only application open is Finder and it’s already in RAM. Open any other application and then close it. You’ll notice a relatively long delay (10 seconds in my testing, although I don’t have real hardware) after closing the application before the desktop and finder are responsive again. You can try this on your preferred Macintosh emulator online.
I care that it's made with React/React Native or other garbage web frameworks. By definition adding layers between native C/C++ Native Win32 will make it slower and use more RAM.
Stop justifying laziness and mediocrity. Microsoft does this just so they can hire cheap javascript monkeys out of colleges. AKA people who shouldn't be writing code and the reason a chat application now uses 1GB of RAM and nobody seems to care or understand why such waste is both bad and stupid.
First off, this claim that the start menu is written largely with web frameworks isn’t even verified:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
It is supposedly still mostly Windows native XAML. Allegedly, even the components that use react are using react native for windows and are therefore not rendering any sort of resource-wasting web view.
I wrote my own react native phone app and it’s only a 30MB download. Your random comparison to a bulky chat app with an extensive feature list (the most popular culprits like Slack and Discord are not written in React Native, by the way) consuming a GB of RAM is irrelevant. Have you measured the start menu consuming 1GB of RAM? Unless you have, your argument is a whataboutism.
If you think it’s bad that Microsoft is using stuff that makes it easy for them to develop windows you should explain to me how it would be better for them to have extreme difficulty in making improvements like how the old control panel basically couldn’t be updated with any reasonable development cadence for decades while macOS ran circles around Windows for their clean settings experience, versus the new settings pane that Microsoft can actually iterate on and improve.
You can criticize the new settings panel for maybe not having 100% of what you want in it but you can’t criticize being a scary nightmare for novice users like the old version.
It is in the users’ benefit if Microsoft can actually hire people who are real humans and not just myths.
I am wasting my time, you are arguing in bad faith. I have installed windows 7 in a VM and everything takes less RAM not just the start menu and for most things it performs much much better. Start menu actually searches my files instantly, not with delay, not presenting web results, not presenting wrong results. It's doing its job.
Task manager opens immediately. Windows Explorer the same.
Those applications and the OS were written by real humans, not by myths. With your terribly bad argument it seems those OSes never happened since it required "extreme difficulty". No, it didn't require Einsteins. It required non-monkey coders.
You say you wrote your own react native phone app and it only takes 30MBs. So what? You forgot the most important part: what does it do? If it's a basic text editor then yes it's extremely bloated garbage.
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
The new context menu is so awful. There is zero reason in this day and age for a context menu to take multiple seconds to pop up. They didn't even really improve on it in any meaningful way.
I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
Just use NanaZip
In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).
This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!
To 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.
I 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.
> back to the classic 9x look
If i remember correctly this is the windows 2000 look.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Totally 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
Windows 8 was a pretty big overhaul. But I agree with the author it was a most unwelcome overhaul.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
I think one of the fundamental issues is "...to those raised on computers, rather than smartphones"
Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.
I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously, at all. It's a pretty unserious surface level critique of past GUIs based on 2025 standards. It's a bit like ranking the Coolest Looking Batman's - there's not really an honest metric outside of ones personal favorite.
Just 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.
Windows 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.
None of your points are relevant to the article at hand which is about the visual design of the OSs.
What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:
> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."
yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.
GP 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.
Vista wasn't that bad from purely OS side. On a VM it runs pretty stable.
However, Microsoft made a huge change to how the OS and drivers worked. If you still use Windows, you are still benefitting from some of the changes.
However HW vendors usually ship rather broken drivers, it was doubly bad since Vista overhauled the driver interface. By the time all vendors fixed their shitty and badly tested drivers we already had 7. It is also partly Microsoft's fault since they had absolute chaos in Vista development due to shitty hacks on top of hacks that was the consumer OS (XP).
Similarly Vista was very heavy for its contemporary average hardware. By the time HW caught up, 7 was released.
What does anything you just said have to do with the article though, which specifically focuses on the UI?
This article wasn’t ranking the quality of the OS overall, just the UI
Is everyone who disagrees with you an unserious person, or just on this particular topic?
The disagreement isn't what makes him not serious; the hubris to declare Windows 11 the most usable OS does.
No one who has any real experience with *nix, legacy ios, legacy Windows, and modern Windows/ios UI/UX would rate win11 top without serious qualifiers
Agreed. Something has to be wrong with you if you were to prefer Windows 11 to basically anything else. GNOME 3, Ubuntu's whatever desktop environment, KDE, Omarchy, macOS, Windows 8-10 - it's all more consistent, easier to grasp and also looks better than Windows 11.
I'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!
I 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.
In 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.
Windows 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
8.1 was slightly better, but most people I know that used it, used one of the start menu replacements that looked/felt more like Win7.
They actually backported this start menu to Windows RT which makes it even less sense considering Windows RT was mainly used on tablets and the start screen is better for these devices.
> 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.
Win2k 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.
I loved how consistent it was. Just peak Microsoft UI for me. Don’t know what happened after that but it all went to hell.
I 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.
30 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.
I don't even mind WebView or otherwise flatter material design choices... but so many implementations fail at even that... If you actually read through the material design guidelines it makes a lot of sense. But then so many UI toolkits and programs that are allegedly following this are just plain not.
Performance issues aside that is.
So 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.
Coming 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.
Windows 11 < Windows 10?
Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
Does 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.
You 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.
Start 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.
I 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
In 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.
I 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. :|
I 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.
I think Windows XP should have shipped with the Watercolor theme, although Luna does a better job of setting it apart from previous versions
Give 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.
I 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.
You're talking about Windows 3. Windows 2 predates Presentation Manager.
It doesn't seem to be the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Manager#History
Maybe they were developed together but Windows 2.0 released earlier was my point, so saying that Windows 2 was based on PM didn't feel right.
I really liked the fact they had full menu bars on resolutions far lower than phones had 15 years ago. No hamburger menus.
Oh cool, someone else that appreciates Windows 2000 more than XP. There are dozens of us!
It was supposed to be a "business" OS, but I still remember playing Need for Speed on it, games were still installable on it.
Anybody who experienced or knows how haphazardly the Microsoft consumer division forked and developed XP would prefer 2000 or 2003 over XP.
I 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.
I 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.
Haha, 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.
Mine said “Über”, which seemed very clever to me for some reason.
They 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.
"Windows NT" the brand, not "Windows" with NT the kernel.
I 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.
As 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.
I 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.
Windows 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.
From 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?
I 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.
Liquid 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.
In 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.
XP, a regression? closes tab.
I'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
And 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.
I 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...
I 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.
Been pretty happy with the PopOS Cosmic series so far.
MSFT peaked at Windows 2000.
I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.
It 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!
It 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.
Yes 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).
> 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
I 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.
The 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)
Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
At 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.
That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
Of course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.
Windows 11 is just walmart brand macOS, they peaked at Windows 7.
They forgot Windows Millenium Me the most awful version I ever used.
remember that there are still classic theme bois out there. 9x/2k is the best theme.
11 is indeed pretty good looking. Once you use it 10 feels so clunky.
11 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.
IMHO it would be more interesting to compare UI/UX of something like MS Office. That traces the evolution of the GUI pretty well.
I happen to like the Windows 1.0 appearance and I think it is not so ugly.
Just invert this ranking and then it should fit.
Something 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."
I assume there is a reason for leaving out Windows Me.
From 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.
I 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
We don't talk about Windows Me.
Windows 1 had hamburger menus, originally from Xerox Star.
Kinda cool
If 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.
I 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.
All those versions had customizable color themes, which windows has gradually weakened to almost nothing. There was nothing stopping you from rocking hotdog stand back then except your own good taste and the bleeding from your eyes.
I liked it although that was maybe because Windows 2000 was a great OS. Having seen the awful mess the Unix vendors made of CDE/Motif, 2000 felt more professional.
This 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?
Bring back the 2000s transparency in the hardware. Transparent phone (nokia 3310, of course), transparent PC, transparent everything!
I 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.
Dont forget the transparent landline phone, alarmclock, and tvs!
not 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
More likely, people just don't give a damn if their keyboards only last a coupe years and buy a new one.
2000 had a nice shade of blue for its desktop background, IMO.
Was anyone surprised? This follows the classic pattern.
I 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.
Windows 11 is bad but will only get worse with AI updates.
Why do you want to remove the scrollbar on a website - you never know how long the ‘page’ is… - I really hate those UX decisions
[dead]
Cooked take.