Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners).<p>For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side actually mean - with one exception: "users". There are <i>two</i> icons that both look like hamburger menues FFS.
The single most "oh, <i>Microsoft</i>" moment I had when updating to Windows 11 is actually glossed over in this article without comment. Context menus are restyled, and also now have a "show more options" entry[1] -- if you press it, what happens? The pre-Windows-11 context menu appears.<p>That's right. There's archeological layers of UI design in <i>context menus</i> now.<p>[1] <a href="https://ntdotdev.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/image-4.png" rel="nofollow">https://ntdotdev.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/image-4.png</a>
To be fair, I think some examples, and specifically those from 95/NT and then 3.1 times, are too far-fetched. I agree that consistency is important, but it doesn't mean that every screen needs to be redesigned altogether. For instance, I don't think that examples of Screen Saver Settings or File Properties are relevant, as long as their styling is in line with the rest of the OS.<p>One thing that surprises me a lot, though, is that a lot of applications seem to need to be upgraded one-by-one, even if the UI is largely the same and only the styling needs to be upgraded. I never developed for Windows UI, but does it mean that there is no single reusable UI Kit, where just the styling could be changed from OS version to another? Do all these examples demonstrate that different applications are compiled with different UI Frameworks that are all in use and supported?
What's more embarrassing than UI is that after 10+ years Win10/11 Settings still don't have the functionality parity with Win7 Control Panel, evidenced by the fact you find links everywhere in Settings to <i>officially</i> ask you to open their equivalent in Control Panel to adjust "advanced" settings.<p>And even at the places they do, arguments can be made about if their UX/UI are actually better; but that's kinda subjective, to be totally fair to MS.
I have a bit of a perfectionistic tendency to 'start over' things over and over and do them again as perfectly as possible; the Windows side of MS feels like a corporate embodiment of this habit.<p>They've done this sort of thing with app installers(setup.exe, click once, appv, msi, msix) and UI frameworks(win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3). It's like the teams responsible for their respective product keep starting over with a shiny new way of doing things every couple of years to achieve the 'perfect' installer/ui framework or anything else for that matter. Infact W11 felt like a way of 'restarting' W10 without building a whole new OS.<p>Atleast with W11 they're actively updating old things rather than introducing new ones, I did not have a lot of hope when it first came out, but they have gotten my hopes up since the release for sure. I just hope they stick with winui 3 and see it through.
The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around.<p>Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating system backwards compatible.<p>Comparatively, the Linux kernel API is stable, though applications relying on newer system calls are forever stuck requiring minimum kernel versions. On the userspace side, application packages are in a near constant state of flux and can break with a single version/dependency change.
As a long-time Linux user with habit of throwing everything into the mix, I got quite used to number of inconsistencies that I have, so I don't think that MS deserves criticism for having them too (although article is not very critical, it just counts the inconsisitencies). I have GTK2/3/4 apps, KDE apps, Qt apps, Electron apps, AND Windows apps running under wine. So the only consistency on my desktop is an inconsistency. Also Windows has good track record for backwards compatibility, no surprise that an OS has some "ancient" parts.
>The ability to choose icons that are more than 30 years old is still here, with the inclusion of the very important and absolutely critical to the good function of the OS moricons.dll<p>I will happily bet there are programs out there that would crash and burn horrifically without moricons.dll.
Pretty sure MS has just given up on consistency at this point. The control panel on particular is a writeoff - simple things like setting an IP on a net adapter is an adventure in itself
What I don’t understand is why Microsoft seems to have failed so often at creating the basic abstractions needed to be able to replace the old dialogs (for instance the file browser the ODBC connection UI) with new ones without needing to touch the calling code.<p>Microsoft’s answer for making new UI always seems to involve making new API’s altogether, leaving the old ones intact for compatibility, and adopting the new ones gradually over time. What’s the point of interfaces if you need to change them to change the implementation? The ODBC dialog should have been able to be changed without the calling software even knowing about it.<p>I seem to recall the reasons being something about explorer shell plugins and needing to support third party additions to the dialogs, but that just raises further concerns for me: why allow such things in the first place if it causes you to never be able to change the dialogs? Why does the explorer right-click menu (for example) have a plugin interface that prevents you from changing it to use a new UI look and feel?<p>It all reeks of “the wrong abstraction” all over the place to me. It’s probably getting old to point this out at this point, but macOS doesn’t seem to suffer from any of these issues. If they decide to do a new UI theme for a macOS release, you generally see it everywhere. There’s no 1993-era UI elements in macOS that are significantly out of place (not saying they don’t have UI that has sat unchanged, but it’s usually because the changes aren’t needed, not because they just didn’t get around to it.)
This is a really great documentation of how far back various pieces of the UI go. If you’ve been using Windows for a long time, you remember when different pieces of the UI got introduced or changed and then frozen in amber until today.<p>Crazy to think they are still recovering from Windows 8 and the pivot to Metro UI.
My favourite was the "Windows Classic" ala Windows 98 theme which disappeared along with Windows 7. These fancy monstrosities keep getting worse every year.
My biggest issue with Windows 11 UI is the existence of both the control panel and the settings app.<p>Often I don't know which setting takes precedence, for example I can create power plans from control panel and also use different power modes from the settings app.
> Last, but not least, the boot screen has been updated to the new Windows logo, as well as the new WinUI loading circle, which replaces the dated spinning dots.<p>I guess this is why I'm not a designer, but why are the spinning dots dated and why is that bad?
Windows file version history is an interesting example of UI inconsistent AND being broken as a result.
It has been removed from settings (was in Win 10), but still exists in the control panel (where you can't configure folders to be included in file version history).
There is a real cost to consistency/change, and I don't personally believe that this is just laziness or poor design on Microsoft's behalf.<p>Sure, Windows could have changed the look and layout of every component with every release, but with an application as widely used as Windows you really want the ability for users to move from Windows XP to Windows 11 and still have a sense of familiarity and confidence.<p>It is also difficult for them to remove settings or change their behaviour of settings without breaking compatibility, so really whenever they are making the UI 'consistent' we really mean moving around the existing settings rather than rethinking them entirely - true change has to be done in baby-steps across many Windows versions.
The biggest setback in Windows UI was the "tabletization" of the UI (for the lack of a better word) introduced in Windows 8. IMO, this attempt at making Windows mobile friendly made a lot of compromises which made Windows worse for both mobile and desktop. And because Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously (they have to, for their enterprise customers), the Windows UI ended up being this hot mess that we have today.
Yes, the Windows UX is a sedimentary landscape of decades of leftover stuff that still works and nobody will fund updating. But the inconsistency is even deeper. Just in the examples in the article you can see the whole history of Windows system fonts, which are all (at least back to MS Sans Serif) still there and in use. And if you try hard enough, you can find a single window using two or three different text rendering algorithms!
I never quite understood the point of redesign. The only reason I can think of is marketing. Other than that, it's always, always a big mess. Why does everything need to be freaking round which makes it very ugly in low resolutions?
I started using a windows XP theme for windows 10. it's been bliss.<p>what are people thinking these days with the huge waste of screen real estate everywhere?
Few years back I tried writing Win32 code under Windows 10 to see if I still "had it". I set up my main window with an event loop and then, for shits and giggles, added a button. It entailed calling CreateWindow again with the proper button window class, which I did, and when I ran it... there, on my screen, appeared a small, flat Windows 9x button.<p>With a label in the Windows 3.x system font.<p>Never change, Windows. Never change.
Windows 11 is getting worse not better. I went to type Windows Fax in the start menu since Windows Fax and Scan used to be included. It showed up as an app in the latest Windows 11 but then tried running it and they removed it but left the shortcut.
Note to OP: your page breaks PgDwn scrolling because it 'traps' PgDwn in scrolling endlessly through the image carousels and never PgDwns again. (FF 108.0 & Chromium Version 108.0.5359.71)
I wonder if they kept the ODBC driver installer window with the win3.x-style file tree unchanged, just so they could be compatible with random old legacy odbc driver installer program that might try to programatically automate interactions with that UI?<p>I don't know first-hand of any such program, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some old important enterprisey installer that expects the file chooser dialog to be <i>just so</i> and would freak out if the UI didn't still follow win 3.x conventions..?
I am still looking forward for the option to ungroup task bar buttons, preferably with titles. Again! Something that was there before, worked, and was useful. But some designer decided we don't need that, to the bin with it!
Even more: There are some parts (especially some 3rd-party drivers) whose UI still have the Win95 <i>Classic UI widgets</i> (with grey-like base color, square 3D buttons, etc).<p>Another point is one shown by the case of the sniping tool. The previous version had UI standards not aligned to the current version, but it was small and fast. The current version has a somewhat consistent UI but it's slower and way more bloated.
macOS<p>I posted this yesterday, macOS is also at fault.<p>Here’s an interest blog post from a former Apple UI employee talking about the growing inconsistency in macOS UI.<p><a href="https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monterey-and-user-interface-inconsistencies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...</a>
It was always worth it to me to be a late adopter of Windows, they just take a really long time ironing things out, especially so since they made their users their QAs[0]. I think I'll be fine with my Win 10 LTSC 2021 until the support runs out in 2027, and then I'll see where Win 11 stands.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-did-microsoft-lay-off-programmatic-testers" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-d...</a>
If Microsoft employees can't fix it, something Apple fixed already for their OS years ago, then they should not be working on Windows<p>I don't understand how incompetence is being protected and empowered at Microsoft, it's suspiciously worrying, i hope the military isn't dependent on Microsoft software, i'd be worried if they use their tech in the battlefield, HoloLens is another evidence things are fishy within that company
I use Linux on my desktop most of the time. Recently I've been dual-booting into Windows 10. Whenever I run Windows my HDD usage spikes to 100% until I turn off "real-time virus protection". Does anyone know if this feature still exists in Windows 11, and if it is less buggy on W11?<p>I'm sure there is some registry voodoo I could do to turn this off on every reboot - so far Googling the magic keys and trying them has not worked unfortunately.
RDP, Run dialogue, MMC.exe and Services.msc should stay the way they are thank you very much! These are work tools, in guides and SOPs all over. Rather no redo those.
>It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use<p>Oof first sentence and it's already a train wreck
I can't believe he didn't show the Device Manager window.<p>You know the one that you go to in hopes of figuring out why that USB peripheral or PCI card you plugged in isn't working, only to get a tree menu with a hierarchy of random categories, then a property dialog with zero real info?<p>That thing has been a decades old nightmare to me, and it still hasn't changed.
I rarely use Windows, but every time again I am surprised how they still squeeze most out of their win95 UI concept by only adding new shiny layers.<p>There are dozens of desktops that went into several mostly consistent redesigns in all that time. Gnome Shell nothing feels like Windows 95, Windows 10 still somewhat does.
I have really mixed feeling about these inconsistencies really.<p>On the one hand, I care deeply about the consistency and love the fresher look of the new Windows 11, a breath of fresh air from the ugly Windows 8–10 style.<p>On the other hand, I am really afraid if some of the settings / careful curated wizards are gone --<p>I recently has to reset network settings because I switch to a different router, and I have bridges from Hyper-V, the resetting wizard is buried in a Vista-era guide to diagnose internet. I am sure it will be gone if they refurbish that area of the control panel, the whole "experience" need years to refine which would not be allowed in the speed of corps today.<p>And there is also the performance issue.<p>Just look at the fresh macOS System Settings app, what a mess it is.
Though I indeed experience this in Windows, in macOS I feel the same about buttons, especially when you mix in an external keyboard (I have a Logitech MX keys). It's always a mistery when and how home/end work (does nothing in terminal, it's page down/up in some apps, in Word it's like Windows), when cmd-arrows do home/end (not in terminal [annoying that ctrl-a/e are the only ways!], does work in FireFox), what button gives me ~ (shown on 2 buttons on the MX keys) and when I can paste with crtl-v (ok, yeah I shouldn't but if you switch OS a lot... strangely it sometimes works).<p>Oh and three finger down-swipe is undo on iOS! Very handy! Just not always, more like sometimes.
I find the phrase "outdated spinning dots" design weirdly hilarious.<p>Why is it outdated?<p>It can't be because it doesn't convey the concept properly anymore, since it still does just fine in this regard...<p>I don't think I'll ever understand the minds of UI designers...
a bit unfair to complain about Windows Media Player 12 having the same UI when the application is clearly included for backwards compatibility even though it has already been replaced by newer application (called just Media Player) with the new UI.
Would I prefer an OS with a consistent UI? Yes. Would I prefer a more user friendly OS? Yes! Will I still use Windows? Yes. Why? Because I spend 50% of my time in Microsoft office, which works far better in Windows than other OS
Why do we care so much about this? I daily Fedora, so I'm far from being a Windows fan, but they have an envious amount of backwards compatibility.
I wrote a similar comment here recently, but this is much more detailed, and it's worse than I thought. Nice to see practically all versions addressed in some detail. Looks like Microsoft does have some kind of UWP (he wrote, not at all resenting the loss of his Windows phone).
I've tried Windows full-time again in 2022. I'm a developer. I bought an XPS 13 9310 UHD and activated Windows Pro. WSL2 make the life of a developer pretty easy, specially if you need Docker, it runs better on WSL2 than on Mac. But Lord! What a crappy UI/UX experience, but it is at least getting better. The battery management is terrible, make traveling with a "Thin and Light" laptop a bad experience, you have to be nearby a power outlet. On Dec 29 I bought another Mac. About same price of my XPS. Battery is amazing and the UI/UX still way better.<p>Note: People say that the XPS FHD has a good battery life. I don't care, I don't want a FHD, and UHD is a pretty bad product. Fix it.
> Explorer (which finally has tabs!)<p>This is great, but I do wish people would stop adding tabs to applications and start adding them to window managers instead...
godmode still seems to exists<p><a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-god-mode-windows-11-what-is-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-god-mode-window...</a><p><a href="https://lifehacker.com/you-need-windows-11s-god-mode-1848007324" rel="nofollow">https://lifehacker.com/you-need-windows-11s-god-mode-1848007...</a>
It seems like every few weeks I see posts on HN criticizing Windows about privacy and it’s inconsistent UI. It’s getting a little old.<p>It’s trivial to use Group Policy Editor to disable windows “spyware” as HNers like to call it.<p>As far as the “inconsistent” UI goes, it’s funny to me how no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant.<p>Windows is an OS a tool to get things done. My customers could care less about any of these things. Articles like these are interesting but pedantic.
I would prefer for feature to exist and work and don't care if the buttons look the same. I am super salty because I tried to run some old 32 bits qt4 and gtk2 python apps on latest Kubuntu LTS (I am 100% only Linux for years )and I just wasted hours without any satisfaction, at least on Windows 10 year old programs will still work most of the time(probably some old games could fail but might be a driver issue and not a Microsoft stuff).
As a 25+ year user of windows none of this stuff bothers me. What ticks me off is just the abysmal quality of windows 11 compared to the past. It’s like no one working on it has any pride in their job<p>Example:<p>- hate the new notification area. The action center was so much better<p>- dumb stuff like a window update notification that shows a c# class name instead of windows update<p>- clicking said notification does not bring up the windows update settings as it used to.<p>- searching for windows update in the start menu does not show the setting as a result. Even when you select setting.<p>- every few edge updates, th browser is able to put itself in a state that it takes 5 minutes to start up. In that time most other apps will not launch either.<p>I could go on and on, but these are just a few of the daily problems that irritate me.
I would be curious for a similar dissection of modern macOS. My intuitive sense is that it is a little better though there are probably still at least 5 layers of stuff.<p>So to some extent, does doing this better at the scale of a modern user-facing OS provide enough return on investment?
See the problem with operating systems which don't have strict design guidelines and review like iOS is that they don't have a consistent design language which <i>clearly</i> prevents adoption. That's one of the prime reason why Linux on the desktop will never take off. /s