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.
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.
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).
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!
Also I'm pretty sure default Gnome and KDE include emojis in their "start" menu search, which is its own kind of annoying.
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.
If you disable it, it becomes snappy again. Pretty crazy to me that Microsoft allows the default option to be that slow
Win+x -> u -> s
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.
Being technically correct doesn't make it any less annoying, unfortunately.
You might be correct but at this point your statement is as much a lie as the parent.
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.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
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.
Irony is they're not cheap hires, either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just tested on my very anaemic 5 year old laptop, it loaded in about 2/3 seconds.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
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
Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.
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.
> "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'.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
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 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. :|
Also reminds me of the layers of UI versions still present in Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
I think the best version of macOS was High Sierra. After that, everything started becoming bloated and inconsistent.
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.
Performance issues aside that is.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
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...
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 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).
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
Found a video of it: https://youtu.be/nVZW8i9-92U
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.
- XP was good
- vista was bad
- 7 was good
- 8 was bad
- 10 was good
- 11 is .....drumroll please.... bad.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.
- XP was good
- vista was bad
- 7 was good
- 8 was a disaster
- 10 was worse
- 11 is even worse