IE is crashing for me whenever I try to load any site.
Windows98 Running in the Browser
221–230 of 271 posts
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#222Won't that provoke a DMCA takedown request and a subsequent lawsuit from Microsoft?
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now h…
> People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu
Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of 5-10 seconds to showing every result... What are people paying for? Apparently it must also be that it doesn't even properly separate the drawing code from the search/IO/sync code because while it lags away I can clearly feel the lag even in how the text cursor moves and responds... Reliably! Wtf this is the world's most used OS? (Sorry, rant over.)
There are definitely major problems in Windows, be it incentive structure, or some wrong people at key positions in the UX department, or legacy, or whatever it is, but after experiencing a good desktop manager it is obvious that Windows is not getting better in this regard... It's not about tablet or no tablet, it is just worse, in many ways.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#224omg finally a reasonable minesweeper emulator
Off-topic tangent, but if you like Minesweeper you would really like the games Hexcells and Tametsi, each available for less than $1 on Steam. They're both like Minesweeper but have the improvement that every move can be logically deduced so you never have to guess.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that. > A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people co…
> and resource hogging Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. B…
I agree with the general sentiment, but don't agree with the specifics.
The NT series has always distinguished between cached/locked memory, so I don't see that as an explanation.
Also, consider than, on equivalent hardware, XP actually booted _faster_ than 2k, which led many people (incl those who hated the interface) to actually use it.
So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now h…
> People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of…
KDE Plasma happily copied windows in this way. I have often had the wrong thing launch on KDE because the search updated between when I decided to hit "enter" and when the key press was registered.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now h…
No, the Windows 8 Metro/Win32 split was simply an extremely bad design. I’ve been dealing with a few 8 machines recently, and it’s really, really bad. You want to get between the two worlds? Hope you know about Alt+Tab, because otherwise you’re probably not going to find out how to get there. Seriously. It’s that bad.
Windows 8.1 made some improvements, so that users will probably be able to find their way from Win32 to Metro. Getting back is still a pain. It retained the fundamentally bad paradigm.
Windows 10 was the proper fix: abolish the ecosystem split, as a disastrously failed experiment, and return to a unified experience. You still have the UWP apps (though their design is finally somewhat more in line with the rest of the OS), but they are properly windowed like everything else now.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#228It's funny how I find Win98 more user friendly and logical than Win10. Just look at the start menu where thing are sorted in folders. No ads optimizations anywhere. Just an annoying shortcut on the desktop for MS Internet. Is it possible to make a program like the sheep.exe nowadays? It is awesome.
Gnome 2 was Windows 95 UI, refined, cleaned of all bloat and with a modern look (for his time). All installed apps were automatically stored is the right sub-menu in the Application button. It was really neat to use.
MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/) is the modern, supported, version of Gnome2. It's a great desktop environment and all your old nautilus scripts will work with just a s/nautilus/caja/ regex replacement.
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline. There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with differ…
You're definitely right, what each of us individually perceive as "the golden age" is probably driven largely by age and nostalgia. I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly - I definitely didn't mean it was the golden age of personal computing, but rather the golden age of the internet. Certainly, some things have improved. There's been more standardization and a proliferation of knowledge about the 'right' w…
I agree. Honestly, I'd take the gaudy animated GIFs and marquee tags back if it meant there was less reliance on Medium / Facebook / etc.
For me the biggest change is the shift from content to consumption. 90s web was generally content first. Today's web is all about lower quality content and force-feeding consumers until they're addicted to it like crack (some massive generalisations there)
Re: Windows98 Running in the Browser
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the pinnacle must have been before the title bar gradients were added. They always annoyed me: is the title bar any less of a title bar towards the right? No? Then why does it fade out?
The color is a background for the text. It fades out because the bar stops being about showing the title text, and starts being about showing window controls, that exist as buttons with their own backgrounds and borders. Sort of like how desktop icons have text with a blur-extruded drop-shadow. It fades out at the point where text is no longer shown.
The title is shown in the entire title bar (e.g. long titles for web pages) all the way until it reaches the buttons, which as you say have their own border, so there is no gradual change in its character. It's 100% draggable and 100% showing text all the way, so the form (showing gradual change) is at odds with the function (sharp distinction between title and buttons).