One more thing missing in the list: MDI (multiple document interface) child windows are styled with Aero basic (i.e. without glass styling) frames, which really look rather ugly when embedded into a Window with a Windows 10 frame.
State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
151–160 of 335 posts
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
They tried modernizing with Windows RT, which was actually very smooth and functional if it wasn't so locked down.
Wasn't RT just windows 8 with an ARM build target and win32 stuff removed so they could sell cheaper tablets? So if you wanted an "unlocked" windows RT, couldn't you just have run windows 8?
>win32 stuff removed
Win32 was not removed from Windows RT, but your access to it (if your name wasn't "Microsoft"; because that low-level access was reportedly how they got Office on it) was.
And because of Secure Boot, which (unlike x86, for now) is mandated enabled for Windows on ARM systems, you had to wait for an unpatchable security hole in the booting process (which, while it exists, wasn't relevant until past the end of the Surface RT's lifecycle), you couldn't run full Windows 8 or a tablet-first Linux distro.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception. Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the le…
This may explain why Microsoft have created so many email clients and none of them 100% work.
* Microsoft Mail
* Windows Messaging
* Outlook Express
* Microsoft Outlook
* Windows Mail
* Windows Live Mail
* Mail.app
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
> Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had…
The ecosystem was never uniform. In the 95/2000 days there was a lot of 3.11 UI everywhere, in the 7/8 days a lot of XP UI. Office always had its own UI conventions, often being the playground where new ideas were tested.
It's not so much that microsoft let things go as it was taken from them. When computers became networked we needed ways of easily distributing applications across that network in secure, reliable and always up to date ways. Windows never had a good solution to that (not even today), because every install was fraught with peril, and every app had to roll its own update mechanism. Meanwhile the web was sandboxed and up to date by definition, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for networked software. Anything that could move to the web did move to the web, which opened the door for chromebooks, which in turn fragmented the OS market, which made it uneconomical for companies to invest in a windows native codebase. Microsoft could have stopped this had they leaned hard into the concept of an app store and sandboxing around 2000, and hadn't stumbled so badly when it came to extending windows to mobile.
I'm pretty sure that modernizing the entire windows UI doesn't change a thing for windows market share. But the reason to do it is not because it makes economic sense, it is because they should have pride in the products they make, and want them to be well-made.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you might want to look into MacOS. Or at least might've wanted before Big Sur, dunno about now.
Yeah, macOS jumping on the "huge UI elements with tons of empty space" bandwagon was the proverbial straw for me that moved my beloved MBP from daily workhorse to random idle browsing machine. I'd say it's still not as bad as Windows, in that at least it's not pure white that burns your eyes, but I still hate how half of my laptop screen is taken up by useless UI elements.
Is this a thing with Big Sur? I haven't moved to it yet, but reading here [1] it doesn't seem like bad changes?
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/234382/macos-big-sur-learn-...
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#156This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windo…
As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer t…
>I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it.
They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets.
Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine.
They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty.
No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#157Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be to…
Please don't waste your time and talent on GNOME.
The GNOME project burnt all their good will and capital building a touch focused UI (for all those touch devices running linux, you know) at the cost of their very desktop orientated userbase (sound familiar?). The core project members are more interested in social justice witch hunts than creating a good product and it shows.
Open UNIX's are desperate for a light comprehensive desktop environment with modern features. GNOME ain't it chief.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#158This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windo…
> In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies".
Don't you ever have to change sound settings? Because I have to deal with that every week, and have to dig through 3 different style of UIs and several different windows/dialogs to get to what I need.
Everything related to control panel / settings is a giant mess, and it's often really hard to find the settings you want, especially if you don't already know where it is. Some things is in the new UI, some in an old UI.
It's actually one of the main reasons why I really don't want to use Windows for my home laptop. Windows does have it strengths, and I don't mind using it at work, but I really don't want any of that bullsh*t when I get home from work.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).
Could you ever see Microsoft dropping the registry? My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system. Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.
If I remember correctly there was an internal effort at Microsoft to scrap the registry (Longhorn?) but they decided not to, and probably because a registry is actually a good idea and necessary to get something performant (compared to ini files).
The critique against the Windows registry stems from the Windows 95 days when the registry could become corrupt and repair or reinstall was necessary. However since then the registry works like a database, it has transaction logs and simultaneous writes are atomic. Registry is also strongly typed, not a bunch of strings. Registry can easily be backed up and restored.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you ever see Microsoft dropping the registry? My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system. Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.
If I remember correctly there was an internal effort at Microsoft to scrap the registry (Longhorn?) but they decided not to, and probably because a registry is actually a good idea and necessary to get something performant (compared to ini files). The critique against the Windows registry stems from the Windows 95 days when the registry could become corrupt and repair or reinstall was necessary. However since then th…
Probably because Longhorn tried to replace even more parts of Windows with a database-like system, and they'd have rolled the registry-equivalent into that, if it had succeeded.