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Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

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Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#71

Post by jameshart »

freeone3000 wrote: post #68
jameshart wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have. Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a f…

Put an SSD and a modern emulation behind Windows 98 and it flies . You’re excusing inefficient software because it was paired with improved hardware.

But it didn’t do much? This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.

It wasn’t efficient it was limited.

It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.

Computers are doing so much more nowadays.

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#72

Post by Narishma »

afzalive wrote: post #64
narag wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Windows 9x was peak Windows. I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state. XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success.…

Wasn't 2000 the first NT architecture on desktop? 2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.

What do you mean by 'on desktop'?

NT has always had both server and workstation versions.

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#74

Post by pjmlp »

DrBazza wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that goes to either Windows 2000 or Windows 7.

This is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did. Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista. They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.

If only .NET was actually everywhere like Swift on Apple, or Java/Kotlin on Google land.

Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#76

Post by api »

jameshart wrote: post #21
reddalo wrote: post #3

I think Windows 9x was peak Windows. Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen. But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive . The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron. Edit. See OP's previous article here,…

Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have. Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a f…

This is true but also false.

It’s true that things could be slow on those old machines, especially when it had to hit disk. It’s true that things were often single threaded and would stall.

But what’s also true is that this old code was orders of magnitude more efficient. Put that code on even a modest machine from today with an SSD, even a Raspberry Pi, and it would scream. Everything would be instantaneous.

Some of the reasons for this degradation are unavoidable, like high DPI displays and feature depth, but a lot of it is just bloat on top of bloat on top of bloat.

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#77

Post by varun_ch »

reddalo wrote: post #7
tentacleuno wrote: post #4

I imagine that the database for the online file association service for Windows XP has been lost to time, but for those who remember it: was it any good? It seems like quite a good idea now -- if I remember correctly, Windows as of current seems to suggest a generic Bing search, which brings up all the spam "What extension is XXX?" sites. That could have changed; I haven't really used Windows after 11's debut.

If I recall correctly, it was pretty bad. It used to open Internet Explorer on this page: http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={e... where {ext} was the extension. Suggestions were vague and they only made sense with well-known filetypes. There's a screenshot of how it looked here: https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg

this might be the only place where a redirection to bing provides a much better UX than what was there previously!

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#78

Post by edg5000 »

inigyou wrote: post #36
edg5000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I daily drive GNOME on Ubuntu 22 on a daily basis and its UX is the favorite of all the UIs I've ever used, and I've used classic mac, OS X, all windows versions, xfce, kde and a trillion programs. And both android and ios devicess, both from early versions onto recent. And GNOME really shines here. I'm on X11 though. Wayland lagged my mouse when I tried it years back, so I gave up on Wayland. Maybe they've fixed the…

4-year-old unsupported OS. X11 support was removed from GNOME this year.

Gets security updates until April 2027. Everything works perfectly. Why bother upgrading?

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#79

Post by bombela »

airstrike wrote: post #66

Good post but those images are way too small for me to see anything without having to open a new tab or navigate away, neither of which is fun to do when there are 10+ images

Click on the picture to open the full size version. Click history back to get back to the text.

I noticed I am afraid of clicking without opening new tab today because so many times the UX is broken and loses it's spatial position.

Re: Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file

#80

Post by bombela »

edoloughlin wrote: post #34
shevy-java wrote: post #2

Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement. Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser nev…

One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file... (Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)

plus the filter search is very slow. plus the async race conditions if you click or keyboard enter too quickly.
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