101–110 of 166 posts
Amazing, only 2 years to implement a feature you had already. What was so problematic about the Windows 10 taskbar that they had to completely scrap it and start from zero??
Why stop there? Lets go back to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I remember that being better than Windows 10.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.
They have tried exactly that with Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly.
Curious what they will do about Microsoft Store apps in such a release. It's becoming more of a pressing concern. Maybe Windows 11 LTSC will have a "filtered flathub" situation similar to Red Hat / Fedora?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time,…
> at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. That's a bit of a re-write of history. Mac OS tried to throw away all backwards compatibly on day one but major software vendors told them to pound sand so they had to spend another year building out Carbon. Not to mention that Mac OS X itself is built on NextSTEP. Linux breaks front-end compatibility s…
I figured this would happen, and I figured I'd have a few years to hold off updating before they forced me to. Glad it looks like things are going to be mostly back to par by then
I really have to wonder about the process the Windows team follows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they didn't scrap it and start from zero... at least the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default, and more than 10 years later they thought it would be safe to remove them completely, but looks like they were wrong. Personally, the Windows 7-style task bar (icons only and combining quick launch icons with the task bar) was one of the few innovations (yeah, I know it was heavily inspired by MacOS) t…
> the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default And literally every Windows user I personally know has turned them back on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.
Or just have two Desktop Environments. One for the hoi polloi where the designers can go wild and the bean counters can push MSN "news", and one for Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars The obvious solution is to leave those enterprise customers behind on the legacy edition of Windows and launching something new. But Microsoft seems incapable of going to market with something new al…
It's strange that MS has never did what Apple did with the OS 9 → OS X transition, starting with a fresh foundation and making a clean break from the predecessor by way of a well-integrated "Classic" mode that seamlessly runs legacy applications in a "borderless" VM. The most natural time to have done this would've probably been going from XP → Vista/7, which broke a number of old things anyway. For all that switchin…
Microsoft had a good thing going, with the massive success of MS-DOS and Windows 95 it was imperative that the next generation consumer OS, Windows 2000, could run programs from their existing well-respected platform without users noticing the gap. (With OS X, you noticed the gap -- totally different UI style when in Classic Environment, and the Carbon API for easy porting was a mess that went unadopted by developers)
Windows 7 taskbar was great. Windows 10 added a few improvements. Windows 11 restarted from scratch for no reason whatsoever. I think they only way this happens is if nobody in the entire org has a cohesive vision for the product. It's every man for himself. Somebody wanted to implement a new taskbar from scratch, and they had enough pull within the company. So they got to do it. Users and product be dammed.
Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.
All the browsers have the ability to open both windows and tabs. If I wanted stuff grouped in one taskbar item, I'd open a tab. If I've specifically opened a new window, I am specifically saying I don't want those grouped -- the OS applying its own grouping is obnoxious.
If all the apps I use had native executables, they'd appear as their own taskbar icon. If they were wrapped in an Electron app, I'd have essentially the same user experience but they'd get their own icon.
My point is really that combining windows/processes that happen to be hosted by the same executable is silly -- even as a highly technical user I don't care about that detail. I'm doing a semantically different activity; I specifically opened a new window; I want a dedicated taskbar icon for it.
I'd be curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?