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Windows Explorer Through the Years

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Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#141
post #99
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders. I use Keypirinha , Everything , and other tools to get work done.

In many of those cases it's shell extensions installed by other apps that make Explorer slow. I forgot how you can check that, but you can.

This! Especially f'in dropbox.. swear to god everytime you try to click on a file it does some type of request to try to "help" you.

Which is fine, but it gets slow as hell. I have a brand new very fast machine and all the sudden explorer was getting so terrible. I downloaded something to disable the dropbox shell extensions and back to very nice performance.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#143
I love this, find it fascinating but this isn't right:

"which is historically interesting only because it shows the direction Microsoft's product lines had shifted - suddenly NT was the line where new UI developments were being made and 9x was getting hand-me-downs."

win me was the breeding ground for things that made it into win 2003, things like sfc, msconfig etc - all the utilities went into me first and then to 2003.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#144
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the wrong word. Please note the difference in usage.

No, I used it correctly for what I was saying. Don't put words in my mouth please. MDI has not been removed. It's been DEPRECIATED as in it's still there and it still works (kinda) but MS no longer see value in it's function. My terminology for what I was saying was correct. This sub-thread is a classic example of HN pedantry. Down vote me into oblivion if it makes you happy. /sigh

But deprecated doesn't mean it's "been removed". If I understand what you were originally trying to say, then deprecated is a better fitting word than depreciated because that is a financial term. Whereas deprecated is a common software term meaning exactly what you said "it's still there and it still works [...] but no longer see value in it's function".

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#145
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right move IMHO, I always found it a bit confusing and somewhat arbitrary. However, removing MDI from Office apps was not followed by implementing a persistent-background-app replacement. So now you open a Word document, wait with splash-screen, look at the document, close it, then open another Word document, wait with splash-screen , repeat... so annoying.

I do not see how it is confusing (to someone who is familiar with computers - i can see how some people who aren't used to computers might be confused by the maximization state). It is very useful in several types of applications, like image editors where you want to have multiple images open while having docked toolbars/controls, avoiding a waste of screen space and a clean background. This way you can have, e.g. th…

MDI's don't play well with multiple screens. While they have some good applications as you suggest, such as image editing - Spreadsheets and Word Processing were not great with MDI. The shared context such as pallets don't apply for documents.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#146
post #109

To the author: stop railing about toolbars. Misguided as Microsoft is in many cases, they do have metrics for those things and people do press them. I can also add a ton of anecdotal evidence pointing that even super smart casual users don't know or use keyboard shortcuts. Even for copy paste, in many cases. Sad from our point of view, but a lot of people have better things to do with their lives and we should stop j…

I like toolbars for quick, frequent-but-not-that-much actions, like exporting to a pdf in LibreOffice. But I also like menu bars, as those give you some shortcuts if you often use a functionality. As an example, and since I type this into Firefox right now, after glancing at the menus, Alt+V,Y,N disables the page stylesheets, Alt+T,S synchronizes the account, etc.

like menubars, the toolbars give you the short cuts when you hover over them.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#149
post #2

I wish Windows Save/Open dialogues would have links to already open Explorer windows (much like the links to Documents.) Rationale: Project are often contained in a single root folder. I often start by opening this folder in Explorer. Some programs can be started by double clicking files. Others cannot. Saving new files always requires interacting with the save dialog and thus browsing to the project folder again.

This feature is actually implemented in OS/2, which was a Microsoft project at one point. It came so close to reaching windows, and would have made the system common dialogs far more powerful.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#150
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the wrong word. Please note the difference in usage.

No, I used it correctly for what I was saying. Don't put words in my mouth please. MDI has not been removed. It's been DEPRECIATED as in it's still there and it still works (kinda) but MS no longer see value in it's function. My terminology for what I was saying was correct. This sub-thread is a classic example of HN pedantry. Down vote me into oblivion if it makes you happy. /sigh

Not pendantry, just pointing mistakes...

If you want a good read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation

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