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State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

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Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#171

Post by HellDunkel »

signal11 wrote: post #130
andi999 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What market share is left there to gain? Ok 17% Mac OS, maybe 5% would switch to Windows?

Strategically, worrying about the low end “worse” competitor is more worthwhile than the higher end competitor. Eg IBM were not undone by a better mainframe. In Windows’s case the “worse” competitor is ChromeOS and Chromebook, and Microsoft’s basically thrown in the towel when it comes to native apps, so with time everyone who doesn’t need pro Photoshop or AutoCAD could just use a Chromebook. Note that you can run Wo…

You forgot about PC gaming. Kid growing up with Windows is a huge advantage. I think it cannot be overstated and Mircosoft played this game well.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#172

Post by jiggawatts »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #132
jiggawatts wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings. Does logman not working anymore? If not, hasn't it been replaced by PS APIs?

I did specify that this is related to GUI approaches, not command-line tools. Thankfully the "churn" in the CLI is much lower, but not zero. Most users are happy about the the migration from the legacy CMD-based tooling to PowerShell, but the latest crop of tools are abandoning that and reverting back. E.g.: "dotnet", "bicep", "aks", "az", etc... are all going back to the UNIX-style parameters for consistency with Linux, even though PowerShell is a demonstrably superior shell, especially on Windows.

So even there, the unnecessary and counter-productive interface churn continues to the detriment of the users.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#173

Post by Jochim »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #70
ridiculous_fish wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the backwards compatibility case for APIs, but not for OS dialogs. Is there a compatibility reason why the folder properties dialog is crufty (unresizable, etc)? I always just assumed there was no engineering appetite or business case to work on it.

Non-resizable dialogs are one of the top reasons why I cannot stand Windows and find it a huge pain to work with as a non-regular user. Now, while I can understand the sibling's point about third-party overlays [0] which may break when the windows suddenly become resizable, what I find absolutely infuriating is that even what seem like recent features still inherit this stupid behavior. The thing that I'm reminded of…

>[0] Not sure what those are. Do random third-parties "augment" system dialogs by drawing random stuff on top of them? I find that thought horrendous.

The common example would be Dell/Synaptics adding their own tabs to the old Mouse system dialog.

I think the idea was quite sensible. Keeping the configuration in one place while supporting whatever features the manufacturers might have added e.g. touch pad gestures.

The only reason it's unfortunate is that the new dialogs don't support the old extension mechanism, forcing the old dialogs to be kept around.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#174

Post by NickNameNick »

MillenialMan wrote: post #166
neelc wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: 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…

>The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) ...completely unjustifiable? Come on, why does this mean we need 5 different sound dialogues to do 5 different things? That's ridiculous on every level. It used to all be in one place anyway, so it's not even like it needs to be spread out in the first place. Make the old dialogues inaccessible, hide them, and create a new one which does all of those…

Or they could just stop screwing with it?

Every windows update makes the strips a function from the control panel and ads something not quite as good to the settings app.

After the last update the settings app even has ads for 'bing rewards points' in it. Which appear to be impossible to remove.

I need to look harder at getting one of the commercial versions of windows that only gets security updates, but no feature updates, because I've come to hate and fear upgrades.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#175

Post by lucumo »

Flockster wrote: post #134
jpeter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this also the reason why there are no tabs in windows explorer?

I'm a TreeStyleTab user in Firefox with always >200 Tabs open. But I never got the idea of Tabs in Explorer (or Finder for that matter). When I use multiple Explorer Views, most of the time I do it, to interact between them. This is not the case for websites. So for drag and drop interactions, two windows always beat the drag, hover over the other tab until it catches my intend to switch to this tab, and drop it ther…

> I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always.

It's ctrl+tab. And shift will reverse direction in both. It's nice and related.

And then there's MacOS, where cmd-tab doesn't cycle through windows, but through applications. Cmd-` cycles through windows of the same application. Because apparently, using multiple applications and multiple windows means you're a bad boy and need to be punished.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#176

Post by mcny »

HellDunkel wrote: post #171
signal11 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strategically, worrying about the low end “worse” competitor is more worthwhile than the higher end competitor. Eg IBM were not undone by a better mainframe. In Windows’s case the “worse” competitor is ChromeOS and Chromebook, and Microsoft’s basically thrown in the towel when it comes to native apps, so with time everyone who doesn’t need pro Photoshop or AutoCAD could just use a Chromebook. Note that you can run Wo…

You forgot about PC gaming. Kid growing up with Windows is a huge advantage. I think it cannot be overstated and Mircosoft played this game well.

I know stadia is so poorly managed that it is not even a worthy competitor but the concept is sound and nVidia’s GeForce Now and Microsoft’s x cloud will eventually work well enough on Google Chrome that between that and Proton, Windows’ gaming advantage should become a little diminished over time?

I haven’t used android games on chrome os but things like candy crush should work just fine in chrome os by now?

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#177

Post by Razengan »

neelc wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: 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…

> Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.

macOS has actually been pretty good at seamlessly adding new features to old apps, with just a recompile against the latest SDK, like all the NSDocument-derived stuff (auto-save, auto-recover, iCloud etc.), Dark Mode, accessibility etc.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#178

Post by Maken »

HellDunkel wrote: post #171
signal11 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strategically, worrying about the low end “worse” competitor is more worthwhile than the higher end competitor. Eg IBM were not undone by a better mainframe. In Windows’s case the “worse” competitor is ChromeOS and Chromebook, and Microsoft’s basically thrown in the towel when it comes to native apps, so with time everyone who doesn’t need pro Photoshop or AutoCAD could just use a Chromebook. Note that you can run Wo…

You forgot about PC gaming. Kid growing up with Windows is a huge advantage. I think it cannot be overstated and Mircosoft played this game well.

I would say that happened unintentionally, given how hard they tried for years to undermine the PC gaming market in favour of Xbox.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#179

Post by HellDunkel »

NickNameNick wrote: post #174
MillenialMan wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) ...completely unjustifiable? Come on, why does this mean we need 5 different sound dialogues to do 5 different things? That's ridiculous on every level. It used to all be in one place anyway, so it's not even like it needs to be spread out in the first place. Make the old dialogues inaccessible, hide them, and create a new one which does all of those…

Or they could just stop screwing with it? Every windows update makes the strips a function from the control panel and ads something not quite as good to the settings app. After the last update the settings app even has ads for 'bing rewards points' in it. Which appear to be impossible to remove. I need to look harder at getting one of the commercial versions of windows that only gets security updates, but no feature…

The updates/upgrades on Windows 10 were particularly bad- i was a late adopter and still ran into an unfixable black screen on startup. not good.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#180

Post by Macha »

flohofwoe wrote: post #165
meowkit wrote: post #45

Earlier 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).

Asking the obvious question: why aren't the UIs in newer Windows versions not "just" different themes over Win32 widgets? Instead the UI theme seems to be tied to UI frameworks which seem to be created and discarded annually at Microsoft, so each time some genius decides to overhaul the UI, a completely new sediment layer is created instead of letting some UI designers tinker with a theme editor. I don't get it. Func…

This was historically the case, it's why despite the article calling out winver, folder properties, the run dialog as being from the win9x -> win2k period, they didn't look remotely as out of place in win7 as win10.

Of course there are limits. iirc Windows 7 RTM had an obviously 3.1 derived file picker make it into the add fonts dialog until it was replaced in SP1 if my memory has the timing right. Despite using win32 widgets which had the correct theming, that didn't look native at all

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