State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
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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?
#2Win 3.1 File Open Dialog can be found in Windows 11
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o12no7/still_rocki...
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#3I find it hilarious that even in such a comprehensive post, the author missed some:
Some apps are now shipping with “Fluent but inconsistently round”, mostly the ones that use WinUI. Maps is a good example where this is noticeable. You can see some screenshots in link below.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#4What I want to know is how can I get that Betta fish on my boot screen!
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#5In Win7's control panel I counted ten different kinds of windows—in only MS' own sections, no third-parties (who tend to make the problem worse). Some of navigational widgets weren't used anywhere in the remainder of the OS.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#6I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be.
All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#7I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform.
But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state.
I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix.
With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#8I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps.
[1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#9How is MacOS able to maintain such a consistent UI even with massive changes in their design language ? Is Windows UI not a separate layer or something that they can update ?
Or is it that the UI elements somehow get baked into the program at the time you build it, so if you didn't update you are just stuck with that particular version of UI you built the program ?
Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?
#10I don't think the Fluent+Metro stuff is so different as to be a real consistency issue. Certainly minor inconsistencies that can be easily pointed out in a list but little that makes a typical user think "this is a completely different thing I'm using". The rest of the "old" stuff seems to have been made visually consistent in the 7 era even if the tools themselves originated from different eras with most gaining high DPI support and following the newer theming, again not a consistency issue in itself. There are a few REALLY old dialogs called by ODBC and maybe some others but I can't think of any you run into unless you're intentionally looking to run old software that will call them. So technically 3 but really 2 really noticeable UI environments in day to day.
I'm worried with 11 it'll be a repeat of Windows 10 where at the start you're constantly using "yet another UI". At this point it's nearly gotten decent to the point if you aren't a sysadmin (MMC, regedit, task manager, advanced control panel items not nowadays part of Settings) you rarely run into the "old" style stuff with the one exception of File Explorer. Hopefully it doesn't take another 6 years to be saying that about Fluent/Metro stuff being updated to match 11's new look.