It's actually amazing how old Windows is, and how many vestigial bits of ancient GUI versions are still a part of the OS. There's various levels of the UI: The newbie consumer level, the pro-user level, and the sys-admin level. The top is always changing, then the pro-user stuff gets updates after a while (always missing options which drives power users batshit), and then the low-level stuff which works fine and there's no reason to ever update just for looks.
That's where you run into truly ancient designs that haven't changed since the 90s. Event viewer, remote tools, driver install, etc.
And it's all still in there, using god knows what common .dlls from the dozen or so GUI toolkits that have come and gone. You have to admit, it shows an impressive longevity.
I just have to assume that Microsoft doesn't prioritize updating those elderly dialog boxes and tools because it's a thankless (and profit-less) task, which takes longer than expected and always filled with crazy edge cases and gotchas. They spent several years just updating the command line - granted, that's an important app which touched a lot of the OS, but it just shows the perils of messing with stuff that already works.
This is all modern examples but there are still bits hidden deeply within system that come from 9x times. I remember when MS published interface guidelines with Vista but the document was quickly forgotten and picture above shows all that mess. Personally, I remember almost all Ribbon UI changes and Windows Live brand "refreshes".
There were community attempts to polish interface initiated by Long Zheng, an user experience entrepreneur from Melbourne : Aero and Win7 Taskforce where you could submit all these inconsistencies and provide mockups (if you were able to do so). I'm pretty sure there were people from MS who took this unique feedback into consideration and some suggestions were implemented but with Windows 8 and 10 all these efforts become meaningless.
It’s not only that but it’s also that drivers could ship custom property pages in an accompanying DLL. All using property page / dialog box classic Win32 technology.
So unless you have a locked down device like a phone, you can’t magically port everything over to a new settings app without providing a path for your ISV / IHV ecosystem to migrate to on timelines that are sensible for the business. And ‘drivers’ consists of way more than hardware devices: database access drivers etc etc.
Part of me wonders if an AI model couldn’t just sandbox the old UI and inspect it, and then auto map to a new settings style AI.
One of my favorites is "dialer.exe". I wonder how many have actually made a phone call with it on Windows 11. I'd expect more than 0... just not sure how much more.
That's where you run into truly ancient designs that haven't changed since the 90s. Event viewer, remote tools, driver install, etc.
And it's all still in there, using god knows what common .dlls from the dozen or so GUI toolkits that have come and gone. You have to admit, it shows an impressive longevity.
I just have to assume that Microsoft doesn't prioritize updating those elderly dialog boxes and tools because it's a thankless (and profit-less) task, which takes longer than expected and always filled with crazy edge cases and gotchas. They spent several years just updating the command line - granted, that's an important app which touched a lot of the OS, but it just shows the perils of messing with stuff that already works.