All this engineering effort for what? The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.
Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do??
In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant.
So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think.
Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions.
For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well.
Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.
This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful.
There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.
There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time.
Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work.
And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.
This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names).
Compared to that, search
in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS.
Windows search is so bad that you can type "NOTE" and it'll be seconds, on a freaking supercomputer, before "Notepad" appears. This is insane. The list of applications on my computer is in the very low hundreds total, and the number of users with literally hundreds of thousands or millions of apps is very, very low. It can and should be in the search bar's RAM at all times and a linear search should be orders of magnitude below my human perception speed to say nothing of better algorithms.
So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years?
The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows.
The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.
The only way I'd use Windows is for work or a specific purpose like gaming. AKA I turn the computer on, launch a few software and stayed in those until I shut it down. I wouldn't bear with it for personal computing. macOS is heading the same way (minus the ads, plus the phone-like interface). Linux may be rough, but I can do whatever I want with it.
This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface.
I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95.
I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones.
Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory.
Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X
> "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
I don't understand how Win 95 icons are meaningfully different than the icons on a smartphone home screen. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant.
In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.
Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.
Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses.
Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.
The most genuinely bad and frustrating part of the new control panel that made me ask "did literally anyone even test this for 5 minutes" are any of the pages where you have a list of things longer than 6 or 7 items. Like per-app sound device options, or associating a program with a file extension, or even just uninstalling a program.
* No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc
* List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before
* The whole thing is just sloooooww
A regression in every sense of the word :(
Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.
Here’s one example of why it takes ages — drivers that grab the window handle of a control panel and hack at it to show custom UI. Old example that specifically addresses the Displays and Printers control panels, but similar hacks probably still exist today.
When you have no external business to compete with you end up with managers competing internally. They're literally just burning cash trying to look busy and distinguished.
Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.
> The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.
This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it.
The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.
Having a function simply not exist can not count towards making it more intuitive to control that function.
Having simple controls that don't accomplish tasks is not a valid example of simple controls to accomplish tasks, and I'm shocked at anyone here not seeing it.
If this theory of the users needs were true, then everyone would and should just use Chromebooks.
The reason Windows exists and must be used by so many even when they don't want to, why a Chromebook or an iPad doesn't cut it, is Windows is where all the actual unimaginably varied productivity and special purpose software is. Not because of the middle of the road generic office and web apps. It's because of those PLUS the infinite other. It takes both to be useful not just the big mass in the middle of the bell curve.
No matter how much bigger the numbers are for the common case, things need to cover all cases in order to be useful. Trying to reduce Windows down to a Chromebook or an iPad is silly when the Windows95 paradigm was already the simplification.
Windows without the functionality of Windows is nothing. An iPad is far better at that than a simplified Widows can ever be. Even if somehow MS managed to make an excellent iPad, then what? iPads already exist and someone else is famous for them. Meanwhile, the thing they ripped out was their very value proposition itself. The differentiator that gives them a reason to exist at all.
All that supposedly unwanted complicated stuff was litterally the primary value and differentiator of the product itself.
> The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer.
Right but the iPad UX is also terrible. All I can really do is remove and recreate. There’s no way to actually fix anything. This isn’t necessary. Advanced options could be exposed in iOS too. It’s just bad design everywhere.
I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.
I use the old control panel but one should concede that it's really quite esoteric and the new control panel is comparatively more straight forward.
I'm also amazed at software developers complaining about Microsoft's development process for the Settings app. They've been incrementally developing it for years -- which is a good thing -- and yet there so many complaints here that it didn't materialize fully formed on day one. It's like when talking about Microsoft everyone forgets how software development is actually done.
The old control panel has a very logical layout, and that's why it stayed this way for so long. But it was also an expert tool and you ought to go there with the manual close at hand because it was so powerful. Like the networks sections having everything related to network thay you may want. Maybe there should be a beginner mode, but you don't want a beginner near those settings. Just like I rarely see people go into their network connection settings on iOS. The rewrite feels like taking Photoshop and morph it into Paint. Easier to understand but ultimately worthless.
But 99.99% of users are "beginners". I really don't know how to use Photoshop but I can use simpler paint tools to do what I want.
Microsoft will not remove the control panel until you can do everything with the Settings app (or something else not yet invented). Despite this "deprecation" it's really not going anywhere.
My use of the settings app has slowly increased over time as more and more settings are available there. I have to be doing something pretty specific to open the control panel now.
The Windows Control Panel was first released in 1985. That’s 39 years ago. That’s longer than the time between the Wright Brothers’ first flight and the first jet aircraft.
How is Microsoft still doing fundamental rewrites of core features?
I still don't get what you mean. Clearly Windows isn't the same as it was 39 years ago and if it didn't change in all that time we wouldn't still be using it. Every operating system rewrites fundamental core features all the time.
The X Window System was originally released June 1984. That's 40 years ago.
And yet we're still having debates and active development on how to have graphical sessions on Linux.
iptables was released in 1998. That's 26 years ago. And yet those Linux devs are still working on nftables and firewalld.
If those Linux devs still haven't figured out how to do graphical sessions or firewall by now they never will.
FFS how to boot/init Linux is still under active development and some rapid changes over the past several years. If they can't even figure out how to boot how can you take those devs seriously?
Or maybe you redesign your stuff for the realities of today instead of just assuming what a few people did in the 80s was the be-all end-all of software and UI design.
And yet, back in the 90s most of the non-experienced users learned to use their computer nonetheless, in some cases gaining deeper understanding through the process of navigating the logically structured interface.
Maybe it's more profitable to keep your users inexperienced. Easier to sell them cruft that way.
Right? Most of us who were children at the time learned how to use 95/98 by ourselves. The vast majority of people had to learn how to use 95/98, and most had never touched a computer before.
I don't think this demographic of tablet users who can't ever possibly accept another UI style actually exists. Poking at an unknown object to figure out how it works is not some ancient lost art. It's one of the most basic things that all humans do. We do this as infants.
Gods, imagine how frightened and confused DOS users were by Windows.
Totally. I was there, porting a FoxPro DOS app to Visual FoxPro and one of the biggest fights with the boss was about why I was adding multiple windows in the app.
And I remember that the mouse was something that confused users.
And the joke about using the CD drawer to put the coffee there? I see it.
Yet, all those users (school managers and a lot of old ladies) get it anyway.
What irks me most about the new Settings app is the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Sure, you can use the arrows to jump around the different elements but whatever happened to good old Alt-F, etc.? Plus, on a traditional menu bar, every keyboard shortcut is clearly labeled. Not so for Settings.
Frankly just because the interface looks more tablet-like doesn't mean it's actually ergonomic for tablet use either.
What they are presenting us is far more like the 90's Macromedia Flash style UI bloatware that hardware peripheral manufacturers also keep trying to foist onto us.
That could be somewhat true if Settings was feature complete. It's not really for iPad audience if you have to spin up RegEdit and google for an afternoon to do half of the stuff you could do by clicking around Control Panel.
Also, ability to filter or sort a list wouldn't confuse iPad audience all that much, would it?
The fact you are trying to copy someone shouldn't prevent you from making it better in some basic ways.
I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years and I may be in a minority of one, but I prefer the new settings. When I use my old Mac with the old settings I find myself thinking “so which image do I need to click to do what I want?” but in the new settings I can find what I need from the text labels.
I was a Mac user for about six years, went back to Windows through necessity, and returned to Mac four years ago. I don't hate the new Mac System Settings, but for me it's not as intuitive as the old version. Nor is the iPhone/iPad settings app easy to navigate. I don't completely understand the reasoning for the order or grouping of things. Then I realize I have no control over it, shrug my shoulders, and get on with finding and using the options I want.
catering to developers is important in a completely different way than catering to typical users. I have one stomach for dinner and another for desert.
Right, he could just end by stating that corporations employ useless people who then do useless things to justify their employment like they always did, like every large organisation ever. But then he had to go all modern identity politics on it. It fries brains of its opponets just as much if not more than its supporters.
48.3% whites are a minority and they are underrepresented compared to the 59.3% in the U.S. population.
That is just for background. GP tried to make the case that developers engaging in diversity initiatives, who are often white, do this for their career. In other words, they are unproductive B players, who will hire C players in order to keep their jobs. They also discourage A players from engaging in work.
You could plausibly be referring to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows Vista or Windows ME. Making this strange line of argument just seem idiosyncratic and more about your own feelings on "inclusivity" than objective analysis of software quality.
ME was a rushed attempt at making DOS-based Windows less DOS-like, while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI. 8 is when the nosedive started and things began getting really dumbed-down as they decided to rewrite huge swaths of previously working functionality and broke much of it in the process.
11 is, according to Microsoft in their official marketing material, "the most inclusively designed version of Windows". They sure are right about that -- they included a bunch of idiots in the design process.
> while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI
Vista was a fine OS. The aero glass stuff was a little on the side of bad taste, but the UI usability wasn't bad, there was little difference in UI between Vista (the hated OS) and 7 aside from visuals, the layout of UI elements was mostly the same. And in terms of look, I can't say it was worse than the fisher price styling of Windows XP. Windows 2000 is where Microsoft aesthetics peaked and it's been downhill ever since.
The main reason Vista was hated was because it was very resource hungry compared to XP and most computers could barely handle it. 7's improvements on that side of things were rather minor, and most of the reason why people loved 7 is because they ran it with hardware that was modern enough so the experience didn't feel as slow as running Vista on 1gb of ram and an intel igpu (back then, intel igpu were unreasonably terrible. If you can do moderate gaming on low settings on modern igpus, back in the day, the intel igpu couldn't even run the UI of Vista, no AeroGlass/GPU compositing for you).
Most of the truly needed architectural change in Windows for the sake of reliability and security happened with Vista, though! Vista is when the graphic stack moved back to the user space and Windows became the OS that handled GPU driver crashes best. I remember when I had an ATi GPU with terrible drivers how good it felt to not reboot the computer or lose unsaved work as Windows could restart the driver on the fly and it wouldn't cause any issue except for 3d rendering software (so games would still crash in such a situation).
Vista also virtualized some of the filesystem calls so that programs used to having full permissions to write in folders they had no business to write to could run in userspace without admin rights.
All the changes Vista did piled up in terms of overhead, making it a heavier OS, but it was all for good reasons. Some of the overhead could have been avoided if Windows had been designed the right way to begin with (like not letting people get used to running software with admin accounts) but Vista did what it could to make Windows a better OS. People who hated Vista just didn't understand how needed those improvements, which we take for granted today, were. I still remember those worms circulating on the internet instantly pwning computers just for /being on the internet/ during Windows XP's era. Installing XP from unpatched mediums like an old CD and then connecting to the internet to get updates was very risky without being behind a NAT or firewall.
I really feel grateful towards the work the Windows team did during the Vista era, that windows can be considered a decent OS at all is all coming from the legacy of the groundwork they did on its foundations.
People being given preferential hiring because of their race or sex is inherently racist and sexist. He's perfectly justified to be upset over widespread racism in the tech industry, especially when it is also leading to noticable drops in software development quality. The real question is why do you seem to support explicit racism and sexism?
Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do??
In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant.
So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think.
Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions.
For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well.
Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.