You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back?
That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu.
A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now happy with Windows 10.
It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
> People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu
Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of 5-10 seconds to showing every result... What are people paying for? Apparently it must also be that it doesn't even properly separate the drawing code from the search/IO/sync code because while it lags away I can clearly feel the lag even in how the text cursor moves and responds... Reliably! Wtf this is the world's most used OS? (Sorry, rant over.)
There are definitely major problems in Windows, be it incentive structure, or some wrong people at key positions in the UX department, or legacy, or whatever it is, but after experiencing a good desktop manager it is obvious that Windows is not getting better in this regard... It's not about tablet or no tablet, it is just worse, in many ways.
How is it possible in 2020 a basic search of the start menu doesn't work? For example, I have Spotify installed, it appears in my start menu, but if I search for "Spotify" it's nowhere to be found.
KDE Plasma happily copied windows in this way. I have often had the wrong thing launch on KDE because the search updated between when I decided to hit "enter" and when the key press was registered.
> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history.
Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that.
> A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI
No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people. People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything else.
When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7 arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds complaints.
Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market, targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it and complain that the fuel consumption was huge. Strangely enough this was a modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing. The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption. When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering" complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not).
Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a product, not its actual qualities.
I am pretty sure Windows 7 was pretty highly praised upon its release and considered vastly superior to Vista, and at least on par with XP as far as usability.
Vista was a blip on the radar and nobody ever really used it as a reference point for anything other than ridicule. XP was running strong even in 2014 when it went out of support so it makes sense this was the bar to pass for Win 7. And the vast majority of users jumped from XP to 7 as the numbers confirm.
In 2009 when Windows 7 was launched, Vista's market share (all desktop OSes) reached the all time peak of 18%. At the same time the (then) 8 year old Windows XP had 72%.
I agree with the general sentiment, but don't agree with the specifics.
The NT series has always distinguished between cached/locked memory, so I don't see that as an explanation.
Also, consider than, on equivalent hardware, XP actually booted _faster_ than 2k, which led many people (incl those who hated the interface) to actually use it.
So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
What I meant by "isn't marked that obviously" is that the labels didn't help. XP (and 2000 before it) had Total, Available, System Cache in K. Vista used Total, Cached, Free in M. Vista cached (rule of thumb applicable then) double the memory compared to XP so the "Free" was usually well under 10% of the memory, even single digit MB. XP rarely had less than 20% available. Forums were flooded by complaints that Vista uses up all the memory, they either saw too much cache, or too little free. It's probably not immediately apparent now but seeing a label "Free 8" leaves a far bigger impression than "Available 89615".
As for XP most people upgraded from 98. The resource usage difference was undeniable and so was the driver incompatibility which made most devices not work properly or at all initially. I did not have the experience of XP booting faster than 2000 even on the same hardware but SP1 fixed a lot of issues, maybe also this. For the first couple of years every forum, IRC channel, BBS, or DC hub I read was full of complaints about either performance and compatibility, or stability depending on what people were upgrading from.
> So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
Not only. But it's one big part of the explanation. People are usually skeptical about change and compare around transition time so are inherently biased. They're comparing a stable, fine tuned product with the fresh, rough edged one. The Vista name was dropped because it was already toxic. But Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP3. If Vista didn't flop so hard from the start it would have had the same evolution as XP: launch grumbles grumbles grumbles > SP1 grumbles grumbles > SP2 gru... hey, this is pretty ok > SP3 noice!.
Even Win 10, with all its issues, is a far better product today than it was 5 years ago.
> "When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles [...] By SP3 people were loving it"
Well, that's because they fixed most of the issues in SP1 and SP2.
Also is there a specific reason you skipped certain versions such as Windows ME, Windows Vista etc? Maybe it's not only "people just can't take change" and some products are legitimately bad?
> No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
The biggest fault of Windows Vista in my opinion was Microsoft made one too many compromise. There were machines that came with Windows Vista pre-installed that should have never gotten Windows Vista. My roommate in college had a Compaq machine on which the screen completely blanked for over three minutes at a time as it tried to display the user access control overlay. Of course, over three minutes later the screen would turn on as if nothing had gone wrong at all. iirc it was something about the processor/integrated graphics being too weak for Windows Display Driver Model. [1]
I think Microsoft is making a similar mistake today by allowing OEMs to ship Windows 10 on new machines with anything less than a SATA SSD (mechanical hard disks or eMMC).
> No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
People complained about memory usage even tho it was just windows precaching. Something they don’t complain about now.
The issue with vista was drivers. And then when 7 came out everyone is like oh yay everything works. Even tho it was using the Drivers from vista.
Majority of the vista complaints are silly. It was never as bad as everyone made out to be. Just the same old cool fad to hate on MS.
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Change is only good if it improves things. Win8 and later were a massive usability regression for keyboard+mouse/trackpad users. Windows 10 rolled some changes back, but those that weren't rolled back are still an inconsistent mess (and with no signs of improvement, that's the actually worrying part). There's no rational way to call the Windows 10 start menu or system settings an improvement over Windows7 all the way back to Windows95. And both the start menu and the control panel area weren't all that great to begin with in Win95+, but somehow Windows 8 and 10 still managed to make it worse.
PS: The main reason why the Win8 start screen and Win10 start menu are bad seems to be that they assume that a Windows application is just the executable, like on macOS. But Windows applications usually have more files associated with them, mostly other tools, readme files, uninstallers. Visual Studio is the best example, it's nearly impossible to find the tools associated with Visual Studio in Windows 10 without installing a proper start menu replacement. And Visual Studio is a Microsoft product. Go figure.
No, the Windows 8 Metro/Win32 split was simply an extremely bad design. I’ve been dealing with a few 8 machines recently, and it’s really, really bad. You want to get between the two worlds? Hope you know about Alt+Tab, because otherwise you’re probably not going to find out how to get there. Seriously. It’s that bad.
Windows 8.1 made some improvements, so that users will probably be able to find their way from Win32 to Metro. Getting back is still a pain. It retained the fundamentally bad paradigm.
Windows 10 was the proper fix: abolish the ecosystem split, as a disastrously failed experiment, and return to a unified experience. You still have the UWP apps (though their design is finally somewhat more in line with the rest of the OS), but they are properly windowed like everything else now.
The split made a lot of sense to tiling window manager fans. Admittedly a small niche to accidentally target a mainstream operating system to, so unsurprising it got so much bad press.
In 8 the tiling window manager and non-tiling window manager were separate worlds you switched between virtual desktop style. In 8.1 they made the entire non-tiling window manager desktop a "proper" tile. (In 10 they killed the tiling window manager.)
As a tiling window manager fan, it's easy to sometimes wish they'd gone down the other path in some AU 10 and "promoted" more Win32 applications to proper tiles in the tiling window manager, rather than "demote" all the tile capable apps to the chaos of traditional non-tiling window manager.
Your comment baffles me. The Metro experience did not behave like a tiling window manager in literally any way I can think of.
I switched to Windows 10 purely for the Surface Book hardware a few years ago. Before that, I was a contented Arch Linux + i3 user. (And my next laptop will probably be back to Arch Linux, with Sway instead of i3 because Wayland > X.)
The split made, and still makes, no sense at all to me as a tiling window manager fan. It maintained two separate worlds that you could not easily switch between, which is fairly antithetical to a tiling window manager. And functionality like, y’know, tiling, was non-existent. (And tiling does exist just a little bit on the other side, with window snapping.)
It was a window-management disaster, wholly unmitigated.
The "modern apps" experience on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 was built on a horizontally tiling window manager. For the most part that tiling window manager is disabled/crippled on Windows 10. (It's ghost kind of exists in Tablet Mode only.) It was heavily gesture based, so few people pushed it beyond the single split it would sometimes do if you opened a new app from a current app, and few people learned its gestures or keyboard shortcuts. But it did go far beyond a single split if you had the monitor space and the apps for it.
Early on most apps, because of Windows 8's attempted focus on Tablets/Phones typically only supported full screen, half screen, and phone widths. Windows 8.1 added a lot more responsive screen sizes to more of the apps, adding a lot more variety/capability to the ways you could tile apps. The classic Win32 desktop even lived "inside" one of these tiles in Windows 8.1, so you could tile apps on both sides around it.
At various points in Windows 8.1 I'd have a half dozen apps (including the Win32 desktop as a single "app") tiled across two 16:9 monitors. It was actually a very nice dual monitor desktop experience and a good use of all that horizontal space, which I will continue to point out to people that didn't believe the tiling window manager made as much sense for desktop users as it did for tablet users. (I joke that I wish I could turn on Windows 10's Tablet Mode on dual monitor systems still, even as anemic and nearly dead as the surviving tile manager is.)
Indeed. It should not be a surprise that tiling window managers are probably preferable to every method of input other than mouse. That AU probably would be a good one.
(Keyboard included and especially. Do you know the keyboard shortcuts to move/resize/arrange windows and when was the last time you tried to use them? Part of my love for tiling window managers came from daily use of a laptop with a bad trackpad and wanting to automate more things with the keyboard.)
Hmm? I’ve used my Surface Book in tablet mode from time to time and see no particular problems with it. Every window becomes full-screen, swipes from the screen edges do meaningful things that are similar in effect to what Windows 8/8.1 had. I wouldn’t describe it as in any way nasty by comparison. Do you have something particular in mind? (Or were you perhaps unaware of tablet mode?)
Up until this year, for example, the keyboard used to _overlap_ the main tile -- but only if you have one tile only, hiding whatever textbox you actually wanted to write in if it was in the bottom half. If you had two, then the keyboard worked correctly as in windows8.
This was broken for 5 frigging years. The general consensus was that tablet mode was more problems than it was worth. They fixed in some recent release but is still buggy as hell (windows will not return to full height and instead be partially moved off screen for some reason).
Another example was GNOME 2.32 to GNOME Shell, which Microsoft later attempted to emulate in 8.x, though with the major conveniences removed - namely, a "classic" fallback mode.
Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness.
I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.
Well I for one do have multiple complains, but I'm impartial now to it's success having switched to KDE years ago. If something happened to KDE I'd switch to Cinnamon. If something happened yet again, I'd continue my search for a desktop-focused DE, but gnome would be the last resort (I do say that as someone who's otherwise quite committed to redhat)
Personally I've always been slightly amazed that at no point in time did anyone at Microsoft think that making msn.com the default homepage for servers was a bad idea.
Hilariously, Microsoft production servers are also set to the MSN default homepage, even though most forests are firewalled off from the entire internet.
Personally I feel it's completely understandable. Microsoft has huge market power. It's hard to abandon software you are locked in.
More importantly people who suffer from to those interfaces are not in position of power to make switch operating systems. Forcing them to eat what MS feeds them seems like good way to experiment. If experiment fails, you don't have to hurry and repair it.
How many people actually care about a default homepage in IE in Windows Server? And is it worth the time and effort to make that setting dependent on the SKU?
Sadly the current start menu is far from normal. Normal would a simple menuized view of a folder hierarchy, what we have is some abomination tied into the Windows Store in mysterious ways that cause it to break under a wide variety of circumstances in such a way that an in-place reinstall is the only sure-fire fix.
I have never been convinced with the folder hierarchy in start menus. Programs get installed in lot of places, what's the mapping between the menu items and the "real" location then ?
Linux got this standard arbitrary menu categories thing but in the end people use menus to launch a program so I believe a simple A-Z list with a search box should be enough.
Throwing app store stuff in there is not okay though (as in the current windows situation and the previous ubuntu affiliate links in the dash bar).
It isn't the relationship between the folder structure presented in the start menu and any actual physical location that's the most valuable part (though with portable applications they can be one and the same!), what's important is the simplicity of it and that the user can easily manipulate it with nothing but a file browser.
When I first saw win10's start menu, I promptly removed the tiles (ads, really) as useless fluff then promptly vowed to do everything I can to never use it.
My desktop is a mess now, but one of my own doing.
(You can imagine what my reaction was when edgy auto-started after an update to tell me the over-engineered Firefox downloader was now "better" than ever. I had to kill the process in order to not see the mandatory new features tour. It did it again after the recent update to make sure I hate it as much as possible.)
My taskbar is full of pinned icons, and I have set the start menu to only show my apps (deleted all tiles), and made it full-height. The end result is a simple minimal menu for when I need to scroll through the list, although I launch most things from the pinned taskbar icons anyway. That’s a pretty usable setup and no advertising.
The frustrating part is that when you actually try to use windows 10 on a tablet in tablet mode you find out very quickly how bad it is as a tablet os because of a lot of paper cuts. That is microsoft in a nut shell: lack of following through.
Take for example the fluent design, which by itself is a good design, but after three years is still not consistently applied in windows, let alone microsoft’s first party apps. Meanwhile apple has redesigned all of the ui of the os and all first party apps, in one year. That is what following through looks like. It is embarrassing for microsoft how much better apple is at rolling out design changes.
Yup, but GNOME3 is really the best tablet experience around (unless you really need proprietary on-device "apps", as with Android/iPadOS). The Activities overview screen is extremely intuituve and way better than whatever the Windows 8 folks came up with, and the GUI widgets are touch-ready in every GNOME-native app.
Arguably Microsoft would have had more time/energy to devote to bringing first party apps/components to Fluent Design if it didn't keep doing 270 degree turns in Windows 8. It's hard to follow through when customers keep backseat driving and yelling at you to swerve. (Whether or not those were the right decisions, and I'm not implying that listening to customers is necessarily a bad thing, just that you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't complain that Microsoft didn't follow through on the straight path when you complain that they needed to swerve in the first place.)
That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....