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Comment by tniemi | Hacker News Reader

I personally think that people unconsciouslly hated the start menu of Windows 8 because of this phenomenom. You open it and the whole screen changes. Worst possible UI.

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That's an interesting observation.

The problem -- if it is one -- is certainly not limited to the Win 8 Start menu. There are plenty of interfaces where pressing a button, or some similar action, pops up a new full-screen or nearly full-screen UI element that looks & works differently from what was there before.

I wonder whether any research has been done on whether this makes any significant number of users forget what they were doing. If not, I think such research would be worthwhile.

MacOS does this, albeit less intrusively, with full screen apps. (Note that "full screen" means no window chrome, which is different from "maximized".)

Normal task switching is near instantaneous, but full screen apps add about 0.3 seconds of animation to their switch. It's enough to break my concentration, so I end up rarely using full screen even though I prefer it for most apps.

I explicitly hated it for that reason - every time it opened I could basically feel the context switch and felt completely thrown off.

As someone who just started using windows for the first time, doesn’t the little search box essentially replace the start menu? How are people expected to find their app—manually clicking through a bunch of menus to one they are looking for? Assuming they have NOT pinned it to the dock at the bottom.

Yeah, I've only used the search box since Windows 7 when it was introduced. I find it a lot faster than clicking through the menu. It seems like it's difficult for some people to get the hang of after so many years without that option being available though. I do believe it's on Microsoft for not introducing it well though.

Win+R worked for decades. It is not search, but programs like calc, regedit, notepad, excel went into MRU and autocompleted the next time you type it. Search is a mental stress for me since I have to check if it is 1) completed, 2) which result is mine, 3) tons of Documents/ garbage pops up for too few letters.

And now they killed quick launch bar, so I have to look for a task button and scroll-click on it [inconveniently] to start another window. I’m using 7taskbar+ or something like that to return back to 2000s.

Pretty off topic, but here goes nothing:

You can hide the search box and still use that functionality by pressing windows and just typing the term.

Saves space in the dock

Damn, good tip.

That's the thing, you're new to Windows and thus are learning the optimum way to use the interface as it is now. And yes, just hitting the Windows key and typing is the easiest way to get what you want. But that wasn't always there, and when it was it wasn't the best way. Existing users had grown accustomed to picking what they wanted from a list. It was this disruption in their workflow that upset people.

In Windows 95 and NT 4 it was indeed horrible and there were as many complaints about the original start menu as there was the full-screen one. This was mostly handled starting with Windows 2000 by having the first few icons in the menu be frequently used items. The things you use 90% of the time were no more than two clicks away. (One if you pin it to the task bar.)

Search was added in Vista but was unreliable because the word matching wasn't predictable. Today I was having to use regedit on Windows 7 and the icon wouldn't be shown until I typed the 'd'. Windows 10 improved a lot, though I still am befuddled why it decides to show or not show certain things.

Also, it's further confused by their being two searches. The box you see when you press the Windows key or icon isn't the same as the Cortana bar. Add to that that opening a link to a website from there will always send you to Edge. It's easy to be skeptical about what Microsoft will do with search in the future. How will you feel if in three years they do away with the search box that you've become accustomed to?

Typing something you know is there, is awesome if you know what you are looking for.

The traditional hierarchical tree that showed you what was available, by grouping them into narrower and narrower groups, is awesome if you don't know what you are looking for, as exploring is neigh impossible.

Guessing search terms in wider and wider circles is very unsatisfying.

Thanks, great explanation! Makes sense.

It only shows what it finds, and it only searches what is already indexed. If you want something to show up, you need to include it in the search indexing, run a reindex, and wait for the index to be completed (and potentially reboot). For more info, Google "Windows search index".

They recently screwed up the task switcher UI. Iff you turn off all the Timeline stuff, half of the UI is long wordy text about turning back on the Timeline. Every time you Win-tab.

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