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jancsika

> - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.

New Start menu:

1. Click Windows key

2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run

3. Click <Enter>

That's 4 keystrokes, bound only by the time it takes the user to physically make the keypresses.

User doesn't need any knowledge of how programs are categorized, nor know a hierarchy of categories.

The process by which the system displays programs matching what the user is typing happens as fast as possible.

You can even speak to your damned computer and the start menu will probably react accordingly.

None of these actions require the user to even know they have a harddrive, or a system path, etc.

So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load.

Remind me: how does Windows 98 Start Menu compare to that?

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> 2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run

Unless what you want to run is, for example, "Internet Explorer": "Inte" will auto-complete to nothing useful if you have a bunch of apps, "Interne" will auto-complete to Internet Explorer, but "Internet" will auto-complete to Edge. Not exactly convenient.

Besides: it's full of ads, and it takes bloody ages to find an application in a list where every item is touch-sized and which doesn't expand to fill your screen. The keyboard entry became necessary because the new structure is impossible to navigate visually (for bonus points, while this structure is supposed to be better for touch interfaces, that's precisely where it sucks even more, because "just type three letters of the program you want to run" isn't too convenient on touch-only devices).

There are environments which manage to get this surprisingly right, such as LXQT: you have a hierarchical menu which is easy to navigate, but if you're faster with keyboard-based search, you can do that as well.

Plus, you know, to us ol' Unix farts, not having to type stuff in order to launch a program is what progress is supposed to look like. If thirty years of UX research gave us the equivalent of bash and tab completion, we might as well go all the way and replace the start menu thingie with a terminal and call it a day.

Edit: also, I don't know what kind of super workstation hardware you're on, but I'd hardly call that thing "realtime-responsive" :-).

To be honest it worked much better in Vista/7, but still I find it more convenient to just press the meta key and type whatever I need or just use mouse because usually what I'm looking for is at Recently Added or Most Used section.

In the Linux world I think that Plasma nailed that feature.

> Unless what you want to run is, for example, "Internet Explorer": "Inte" will auto-complete to nothing useful if you have a bunch of apps, "Interne" will auto-complete to Internet Explorer, but "Internet" will auto-complete to Edge. Not exactly convenient.

I realize this may not be very intuitive for most people, but in the case of Internet Explorer I would instincitively just type "ie" because I know the name of the executable.

I used WIN+R nameofexe since 1995 at least. So not so much progress in 20 year

> Besides: it's full of ads

You can turn all of these off, with a combination of registry/GP fixes. Granted, they should be off by default, especially on Professional/Enterprise, but at least you can do it. - https://superuser.com/a/1348759/100543

I assume Win 10 start menu search adapts to what you click on, because start>i gives inkscape, in inkscape, int internet explorer

"int" does autocomplete to "Internet Explorer" here.

Because half the time it finds and launches the install executable

I agree that start menu search was great in Windows 7. However, it is totally broken in Windows 10. Results are unpredictable unless you finish typing out the complete and correct name of exactly what you're searching for. There are a bunch of things in the start menu that it just can't find at all. Worst of all, it's always trying to send me to Bing or the Windows Store. I just want to search the menu!

Or it updates after a few key presses, right before I hit enter and focuses on another result!

This happens entirely too often for me, and the other result that ends up being focused on is "<x> \n See web results".

I've never wanted to search for anything on the web from my start menu, and to make matters worse, it always performs the search using the IE/Edge browser and Bing as the search engine. To date, I've yet to see any way of customizing (or disabling) this behavior.

If I had a list of the "most annoying things my computer does", this would certainly be near the top.

I have a firewall rule set up in Windows to disable outbound connections from Edge purely for this reason.

It also sends your keystrokes outside, in order to get the "Search suggestions" as you type.

It’s bonkers how bad the Windows 10 start search is now. Even when I type in an app I use frequently, it tries to recommend a web search. I’ve given up and usually just use explorer to navigate program files and go to the app directly.

I long ago switched to Classic Start Menu (part of Classic Shell), and I love it. I have a hybrid of Win 98 and Win 7. Hit start, type the first few letters of the program, hit enter.

Launchy is really great as well.

discoverable

That's the problem. It was far easier to browse through what's available. You can't search for something you don't even know the name of, but you can certainly read through a list.

Even back then it was inconsistent.

Some things were in the start menu under a hierarchy of company name -> program name.

Others went just by the program name.

Some were (company name) (program name).

Some were just a start menu entry, not a folder.

But you could move them around as you pleased. I had Graphics, Audio, Video, Games, etc.

Indeed. The classic start menu was incredibly simple, it was just a menuized view of an actual folder hierarchy.

It is notable that you can create your own such menuized views by right-clicking on the taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar.

Oh, this brings memories, although it happens still. It was especially infuriating when a company name wasn't marketed as much as a program brand itself (which is fine by me) and you had to browse to endless meaninglessly named folders to find what you were looking for.

> You can't search for something you don't even know the name of

You can if those search results aren't limited to literal name matches, but also consider the intentions the user expresses with their search terms. Maybe associate a bunch of keywords with the result. Terms like "backup", "update" or "presentation" should lead to relevant applications/settings regardless of what they are actually called.

I very much like the search-to-open feature and it covers 98% of my uses, but every so often, the search doesn't seem to index everything or outright refuse to find things like calc. Or the start menu would take forever to open.

As someone else pointed out, the discoverability isn't as good, but I think this has more to do with the fact that the start menu items aren't just all neatly collected in one location on your disk and by the amount of space the new menu uses, like if I have to always scroll to find what I want, it already lost the race against a list that shows most if not all applications at once.

>So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load.

Discoverability is, to me at least, a nightmare on most modern operating system, mobile included. I don't think it was much better on older operating system, but at least they had a manual and less stuff to worry about.

I get differing results for the same input depending on how sleepy I am and how loaded the machine is. It's utterly useless for me.

I never understood how it is even possible to have the search through the start menu hierarchy lag so much. What is going on there? Modern Wimdows keeps the menu contents cached in a file and keeping the tree of labels cached in memory wouldn't be a huge deal, either - probably around 10kB for just about any realistic system.

It's ridiculous how it fails to perform its one job, in such a spectacular way.

It takes several seconds for the results to load - I know performance may degrade in a VM, but come on! Searching through a list of strings is an interview question.

Not only that, all the key-presses of "Update" show the Java update program.. only when I add the final "S" it will show "Check for updates" system applet.

And with the amount of cpu/memory SearchIndexer.exe consumes, it's not even a bad joke.

I'd say this backs up the original point, because searching is what you do now instead of using the start menu. The huge alphabetical list of programs plus different-sized icons that make up the "menu" part of the start menu now is not so great.

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