State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

I don't get it. Functional UI changes should be different from visual fluff, yet Windows seems to the only OS where the two aren't separated.

You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had an entire ecosystem that was uniform. Letting this go has really hurt the brand IMHO, and creates a very low bar for third parties.

Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the legacy components. It is not the reason reams of GUIs have gone untouched for 20 years. It is not the reason Windows now has at least 4 versions(!) of Performance Monitor, all of which are broken in at least one glaring way. (More on that below.)

The believable reasons for the GUI inconsistencies I've heard are:

1) API churn, because of which the UI teams did not have sufficient time to work on features versus playing catchup.

2) Bad system GUI APIs that are very difficult for even in-house teams to work with.

3) Unwillingness to take ownership of legacy code, with literally noone left at Microsoft willing to touch things like the ODBC connections panel or the Component Services snapin. People prefer to add new things instead of fixing or removing old things because it's "easier".

Actually, let's just stop here for a second. That last point explains the performance monitor views. I mentioned at least 4 copies, written over decades, by different people. Each new team has steadfastly refused to touch (or remove!) the old code, but hasn't replaced the functionality of the old code, so now end-users need 4 different versions to get things done.

These versions are:

1) The performance tab in Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that exposes some metrics such as GPU temperatures. Only shows a small number of fixed metrics.

2) Resource Monitor, which is opened from Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that shows certain per-process metrics, such as the names of files being touched, or per-connection network stats. Has permanent UI issues that will never be fixed, such as not using the system number formatting in some places, making large metrics unreadable as they change faster than users can count the digits. Similarly, the graphs take forever to change their vertical axes, making them useless 90% of the time.

3) The Performance Monitor MMC snapin. Totally legacy, with un-resizable controls that cut off text. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential because it provides the only live GUI view of 100% of the performance metrics available in the system. It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings. It is the only GUI for creating metric logging that persists. Etc...

4) The various versions of Server Manager's performance views, which are so useless that I've literally never used it. Nobody can get their job done doing this, we're all still using RDP to connect to servers so that we can simultaneously launch the three tools above. Why RDP? Because 2 of the 3 above do not support remoting.

I could go on and on like this for hours about how bad just this one aspect of Windows is, let alone the hundreds of other GUIs that have been butchered by bad decision making and internal NIH syndrome leaving a trail of half-baked messes behind.

Wait... did I say 4 performance metrics GUIs? I meant 5, because there's also the new Windows Admin Center, which was clearly written by people that have never had to diagnose a performance issue on a server. It's very pretty and utterly useless, which means that: Nobody will use it, and it will be superseded by someone else's half-baked attempt in a few years, 100% guaranteed.

I'm always very skeptical of refusal to handle the past because of the promise that the same won't reiterate in the future. What could also happen is that 5 years from now, you or another dev justifies refusal to handle inconsistencies developed "temporarily" and or accidentally in the meantime with exactly the same reasoning.

A more direct and simple observation is that if nobody is working on converging / cleaning up stuff, they don't converge and aren't cleaned up.

As for the amount of backward compat already provided by Windows, it is good but not great anyway. Try to play old games, install/use old VS with a few patches, install/old Matlab, use old devices, etc... Hell even try to continue to use your semi-recent devices across new build of windows, like 20H2 breaking USB-C on my XPS 15 9560 (but now I'm ranting so I'll stop :D )

As for preventing inconsistencies in future, try getting your QA team back.

My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.

Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.

But generally speaking for them it was still a hassle and hurt to use a computer. iPad with Home Button was so much easier. No support calls for years. It was the computing devices that works. But now they moved on to Smartphone meant iPad get way less usage.

Which also means some of those design decisions that make macOS easier to use might not be relevant as PC transfer to a more professional type usage rather than consumer / everyone computing devices. But even in that case I still think Global Menu Bar is a better design.

My perfect OS would have a global menu bar and enforce that all commands can be issued by searching and all ribbons/icon bars can be turned off.

Now, while I can understand the sibling's point about third-party overlays [0] which may break when the windows suddenly become resizable, what I find absolutely infuriating is that even what seem like recent features still inherit this stupid behavior.

The thing that I'm reminded of is "Windows Defender Exceptions" (or similar, don't have a Windows box at hand). Those are configured through a new, Settings App-looking window.

Now I understand this is somehow different, because even though the window vaguely looks like the Settings App (huge icons, tons and tons of whitespace), it behaves very differently.

This "exceptions" panel shows a list of the folders that is fixed, although the outer window can be resized. So if you've got a big high-res screen and maximize it, you'll get 90% of blank space and will still have to scroll around to see the contents. Bonus points for the list being so skinny that I'm only able to see "C:\Users\vlad\..." and have to click on each entry to see it in full.

I sometimes jokingly say that it shows MS has a mouse business, and having to click a thousand times for the simplest of things is by design.

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[0] Not sure what those are. Do random third-parties "augment" system dialogs by drawing random stuff on top of them? I find that thought horrendous.

Detecting whether that is being done is challenging. Typical workaround is that, if any callback is registered with a dialoog, to keep things ‘as is’.

Every windows update makes the strips a function from the control panel and ads something not quite as good to the settings app.

After the last update the settings app even has ads for 'bing rewards points' in it. Which appear to be impossible to remove.

I need to look harder at getting one of the commercial versions of windows that only gets security updates, but no feature updates, because I've come to hate and fear upgrades.

For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough

They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets.

Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine.

They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty.

No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.

Alternative would be knowing that a lot of 'old' control panel UIs are accessible through the new one, so: go into the new settings UI to network-related stuff (Win-x, w or Win-X, n and start typing 'network') and there will be 'change adapter settings' somewhere. Or possibly you can change the setting you want from the new UI.

Which indeed shows this particular par was turned into a mess. But as the OP says: I haven't actually been bothered by it a lot myself. Likewise for some UI parts looking different: it has been like that since as long as I can remember on computers, no matter which OS or whether it's a CLI, TUI or GUI: if you use more than a couple of tools there are always going to be tools which look and/or do things in a different way. So people kinda get used to that anyway. Not that it's an excuse for doing this to an OS, but just looking at it from the practical side.

The wifi and hotspots are in metro ui setting app.

Interfaces are in its own standalone app. (win7 style)

However... The firewall are in a xp style standalone app.

Can't they combine them into one app or at least make a folder that contains link to them?

So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.

To this day, every time I need to uninstall an application I still do: win+R -> control appwiz.cpl -> enter and it brings me to the place I want to be.

And lastly, while it always stays responsive, control of the background processes is also lacking. I spent quite some time restarting the download of a system language, just because I started it while having DNS issues (and to fix those... see above).

I personally don't mind the older designs being mixed in, especially since most of them look good enough with the updated buttons, but the settings panel is, in its current state, still a sidegrade at best.

It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.

It is also a way to bring into Win32 side most of the API that really matter on the UWP side of the fence, most likely (although they are yet to confirm this) as migration path to UWP developers.

.NET Native, C++/CX are pretty much dead, and C++/WinRT keeps missing many of the tooling available on C++/CX for XAML applications.

So I expect them to migrate the APIs into an OS version independent layer, and then give the mercy shot on UWP apps.

;) Sadly I think this is the group Microsoft is least likely to attempt to cater towards.

Those rules were set by example by microsoft.

16 bit applications never worked on any 64 bit Windows.

This is said quite often, almost as a given, but I never thought it reflected reality. macOS has an abundance of useful features for power users — system services, automator, AppleScript, tons of productivity touches like titlebar proxy icons and universal drag-and-drop support... not to mention it's all built on Unix so a terminal is right there for anything not exposed in the UI.

I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.

But I'm not sure that this is a Windows issue per se, in that apps can and sometimes do produce random, custom notifications even on Linux and macOS. I think it's a "cultural" thing: it happens more often on Windows because... it happens more often, so people aren't as surprised when some new app does it, they've been seeing those for years and years. It's kind of "expected", the same way that most Windows users will say "just reboot it" without batting an eye [0]. "It's just how things are".

However, what trips me, is that even Microsoft's own products do this crap. I'm thinking of Teams in particular. I understand they've only recently introduced the "feature" of sending alerts to the notification center, yet Teams is a brand-new product, that appeared in the Windows 10 era.

And they use those same custom notifications on macOS and Linux, too, where they happily ignore any system configuration. Of course, those are actually custom windows that they put up, they didn't even configure the windows properties to be considered a notification (on Linux/X11).

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[0] I know Windows requires much fewer random reboots nowadays, but the people are still trained to reboot it whenever something "doesn't work". They won't even consider that there's something wrong that should be investigated.

Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off.

For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)

What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait?

One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2, have 8 in the cache, the rest loading efficiently, but the last DNS lookup hangs and causes a 30 sec timeout.

If customers knew who the blame then the brand destruction would progress that much quicker; and I wouldn’t be facing the sisphyian journey of proving over and over to sheeple that that the javascript CDN slightly improves median latency at the cost of vastly worse tail latency.

Technically it seems broken too. There was a bug in the calculator app where one button was off by 1 pixel. It boggles the mind to imagine how that kind of thing is possible.

It did remind me to try a pair of browser shortcuts that I haven't used in probably ten years: Space and Shift+Space. They work!