The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
Monitors are bigger than ever with huge resolutions, and yet UIs are being dumbed down to uselessness and alienating an increasing number of users.
A recent related article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954266 seems to indicate that not even people inside Microsoft --- who are being forced to use Win11, because MS --- have any say in the matter. It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows and is determined to show everyone else how much power they have by making these changes and gloating sadistically at seeing everyone object, but still end up using Windows.
I wonder how much damage they will inflict before people start turning to WINE and a saner Linux distro, just to run their Windows applications.
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.
I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened. For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching.
UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up.
Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them.
I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.
I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once because they ignore everyone and are given unquestionable power.
It's absurd. They have as much capacity to be wrong as anybody else
Why are they allowed to work on Windows? Even car salesmen are often required to drive the same car as the one they're selling.
This is ridiculous.
Also, the title bars on MsOffice apps are so cluttered with controls that you can hardly find a safe place to click on them if you want to select that app with your mouse. Why, for example, is the search bar in Outlook up there, instead of some pop-up dialog box? (And the Outlook and Word search tools themselves are a mess, but I digress...)
I've seen open source projects embrace market driven design methodologies, because they mistakenly think it matters.
There are so many designers and developers who have only worked at startups, and dark patterns have become baked into our development culture.
Mostly this attitude that you need to manipulate the experience of the user, and disregard any feedback from them, because you are the expert, and they don't know what they really want. That's what Steve Jobs said, and he was a success, right? So you should do that also.
That explains a lot. Not having the designers dogfood their work is serious oversight
As an MSFT employee, I have no choice but to use win 11. And suffer from taskbar annoyance and bugs
How are they allowed to do this? This is awful and goes completely against the "eat your own dog food" philosophy.
Separately, I've noticed that developers in general are too deferent to designers, who then get to run amok with shitty ideas. Your pushback is exactly what is needed.
and I want to get rid of all these attention stealing animations, all these readability degrading blurs, pre-neon 10 was great, why break it?
This is crazy. Essentially you get no product memory and no incentive at designing a good product because the designers won't experience the negative effects of their actions.
If this is by design, tell me what Microsoft management wants Windows to go to.
A saner dynamic would be
Build this please
I built it, use it for a couple of weeks
OK it's shit let's try this other one.
This was extremely annoying, thank you for standing up for this.
Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars, so it must have gone white in Windows 10. I do wish we have a way to get back colored title bars, since I find myself confused about what Window is active in a multi-monitor world.
On iOS, the fact that the Home Button brought you back home every time was a selling point, so when you are in the sun, you click once and you know where you are. Then they introduced the 2-click on Home for the Control Center, 3-click, 4-click and now, it’s a cycle, so you never are home. Same for the swipe up to bring the control center, which you always have to do twice because the first scroll up generally brings the local app’s own swipe gesture. Apple became a model of stuffing the maximum of gestures, while Windows went the way of the simplicity. I can’t wait the day when Satya Nadella says “The problem with Apple guys is, they have no taste”…
What happened to the culture of "dogfooding" that supposedly was a big thing at Microsoft, and often pointed as a contributing factor to its success?
Not sure if he cares that his legacy goes down the corporate drain, becoming a failure.
Hmm, somebody noticed.
The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).
The Windows design team was always terrible, and not to mention lazy[1]. Don't mean to throw shade on your ex-team, and I'm sure there's dozens of brilliant people working there, but the design has been an absolute dumpster fire for decades. And this comes from an almost exclusive Windows power user. (I just recently bought my first ever Mac laptop).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_...
In every version of Windows since at least 2.0, Alt+Space has worked to bring up the system menu for the current window. This is the same menu you get if you click the app icon in the top left corner.
Once in a while, this has been a lifesaver for me when a window gets stuck offscreen with my multiple monitor configuration. It is a bit tricky, but even if you can't see the window, you can press Alt+Space to open the system menu, then M to select the Move menu item, then press any arrow key, and finally you can use the mouse to move the window around.
Yes, quite kludgy, but this has worked on every version of Windows for decades.
The PowerToys team decided to take over Alt+Space for their own Mac-style launcher, without even warning you at install time that they are disabling a fundamental Windows keyboard shortcut.
This caused me loss of data when I tried to use that trick for a window that got stuck offscreen. I forgot that I'd installed PowerToys a while back, and Alt+Space didn't work to rescue my window!
There have been multiple threads and GitHub issues raised on this, but the PowerToys team has seemed deaf to the problem. They closed one of the issues with a comment like "our metrics show that very few people use Alt+Space for its old purpose, so we felt OK about reassigning it."
I was like, "Your m-----f---ing metrics told you that? Your metrics just caused me loss of data! Do I need to go get Raymond Chen to explain to you the value of backward compatibility?" But I didn't post that, as there is no hope of getting through to people who think metrics should tell them what to do.
Let's say there are a billion Windows users. And only a tenth of one percent know about Alt+Space to open the system menu. No big deal, that's only a million users you have just inconvenienced or caused to lose data.
Please forgive the rant, but I just don't understand that line of thinking.
Now I use Win+Ctrl+Space but it doesn't work at all if certain apps are focused, ironically VSCode and Windows Terminal, so you have to enable some "compatibility mode" that also doesn't work properly sometimes with those apps in focus. The PowerToys Run window pops up but it isn't always focused.
Might have to fork the damn thing and reinstate the old hotkey code :/
Aside to your larger point, but WIN+SHIFT+DOWN ARROW (restore), WIN+SHIFT+LEFT or RIGHT ARROW (move monitor) are an alternative go-to for saving off-screen windows.
You can also reconfigure Powertoys Run to use a different key-combination than ALT-Space.
Finally a use for the windows key! (on top of win+shift+arrows)
New UIs are like shoe stores, with off-white shoes stored in unlabelled off-white shoeboxes. Everything is shuffled around randomly once per quarter, which is exhausting and not understandable.
Why did this happen?
UI/UX people need to make their mark to justify their salary, that's why.
Specifically, this faction's name is WebXT. They're the one responsible for adding all the ads, the forced Edge adoption, etc. And they're doing it with no oversight because there no longer is any one person in charge of Windows any more, it's a pissing contest and whoever's running that team wins because they can show short-term profits (no one seems to worry about the long term effects of burning all the good-will away), such short-sightedness...
> I wonder how much damage they will inflict before people start turning to WINE and a saner Linux distro, just to run their Windows applications.
The issue is, operating systems aren't something you have a whole lot of choice in; you use whatever OS goes with the software/hardware that you need to run. (It's like that classic "I need you to understand that friends don't go around recommending operating systems to one another" meme). Sure, you could try setting up Linux+WINE, but that is a lot of effort for a few taskbar improvements. Even most power users wouldn't go that far.
Installing a printer on Windows... you have to go through so much crap to get it running but on Linux you just connect your printer to WIFI or to your pc and its ready to print. No idea why Windows makes it so hard. I was also surprised when i seen my wacom tablet just works without doing anything and its settings or in the settings panel, but GIMP UI/UX is horrid that's what you get when programmers try to do UX/UI
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Win10 taskbar and MSFT didn't learn a damn thing from Windows METRO fiasco.
Explorer and file browsers on the other hand are in a dire need for change. For instance, I wish I could easily tag my files, no matter where they are. I shouldn't have to remember where I put this or that file in my hard drive. File search on Windows is still terrible.
It's gotten so bad that what they're enumerating in these mobile menus aren't the same source the system is using. It's extremely annoying.
Edit: If anyone is curious about this specific issue, I solved it by adding the languages and layout Windows thought I had, just so I then could explicitly remove them again, which seems to have solved this issue... for now at least.
Edit 2: Don't get me started on the new context menu where you have to click "more" to get the rest of the options that applications can add.
Edit 3: Oh, and there's no setting for not grouping taskbar items, or always showing all systray items, in Windows 11.
I can't imagine any justification for this other than some blind adherence to a design ideology over user testing.
On many (most? all?) Android phones, you can move the icons in that menu around. (Press-and-hold, then drag, IIRC.) Takes a while to find out which ones you use and which you don't, but once you do you can then move the former before the latter.
Can we blame this on Apple?
However even Apple has copied the atrocious flat UI fashion that has destroyed the ability of users to decipher what can be interacted with, and how. If I have to deal with another goddamned toggle that has reinvented the wheel and in so doing destroyed the ability to decipher the current state and what toggling will cause to happen... well I'll be very unhappy and then continue to eat the dog food because I have no other choice.
I've had an antipathy to Apple gear over this since the very first tech job where I worked with Mac SEs, because when they'd crash they'd display this amusing bomb graphic and an utterly unhelpful numeric code. There was no way to explain what had gone wrong to the person using the machine (who had just lost a pile of work) and more often than not the more experienced people in the support department would just shrug and reinstall the operating system.
This Fisher-Price toy mentality now pervades personal computing and is making problem solving itself obsolete. Many people just don't have the patience or inclination to figure something out when they could just reset it.
Just see how car makers have copied stuff out of the Tesla that is really bad like touch screen only controls. Some are thankfully going back to tactile switches as they realized the safety concerns.
We can always blame everything on Apple.
Quite a lot of the time, we'll even be right.
Relentless focus on minimalism but they don't know where to stop.
Apple is doing it.
So is Tesla. Their cars have fewer and fewer dedicated controls, removing control stalks and putting critical functions on a touchscreen (for petes sake).
I suggest you give a laptop to a normal person who doesn't spend time on the computer and see how they use it. Give them a task that doesn't involve using the browser. I'm pretty sure you'll be surprised how easily they get lost in the UIs. These "minimalist" UIs actually do have a use for people who struggle with basic usage of their OS outside the browser.
A lesson that Microsoft could stand to relearn was from Windows XP, where the new grating Fischer Price UI was easily turned off to return to the sane defaults of Windows 2000.
A sane GNU/Linux distro with Plasma/KDE, have a user experience that it's far superior to Windows. It's simply works out of the box, don't spam you, and don't spy you. And offer a familiar UI where the user can customize it totally.
A programmer suggesting a "refactoring" of the whole codebase is often frowned upon (yet happens). On the design side it feels like the opposite, if a designer doesn't come up with some sort of overhaul every year, they, or their boss will feel insecure or something.
Looking at the screen resolution data of visitors to the web apps I’m working on, I’m still surprised by how many people are on 1024x768 screens and even smaller (often more than 50%). Don’t forget there’s a big crowd of people on small and cheap laptops in the developing world. New OSes should also serve this group.
I was also surprised when you said that, but after a few seconds of thought outside of my tech bubble where everyone has 4K/retina screens, I remembered that my parents, and my GF and her parents, all still use their 10+ year old PCs/laptops with low-res screens, so now I am not surprised anymore.
In the developed world too, I'd think. It's not like Grandma -- or the kids / grandkids buying her a Christmas present -- are going to splurge more than a few hundred bucks on a laptop for her to Facebook with.
This! so much this!
Never have we had so much screen real estate, yet UI designers seem to want to compress the actioanable items into as small a space as possible, with the stated goal of providing as much 'content' space as possible. The result is swathes of pointless unused whitespace, or overly large fonts to fill up the space if anybody uses the app maximized.
Currently on Chrome, the tabs occupy what was once the Title bar (why ??!), same on Office apps where the save and search functions take space on the Title bar. Please, I'm an MDI guy, I hardly ever maximize application, and since the monitor(s) is so large, I like to have an easy to click Title bar to select my focus app, or to move the window somewhere. I've been doing this since the GEM days, and that's how I like it!
I also imagine that those designers would maximise a window where there would only be a single page in the middle of the screen and whitespace all around.
Looks "nice" from a minimalist standpoint but a complete waste of space otherwise.
We have seen this happen with Vista and Windows 8, and it will happen again with whatever comes after Windows 11. Microsoft does eventually listen to the users, but unfortunately only after it's too late for release N. I still can't explain how things are able to get that bad, before the correction happens
I'm pretty sure Windows 11 will be mostly OK next year. What's the rush? It's not like Windows 10 is broken.
If it wasn't for telemetry I'd still be on Windows now.
And you were right, I'm on the verge to ditch Windows but unfortunately, there are something cannot run on Linux yet...
Compatibility is definitely the one big thing SerenityOS is missing. A nontrivial effort for sure, but if it can run Linux and Windows binaries, you are going to see much more adoption.
Minimalism is about getting out of people's way. Many extras are never used by most people and shouldn't be visible, or they are annoying. If you want those extras there should be options to enable them or make them visible. Maybe even specialized software. But don't force every obscure feature onto my desktop!
Nothing says minimalism as shoving a 80 pixels dock in people's face. :)) Here is current taskbar https://i.imgur.com/GkAfOMx.png , this is minimalist.
Windows 11 broke most of that, which is the most common complaints I have (and hear). Windows’ SnapAssist is _amazing_, and I miss it on the Mac, but I am not happy with what was done to the taskbar.
(I use both OSes and Linux, so I am OK with change, just not losing flexibility)
The same people who want the authoritarian minimalism buildings: their designers, who get to satisfy the design fashion, and show off to each other.
I jumped to Linux when Windows 11 was announced. I tried it (W11) in a VM and it convinced me that things are only going to get worse.
Must say that I couldn't be happier for the move. I still get to run the vast majority of software via WINE (Affinity products need to up their game though) to boot. Games are much better supported nowadays as well, so it's all good, and no Windows 11.
it is laziness from microsoft
I found having multiple instances of apps open across multiple monitors was extremely painful after using it ungrouped for so many years. And the little dot provided to indicate an open app is worthless. I resorted to StartAllBack to fix it. Everything else has been generally fine for me. So disappointed.
There are several highly voted feedback posts and comments about the taskbar but I don't think I've seen anyone at MS acknowledge any of it.
(Main suggestion is currently at 11k votes. https://aka.ms/AAeyt69)
And as if that wasn't enough, sometimes just clicking the taskbar item does nothing. It can sometimes take several clicks to get it to re-open an app.
You run it, display instantly looks better, and has a very nicely laid out set of features to play with
Even things like the WiFi flyout (a term I didn't know) can be changed: https://i.imgur.com/JHVvzPG.png
Appears its author even dedicated a blog post specifically to this: https://valinet.ro/2021/11/18/Functional-Windows-10-flyouts-...
It looks like this is relying on what are essentially hacks (injecting DLLs into the explorer related processes -- something that apparently can trigger AV false positives) to patch the proprietary DE in Windows, which might break after some future update, costing much of the stability that would go with something proprietary like Windows (at least what stability there is left to have...)
Oh hell yes. That was the worst change in Win11.
So much so that when I recently got a new computer and had to reinstall everything anyways, I downgraded to win10 first.
Some other stuff that works better in win10 is the wifi/sound/battery stuff. That takes a few seconds to load in win11, and requires multiple clicks to do loads of stuff.
Or right clicking a file in win11 gives you this weird menu, so have to click one extra time to open the old menu that actually has the stuff I want (7zip, notepad++ shortcuts).
On win11 alt+tab sometimes hangs. No idea how they can screw up both ways to switch programs in one go.
Like, sure, microsoft.com/visualstudio looks too obvious. What about aka.ms/vs, ha ha ! Good luck guessing what this is about. Phishing ? I can’t say… click on it to be sure.
(I suppose is some Twitter madness that has gone out of control).
I don't know the official meaning - but I'm fairly sure it's for the abbreviation "Also Known As" - "AKA".
Beyond the obvious shortening feature, the main benefit is that MS can change the underlying resource the shortcut links to should they need to in the future.
Weird because while I hate that also, mine is the opposite.
I hate not being able to group my start menu items.
I use it as a "second-tier" taskbar, for apps I use a lot but maybe not every day. But I don't like how it just throws them all in the same bucket now.
BUT,
I'm sad that they removed the option. It took me considerable time to come to a realization that different people like doing things differently and that's okay and there's not right or wrong way of doing it. The thing is, this realization came with personal, not professional growth. You can be a developer/designer for 30 years and still not understand why some people are unhappy with your decisions.
Someone in Microsoft's decision making chain who has enough weight has to acknowledge that removing an option that people have used for long time for just... for what exactly?... is alienating users.
It seems it wants to force open another application, perhaps only available on Windows..
Here's a screenshot for the curious. What's ridiculous is that it says 0 comments when there are thousands.
Dont' worry, they "got it". Whatever that means.
Here's a public forum post about it full of complaints too.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-insider-progr...
That alone Makes me want to quit Windows.
It doesn't sound annoying, but it means you often hit enter mid-typing, only for the top suggestion to change right as you are hitting enter.
I assume the issue is poor decision making about rule conflicts. E.g., what's higher priority: Consistency, or exact-match? E.g. if "photo" auto-completes to "Photoshop", should "photos" auto-complete to "Photoshop" or "Photos"? I think it's "obvious" that consistency is more important here. If the user wants "Photos" despite opening "Photoshop" more often, let them configure the search explicitly to prioritize it, or allow them to select from a list of multiple matches.
And that's just a comparison against a single conflicting rule. Now imagine all the obscure rules they've implemented, for reasons varying from a misguided drive for "features" to nefariously pushing the user to click on what they want them to.
Regardless of what you want the behaviour to be, the behaviour shouldn't be, as it is on my system:
"pho" = Photos
"photo" = Photoshop
"photos" = Photos
And as I type this to confirm what happens after, now "photos" completed to photoshop, despite not selecting anything since the last time I typed it...
There is a good reason why I use either the Powertoys Run or Launchy on every system I touch.
I suspect it's even worse than this. It seems to be something along the lines of "oh you typed pho, and got photoshop, but then typed t, so clearly photoshop wasn't what you wanted, since we already suggested that"
That's the only way I can explain windows "flip between several app suggestions every time a new letter is typed" behavior
"Would you like to make edge your default browser ?" No !!
"3 results for termi - bing"
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/main/README.md
For the fastest searching possible on Windows, I use the Journal-indexing "Everything" search.
It's actually a tough design choice with any multi-channel search: Do you start displaying results from the first sources available or do you wait until all sources have reported in?
If you wait you get latency, but if you try to stream results the order/top result can change which is jarring to the user and creates UX race conditions.
Index the installed apps in the start menu search and make these appear in the search result.
I want to be able to press Win-key -> type "fi" -> press nter to open Firefox. On MacOS and all Linux distros I`ve every tried, it works flawlessly.
For other (more advanced) search mechanisms, implement these in a designated search option in the taskbar, startmenu, standalone etc.
This means that Microsoft needs to abandon Bing and whatever telemetry they can gather from the user in the start menu search making this unlikely to be the reality going forward.
mulmen's laws of UX design:
1. It is never ok for the user to perceive input delay.
2. There must be no compromise in service of law #1.
3. Your UX improvement is a regression until proven otherwise.
4. To change the UX you must first destroy something you love.
5. The CPU belongs to the user, not to you.
In the strongest possible sense: Neither, ever. You can not treat instant results and un-cacheable delayed results of unknown quantity/size as the same element of UI. It's a fallacious premise. (Sorry to sound aggressive.)
[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4167/custom-hot-corne...
It's even worse than "just" moving the mouse to the centre of the screen, you have to target a position that changes according to the number of applications open.
When the button is in a corner the size is virtually infinite (we can move the mouse all we want in one direction and we'd still be over the button)
As for the text labels the article is complaining about, I know what he's referring to but I haven't used the feature in so many years I can't make myself sympathize. Just get over it. A full-page article about one missing feature, and then tried to generalize it to sound like the whole OS was similarly bad. But only one example was provided to support the generalization. I'm more disappointed in this article than I am with Windows 11.
Many people have a lot of windows open, and many of them of the same app (not unusual to have 5+ explorer windows open). Not being able to directly click on the right one is a big loss. Just because you don't do work that requires that kind of feature, does not mean that other people don't need it either.
Admittedly it's terrible for your cursor muscle memory to have the start menu button shift around, but most keyboards have a dedicated button for opening it. Why not use it? I know I might be in the minority here, but I vastly prefer the start menu popping up in the middle of the screen instead of the corner. That way I don't need to turn my head / redirect my gaze as much.
Although I get it. Most people just want to work the way they've been working and treat changes to their workflow with hostility. And of course taking choice away from users ("authotarian minimalism" as some comment here put it) is a bad thing. Many of my friends liked to have a vertical taskbar and I'd imagine they're not happy taskbar repositioning being removed from Windows 11.
edit: formatting
However, "just use shortcuts" isn't a solution to bad design. People don't rename things too often, so such shortcuts are rarely picked up. F5 is the only shortcut I think most computer users know about, and I doubt they realise it'll work in explorer as well.
Nobody cares about shortcuts when the problem is that the UI is unintuitive. If they did, they would've already learned and used them. At this point you might as well direct them to Powershell, because that's even more powerful. We're talking about features that people regularly used half a year ago and now can't do anymore.
For young people this shouldn't be a problem, they just need to decode the new iconography, but for the elderly this change in behaviour means re-taking the entire "how to use a computer" course from the start. The continuous design overhaul Microsoft is trying to do for no apparent reason other than please designers who won't be using Windows anyway is only making everyone's life harder.
If you're redesigning, people shouldn't ask where the buttons have gone. Their new location should be logical and intuitive after only a little bit of looking around. With the new context menu (and the new start menu, actually) this isn't the case. It feels to me like the design was made for an entirely new product instead of for an interaction of a product with thirty to forty years of history.
if they would just pin it dead center and keep it there it would be the easiest spot to reach, especially on big screens, but it would also mean you could organise apps on either side. maybe more permanent apps on the left and less used and then newly opened on the right.
i kind of wish pinned tabs in browers would pin to the middle as well for the same reasons. easy to reach but also would let you organise stuff better. stuff you need to do or read later on the left and ephemeral stuff on the right.
1) - Not change anything in Ux, permissions, or core functionality
2) - Make any new features - like Windows Mixed Media - a la carte add ons - heck even charge for them let the market speak
3) Focus on optimizing kernel, responsiveness, compatibility, and privacy transparency
Too much to ask but honestly it would be amazing.
Aren't they still charging for the DVD player on Windows? They've been doing that since either 8 or 10, and there's been a pretty consistent chain of outcry about it.
4K BluRay support is gone permanently because they dropped the DRM component from Windows 11.
Because it's not designed for work, it's a launcher for video games.
umm.... Chromebook is Linux....
Probably not, otherwise there would be a lot more panic regarding SteamDeck, SteamOS, and Proton within Microsoft.
For example, the killer new feature of Xbox Series X is "DirectStorage", whereby the GPU can access NVMe devices directly for incredible IOPS and throughput. They "added" this to windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/syst...
To quote: "Access to this topic requires membership in an NDA developer program. Contact your publisher or your Xbox program representative if you need direct access. Not in the program? Read about joining the ID@Xbox program to gain access today!"
Translation: "This is not for you PC-only game developer, only Xbox matters, ask permission from the Xbox team and assure them you won't take market share away from them."
That's just the tip of the iceberg. A Windows 10 update a few years ago broke HDR gaming for a huge range of PCs out there, and it has been broken even worse in Windows 11.
Just some of the madness that affects me even on a brand-new, high-end gaming laptop with Windows 11:
- If you have a discrete NVIDIA GPU with a recent laptop that has a HDR screen, all DirectX applications & games using the NVIDIA card will report HDR support as "N/A" for the primary screen. There is no workaround.
- In Windows 11 RTM, monitor gamuts (and all applications) are forced to sRGB and SDR even on a wide-gamut OLED screen with 100% AdobeRGB coverage and full HDR support. External HDMI-connected televisions (like with Xbox!) work as expected, but that's the writing on the wall: Microsoft tests HDR onlybwith Xbox, not with Windows.
- If you accidentally leave HDR enabled and your laptop goes to sleep, the primary display won't turn on at all when you resume from sleep and you have to power-cycle your computer. Obviously HDR "support" was only tested in the context of external TVs just like with Xbox, and was probably done only by the Xbox team. The Windows team literally does not test this scenario or apply bugfixes despite thousands of Feedback Hub comments.
- If you change your monitor "brightness" slider, the reported MaxFALL in HDR mode will change, which makes no sense because it's the physical monitor hasn't magically gained new abilities. Worse, it's backwards: At max brightness SDR apps run with an eye-searing 450 nits, but HDR apps and games will think the maximum display output is just 113 nits and will look completely distorted and washed out (darker than SDR!). Conversely, reducing the brightness will lie to HDR games and report ludicrous maximum brightness levels like 48,000 nits which will clip everything to maximum white, even shadows.
- I'm probably missing a few...
See also exercise equipment, kitchen appliances (large & small), AV equipment, etc.
In Windows 11's case it makes great demo screens but terrible productivity.
Also small appliances like pressure cookers, air-friers have gaudy LEDs with non-tactile buttons, and irritating charms.
Now for a positive example: my italian Gaggia Espresso machine : 3 large rocker switches and 2 status LEDs. It could easily be operated by touch alone. And I expect it to last 30 years with adequate maintenance. And besides the mechanism, no extraneous noises whatsoever.
The official marketing post for the Win11 release actually contains the phrase "empowers you to produce" among other doublespeak, previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528
Everyone likes to complain about privacy, telemetry, etc. in Windows. I’d rather have a Windows 7 with telemetry than Windows 11 with no telemetry. Every Windows release just becomes actively more annoying to use.
Any anecdotes?
I have one: I've had this HP printer for years now. It's one of the... cheaper models that's more geared towards younger people (the app-downloading crowd). Anyway, that printer just would not work on Windows without installing some form of adware from HP. I tried everything, every obscure menu I could find to get the printer working.
They really wanted me to put this thing on my network.
On Linux, well... I plugged it in. And that's it. Software picks it up, works amazingly. I couldn't believe my eyes when it instantly recognised it.
Great tool though, works 99% of the time which is good enough for me, love it!
They still have a thing called "TextInputHost.exe" which takes about 90Mb of RAM and if you kill it all store apps (including Terminal) stop taking keyboard input. It too makes network requests but I can't get rid of it, so had to firewall it instead. But that's just nasty AF: keyboard input works just fine in win32 applications, so you clearly don't need a resident 90Mb network-connected process to get it to work in UWP, you're just being sneaky...
Sadly and disappointingly, Windows 95 was the apex of UX for desktop operating systems. After that, everything on the whole was just in systematic decline. Sure, there are plenty of things that could be improved over Win95, and things that did improve with later OS releases. Unfortunately the other baggage that came with it all wasn't worth the sacrifice. MacOS looks pretty, but there are too many things I hate about how it works because it keeps slowing me down or getting in the way. Now Windows is the same.
It feels like we've gone from the renaissance of user interfaces to baroque, and now to unusable minimalist (dare I say brutalist?), all to stroke designer egos.
Now I use Mac for work because I can only do certain things on a mac, and Windows for anything I can only do on Windows. But whenever I can get away with it, I just use Mate desktop. It's not the best, but it's fast, gets out of your way, works well with remote desktops, and has most of the important big ticket UI innovations (plus I can spin up hundreds of remote desktops using LXC).
I somewhat agree in that the paradigm established and adhered to until it was broken in Vista was the correct way to do it. When drop shadows and thick window borders went away everything got so much harder to use.
2000 - good
Me - bad
XP - good
Vista - bad
7 - good
8 - bad
10 - good
11 - bad
> For Windows 12 we will cycle to "good" UI.
Unlikely.
I found out that Windows 11 was being broadly distributed because I started getting dozens of support tickets a day asking why it stopped working after they upgraded to Windows 11.
Unfortunately the new taskbar doesn't expose any interfaces to officially be able to display anything on the taskbar, which is unfortunate.
When items get auto grouped it is an incredible loss of productivity.
But I guess Microsoft hired designers who dont do real work, just some basic design in 1 window... on a mac.
Go to any office, find an employee who isnt very good at computers (still lots of people like this) and set their taskbar to not auto group (in win 10). They will love you, since now they can easily switch to the window they want.
On a side note, windows also now groups windows 11 per program. Before you could see them the way they were opened (say if you open few spreadsheets and few emails the last one would always be last).
If is a complete failure of ma agement to hire designers who dont even use windows.
But there are some more things missing, like the ability to open the task manager from the taskbar.
What?? I will literally not switch because of this...
No, I am not interested in installing 3rd party addons just to have a functional screen in front of me!
All seriousness aside, for a decade or more I've kept my Windows task bar over on the left-hand side of the screen, precisely because I can see words to describe what each running app is, rather than hieroglyphics and maybe a few letters (my main monitor is vertical, so not so much space along the bottom for full words). I guess this is another reason I don't want Win11.
This is a journey that MS began with during W8 and continued much further with during the W10 reign.
It would not surprise me that the next iteration of Windows there isn't even an admin option and you'll be in a walled garden at the mercy of MS' even more so than now, where you can at least block and disable some things.
The single inexplicable change, to me, is not only the removal of labeled windows (which is annoying, but bearable): its the removal of separated, non-grouped windows. You have to hover over the application with multiple windows, to make the popup appear, to switch the active window. Or alt-tab.
Its how MacOS behaves (with non-minimized windows)! Its how Gnome3/Ubuntu behaves (iirc)! And its baffling! I don't know how anyone, let alone every major operating system vendor, has come to the conclusion that the best way to handle the insanely common use-case of having multiple windows open, is to force the user into not just another click, but a hover. Heck, I'm fine with it being the default; just give me an option to enable it.
It really is my only major complaint about Win11 right now. Which is, I suppose praise. Taskbar search is obscenely slow after the computer has been inactive for a bit; search has always been slow, but it also took a step backward (Ryzen 5800x? 64gb of memory? 2TB gen4 nvme drive? just heading off the low-hanging fruit if any Windows engineers are reading this; its not my computer, its your code). That's roughly it; its a fine OS.
But; its still painful. Not just because the functionality is missing, but more-so because their insistence on authoritarian design makes me, a customer, feel unwelcome. Its hard to make things configurable; but you have a billion users. You can't dictate one experience that works for everyone, despite whatever the macbook-toting designers say. Even asking customers doesn't work because if you make a change that angers 0.1% of your userbase, that's a million people. So, just... keep things configurable.
IMO on laptop widescreens, putting the taskbar at the bottom greatly reduces the most precious screen resource - vertical space.
This small unnecessary change has made me hate using windows 11
I loved the one in Win 10. I had all my shortcuts pinned, sized, grouped and arranged and in my 3 years of using it, I never once had to scroll the program list or search to get to a program.
I don't understand why MS$ has to mess up what is good.
This is definitely 10 steps back, because you can list out things the new menu cant do but the old menu can.
That's about it for the changes. Overall I find it a net positive.
What I worry about is this: If Microsoft used all their telemetry-gathering powers to determine that very few people used this now-missing feature, and that's why they removed it, that's a bad reason. I don't agree with removing features just because few people use them or didn't complain loudly enough during the beta. As a power user, I'm sure I rely on features that few "common people" use, and I'm sure eventually the rug will be pulled out from under me if Microsoft continues to remove features that only 2% of users rely on.
I've found the Settings app to require way more clocks than Windows 10's, and as someone with Bluetooth earphones I open the Bluetooth page often. They didn't improve it in any ways that affect me and only added more clicks.
Most of the improvements I've seen were just bug fixes that were going to be in the next version of Windows 10 before they got the grand idea to use Windows 10X's nasty shell elements. I actually thought the combined system tray might be nice but it was just annoying and requires more clicks.
So back to 10 it was. I'll have to live with the bugs.
Also, it put the final nail IE11’s coffin. Since Win 11 does not support it.
I can’t say anything else is better or even worth upgrading given downsides
Most other things I’m fine with. The Start menu is better than in 10 (not that it matters, I use Keypirinha as launcher), I don’t need text for my icons, and I can easily see which Windows have multiple instances.
Overall, I like the changes in 10 (again with the caveat of needing a 3rd party tool to fix the taskbar).
Windows 10 is absolutely wonderful but start menu is such a lost opportunity for having something useful in that spot.
Aside from taskbar, start menu is worst one in last decade. I didn't use Win7 start menu because it can't manage favorite apps with category well. I used random free launcher at that time. I liked Win8 start screen except fullscreen, because it can be categorized by user well. Win10 is obviously the best ever. I think Win11 start menu is drawback to Win7, with annoying recommend features.
https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-on-windows-11-wi...
> The tweaker is designed for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.
Windows 11 probably isn't supported!
The taskbar is a mess (no more right click -> Task Manager).
The right-click context menu is a mess, since all my useful shortcuts are hidden away.
The file-copy dialog crashes with big folders (it cannot get through a 300gb folder without crashing).
BitLocker control panel -> takes you back to new settings view for Device Encryptions, which says you must login for it to work, or click the button for advanced setting, which takes you back to control panel which say you must go to settings...........
The OS is still in beta.
The taskbar is just one of the many symptoms of this disease. Just right clicking on files in Explorer is a nightmare. If I want to get to the properties of a file, I need to jump through hoops. This is nuts :)
Same question can be applied to the way the whole WinRT/UAP/UWP, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT and now WinUI have been managed.
They have burned all bridges from those of us that still belived in the project, to the point one must question who is actually managing all these headless chickens running into all possible directions.
This should be easy, right? As far back as Vista, the WPF framework had 16-bit and even 32-bit per channel wide-color, and HDR UI support.
Win UI 3 -- the absolutely latest / next-generation user interface framework for Windows removed all such support, scraping it out of the WPF SDK that it was based on. Everything is SDR, 8-bit, and sRGB only forever now!
Meanwhile, Web dev, Macs, TVs, and phones are fairly consistently wide-gamut and HDR capable.
The best GUI app I can make for Windows is a web application.
No wonder Microsoft themselves use Electron.
Shades of old man shouts at cloud I know, but that's my opinion. For context, I've been using Windows since Windows 95 and MacOS since 10.0.
I was hopeful they fixed it, but they didn't. Finally just decided to make Linux my new home and remote into Windows from there. Pretty well just cutting macOS out of my life entirely, although I have reserved the ability to remote into macOS seamlessly as I do with Windows more or less. I can careless what happens on any OS - I can switch btwn them all with relative ease and no hotkey weirdness as this point due to my personal project (kinto.sh).
Most employees cannot install anything on their company computers.
On Ubuntu it's the same, grouped only icons.
On Mac is the same (I think, I don't use Mac).
And I don't like it (that's why I'll stick with Windows 10 and then change to KDE)
Also that the bar takes up the whole screen width, which is quite poor UX for an ultra wide monitor.
I did put in some feature requests to address!
No File Explorer icon by default nor hard drive icon on desktop, so no way to access a particular file without knowing command.
Games don’t run without typing in admin password each time, etc.
Surprised things aren’t more refined by now.
This piece of software fixes a lot of the issues that everyone has, especially the taskbar shenanigans and the right click context menus.
It is now, for me, an irreplaceable tool for Windows 11.
I'll probably have to upgrade eventually but it's really a bummer that they removed this option.
Unfortunately, I still have to run a Windows VM via QEMU so that I can use my Universal Audio interface (no Linux drivers available).
Thankfully they didn’t change the Win+x commands.
My biggest gripe with Win 11 is the stability. Reminds me of the early days of Win 10. Periodic blue screens on sleep and sometimes on boot.
Maybe it’s my hardware, but I doubt it. I was just given this laptop by IT and it didn’t come with Win 10 restore media, so this is what I have now.
I think this is probably because the UX people they got to design it all use Macs.
Not okay about losing this.
Use the keyboard to launch and switch apps.
/jk
People want text on those icons?
(That’s not to say I disagree that windows design is a mess)
Obviously not for everyone, but also obviously a totally valid use case that should be supported.
Adapt, improve, repeat.
Office? I LIKE Office! I like Excel a little (generally find it easier just to write code in a procedural language than to use Excel) and especially like Outlook. But the version of Office I like is from 2003. Due to a change in SMTP email standards, I will have to upgrade to 2007 Office (from eBay) or some such -- that's on my TODO list. Except for that SMTP change, I'd prefer to stay with Office 2003. I know how to use Office 2003, and I don't want to invest the time, and frustration, especially the frustration, to learn about changes, any changes. To me Office is NOT a very good tool, NOT at all central to my work in computing. I do NOT believe that Microsoft has found any worthwhile changes to Office (except responding to the SMTP changes). Net, I do NOT believe that there is anything about new versions of Office that are worth my time or frustration, especially the frustration, to learn. If I want to do something Office 2003 can't do, then I'm perfectly comfortable writing some procedural code, usually for work there is no hope of ever getting done in anything like Office. E.g., I had a 0-1 integer linear programming problem with 600,000 variables and 40,000 constraints. I found a feasible solution guaranteed to be within 0.025% of optimality, no hope of ever doing that on anything like Office.
I see a larger theme: People who have a popular product want it to keep up so work hard to make changes, change or delete old features and add new features. This theme applies quite broadly, e.g., to cars, Windows, Office, women's fashions, suburban single family home architecture, ..., and Web sites. Presumably those people hope, expect, or whatever, that the new version will be better; in fact, too often the new version is worse. Yes, when WiFi, USB, etc. come along, we can need corresponding new functionality -- no question for such cases. But such changes come along only slowly, and changes to user interfaces can happen nearly everyday at nearly every Web site in the world -- biggie issues and questions there.
For cars, e.g., I have an old GMC Yukon, in good condition, and it has some dozens, maybe hundreds, of features that seem to need a computer to do the logic. So, the Yukon keeps trying to get my attention with various lights and sounds, new to cars. For the new stuff, I don't want it. Apparently the GMC designers rushed to conclude that with computers there was a lot they could do to manipulate sensor data and generate lights and alarms. COULD they do that? Yes. But SHOULD they do that? Nearly always, NO!
Here's a broad example of this theme that has a lot to do with 3+ billion people, literally: Way back there were many, millions, of different paper forms with boxes, places to make check marks, etc. Then there was some user interface work, via both hardware and software, by IBM for their 3270 series of data entry terminals, work that borrowed a lot from such paper forms. Since people understood paper forms, both the programmers and the users found 3270 relatively intuitive and easy to use. Then there were dumb terminals, i.e., asynchronous ASCII, and there were a lot of programs to drive such terminals and that borrowed a lot from 3270.
Then there was HTML, and I'm guessing that it borrowed a lot from all of paper forms, 3270, etc. As we know, with HTML there were controls -- single line text boxes, multi-line text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, push buttons, and links. As I recall, that is all, ALL there was. Want to build a Web page? Okay, are stuck with just those few, simple controls.
Now we come to two points: (1) Those controls were so close to, literally, paper forms that they were automatically relatively easy to use. (2) Literally BILLIONS of people, necessarily nearly everyone in the world making use of the Internet, 3+ BILLION people, understood how to use a Web site with Web pages using just those HTML controls.
In important respects, the HTML controls, borrowing so much from what worked so well in the past, were VERY well designed. Then with the discipline of just those few, simple HTML controls, every Web page started with a HUGE advantage in user interface ease of use. It was still possible to build an awful user interface, but, just from the discipline, it was also easier, relatively easy, to build a good one!
Then we got icons: Since icons essentially need a graphics terminal, couldn't have icons with 3270 or the dumb terminals. So, when we got graphics terminals -- terrific for sketches, pictures, movies, games, PDF files, Zoom, etc. -- we also got icons.
BUT: When a new icon is designed, only God and the designer know what it means. Given an icon, can't spell it, type it, pronounce it, easily communicate it, describe its function just from its appearance, sort it with other icons, search for it, look it up in a dictionary, etc. Still, we got lots of icons! We STILL have lots of icons.
Civilization HAD icons and then about 2000 years ago made a HUGE step up, the Roman alphabet. Now it dominates communications around the world; a lot of people even in Asia and Russia understand it, and otherwise essentially everyone who can read understands it.
Then along came JavaScript (JS): With JS it was possible to build Web pages that ignored the discipline of HTML, have the pages very active, that jump around, have lots of secret functionality, etc. It was possible to have an ocean of new functionality.
Alas as we would expect from the theme and history, a LOT of the new functionality was very unwelcome and ruined a LOT of user interfaces. In particular, now each Web page done heavily with JavaScript likely is unique, has to be learned on its own.
In simple terms, with just HTML, there were many millions of Web pages relatively easy for billions of people to use right away, and with JavaScript suddenly there were millions of Web pages all different, often poorly designed, and that had to be learned one at a time. E.g., now a single line text box can be invisible until something else happens at which time suddenly the box becomes visible -- the user has to learn this undocumented, unexpected, unprecedented, obscure, bizarre behavior just by experience, frustrating, error-prone experience, uniquely for nearly each such Web page. Nearly always, similarly for icons -- learn by experience.
Silicon Valley must have mountains of dedicated, dead ex-Google Web page designers and JavaScript programmers who died miserable deaths trying with all their strength to make massive changes to the first Web page at Google! Instead, Google has kept that page, at least as a user first sees it, both OLD and SIMPLE.
I credit 80+% of the Bezos fortune to some discipline, from somewhere at Amazon, for some relatively good and SIMPLE user interface design -- people around the world shop, place orders, and spend their money right away! I would rate the Amazon user interface as in the top 1%, by wide margins, of the shopping Web sites in the world -- we're talking billions of users and about a $trillion in business worth from good, relatively simple Web page design.
Net, in short, just because some new technology makes some new feature possible does not alone make that feature good.
Myself I finally caved and told it to move the start button back to the left corner. It’s just so much easier to flick your wrist back there and click than to figure out where in the center-left it is currently. I did almost get myself wired to hit the actual keyboard start button more though.
If you're used to using the taskbar for quick switching like that it's a jarring change.
The difference is that the Dock has always been like the Dock. It also exists holistically with all the other design decisions in macOS. Put another way, Windows seems to have copied the superficial appearance of the Dock without the considering _why_ the Dock works in the macOS environment.
Any step is a step backward. I want a UI that is stable.
So it's more of a cycle than a trend.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisi...
Coca Cola modified and replaced their flagship product with a better product. It was proven to be statistically better in taste tests. But the product "new coke" ultimately became a failure.
"In retrospect, some marketers believe that the failure of New Coke may have had something to do with sensation transference, a human oddity first described by Louis Cheskin in the 1940s. Cheskin demonstrated that people will unconsciously associate imagery, sounds, tastes, aromas, and textures into their general impression of a product, even if such associations are unintended or inaccurate. These sensory inputs create a halo effect which actually modifies flavor perception, so while cola drinkers may have preferred the new Coke formula, they may have disliked the “taste” of the redesigned packaging. Even Gay Mullins —the man who tried to sue to restore the old flavor —showed a preference for New Coke when subjected to blind taste tests"
I wouldn't be surprised if windows UI/UX designers used statistics to verify the improvements of the windows UI changes. Despite this, consumer psychology always has a way of causing literally almost every major change to any popular product (that is on par with coca cola) be a "debacle" of epic proportions. I see it on every change to OSX, iOS, windows... all consumers are always flabbergast declaring out loud: "What were they thinking!??"
You guys remember when touch screen keyboards were a "debacle"? Nobody could type on that shit back then. It was a royal fuck up. Now everybody types on them.
Inevitably there will be someone who replies to me insisting that it's worse due to some personal yet convincing anecdotal experience. But until you take the UI equivalent of a blind taste test I'm not sure if this is sensation transference or an actual real rational judgement.
Just look at the laughably bad screenshots floating around. They all show a giant desktop, with a taskbar that's 70% empty space, with no option to actually use that space now that apps are force combined. Looks pretty, but dogshit user experience.
"Did Microsoft do this type of test before release their OS? I think so... but I'm not 100% sure. Are consumers using these metrics when decrying the UI changes??? I am 100% sure the answer is NO... they are not."
Basically what I'm saying here is that your opinion is complete and utter dog shit unless you have metrics to back it up. You obviously don't, so my point still stands.
Gay Mullins literally stated that new coke tasted like dog shit. I see a parallel here.
Also I did say this:
"Inevitably there will be someone who replies to me insisting that it's worse due to some personal yet convincing anecdotal experience. But until you take the UI equivalent of a blind taste test I'm not sure if this is sensation transference or an actual real rational judgement. "
That quote above is referring to you. I saw it coming because it's so typical.
Literally every UI change to every major UI product ingrained in out culture labeled as a UI travesty. It happens every single time. Look back a decade or so, it's so predictable. I saw an article like this coming from a mile away.
Still your argument could be valid. It just needs data to back it up. (I'm not making an argument either way... Just pointing out the biases)
Nobody is complaining about the "look" of windows 11 just like nobody complained about the "look" of "new coke." But the hypothesis is, is that the "look" of new coke, the "newness" and change to a popular product ingrained in our culture is what triggers people to think that it's worse. For windows people claim that the "ease of use" has been affected. It happens every single time; on every single major UI change to any product ingrained within out culture... the consumer reaction is exactly the same... and that is not a coincidence.
Such an ability allows you to see truth where others delude themselves. But knowing the absolute truth isn't always a good thing, and sometimes you may get attacked for pointing something out.
Eventually we need to get back to sustainable work.
The article is also well thought out, thoroughly researched and cites the opinions of marketers at the time. I urge you to read it before overriding it with your one paragraph "understanding" of it.
There ya go. fixes one of the problems, no patch needed.
In my view, if you're using the taskbar for more than that, you're using your computer in a suboptimal way.
I have over 40 separate buttons in my taskbar right now, which is 3 rows high. I can see all their names and select the one I want with a single glance and click. How else do you propose being able to do that?
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4624-add-remove-quick-la...
Ok. This article is actually an ad for a 5$ tool that does something to your taskbar. No thank you.
I do feel that it's a vert shallow read into the windows 11 task bar, and that it only really talks about the labels being gone, and icons being centered (which is configurable). The rest of the content is mostly hostory that has little to so with the actual subject.
There's no mention of other regressions (people complaining about weather being gone, not being able to move taskbar away from the bottom of the screen, right click menu being basically empty), no discussion about how those were or were not fixed. No discussion about improvements to the old task bar (I don't know if any exist).
The choice to focus solely on titles being gone, and on mentioning somewhat related history suggests that its a pretty rough write made for that 5$ fix, and suggests to me that the fix is incomplete and doesn't solve the rest of the problems.
The fix may be good, it may solve other issues, I have no problem with paying for stuff. But I do feel like I've read just a shallow article written with that purpose in mind. To drop the paid tool at the end.