Microsoft accidentally revealed a UI design prototype for the next Windows
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
"It will require the lastest processors and 32 GB of RAM because OEMs need to sell computers and all of the windows components are using Electron (or similar memory-hungry web UIs)."
"Teams and Loop will be fully integrated to enable maximum synergy for organizations and pro-sumers."
"MSN and News will also be fully integrated to help keep users informed about current events, their favorite celebrities, and great deals that are availble when they shop with Edge and search with Bing."
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33954176
It’s some serious garbage.
For all its failures, the linux desktop has one of the best if not the best design consistency out there
I really want Microsoft to just make a version of Windows for actual Pros that doesnt pull you into their ecosystem. I want my OS to just be an OS.
I know they're not to everyone's taste but it wouldn't hurt to have an option to replace those with a global menubar for example, because I don't need to know the weather that often and a hotkeyed search ala Spotlight, Alfred, or Microsoft's own PowerToys Run is better than a search field that's starting me in the face all the time, but a way to escape the Curse of the Hamburger Menu would be wonderful.
If they copied well then that would be one thing. But they don't copy well either. In Windows 10 (and 11 too) if you resize a window by dragging the bottom border, the bottom of the window does not quite touch the taskbar: there is a few pixels of gap, which is just a waste. I didn't understand why they did that... until I realized that's because MacOS has that too.
If a chimpanzee views a person perform a series of superfluous actions, along with one single necessary action, in order to obtain a piece of food, the chimpanzee will skip the superfluous action, and perform only the necessary one. In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones [1]. Microsoft isn't being as smart as a chimpanzee in their copying.
Sure, the start screen was a whole screen rather than a bar. But it was easy enough to organize into something useful, as opposed to the Win10 start menu which just feels too busy with a bunch of small tiles littering the screen.
Why, that’s easy, the fucking weather.
Except you know it’s not going to be the weather. It will be, mark my words, a portal for advertising and sponsored content, the revenue maker in the very top left corner. If there’s a better metaphor for an insipid lack of relevancy at all times, the weather couldn’t possibly be a more suitable fit.
I don't understand Microsoft insistence on introducing a brand new design language this often. Just make one and consolidate everything under it.
Also... holy hell does that scream Mac with the icons on the top right and the dock that isnt a dock on the bottom.
I wonder if the best windows won’t turn out to be SteamOS.
I switched to MacOS after many many years of windows and one of the things I love about macOS is all the configuration is in one place, stuff isn’t duplicated in multiple user interfaces, there’s only one UI style for macOS, not random bits of UI cruft accumulated over 30 years randomly appearing everywhere. macOS knows what it is. Windows seems to have had a lifetime of personal identity crisis.
Maybe they realized during a QA meeting that it was too good for their standards.
It used to be a ~60kb executable that worked even on open files, enormous log files, or on servers on their last legs due to memory exhaustion.
The new version takes a solid second to start up, can’t open a one gigabyte text file in under a minute, and can’t even align tabs and spaces despite using a fixed-width font.
It’s the simplest text editor that is so slow that its menus visibly stutter and lag if you simply move your mouse.
If Gates was still in charge he’d have summarily fired that entire team.
If you want nice things, you can’t have nice people in charge.
Guess that's why it needs to be made worse! First the start button shifting depending on how many apps you have pinned, now the whole task bar in the middle of the screen.
I can only congratulate. Maybe they could try placing it diagonally.
I switched to Linux Mint years ago using Cinamon as the DE. Many aspects inspired by Windows, which sadly peaked nearly 30 years ago.
Windows will have a very low value proposition soon with the way Proton (Linux gaming) is going.
Just polish the damn thing and finish what you started with WSL1 instead of suddenly adding advertisement popups and sports news into a released product and creating new superficial design changes and notification features for the casual user in each and every version.
I as many others am required to use this for work, because you have already won so many platforms, the most recent being Teams. Why not just polish it, so we actually WANT to use it, so casual users would join us, too? Isn't that exactly what Apple did with the Mac?
And no Windows 11 is not it.
Nadella was treated like the second coming of Jesus on here a few years back. Turns out he's another one trick capitalist trying to push up revenue of a dying turd by sprinkling glitter on it and selling it to you monthly while pocketing whatever he can make out of your data.
Microsoft would like to disagree. They don't care about fixing bugs or ensuring consistency. They only care that telemetry keeps flowing.
This new breed of dribble-raised "designers" should be fired en-masse, but sadly they've taken over the entire industry
I wonder if the team over at Microsoft is trying to match the look and feel of OSX in order to shorten the gap between the two operating systems and reduce friction of switching between the two.
It looks worse because for no reason at all they have a gap at the bottom. You can bet that it will be click-through, so you have to actually aim with your mouse instead of just bringing the mouse down tho the bottom.
Frankly, I’d argue that changing most settings is easier in windows 95.
It wasn’t perfect but it was a solid UX base with a lot of logical concepts to evolve from.
Keyboard navigation of menus does not have that problem.
In Windows Vista/7/later versions of 10 the solution Microsoft used was to make the tree clickable like the tree in Explorer.
In 8/early 10/11 the solution used is to forbid nesting.
16:9 is the most popular aspect ratio on desktop, there is no valid reason to waste more vertical space
that's poor UX
I sometimes wish portrait oriented 4:3 monitors had become the dominant form.
But hey, I embraced wide screens by using multi-column layouts, you should try them some time.
Everything else is worse. I cannot see any other change from W10 that is not a downgrade, when it's not outright features or settings that disappear totally for reasons.
They managed to make the start menu even worse than the W10 one which was already utmost garbage inherited from 8.
At this point I’m even questioning wether they became mad of if they just want to insult users.
Security is just the excuse to push user hostile feutures down our throats by remote code execution from MS servers.