Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web

khang-nd.github.io

174 pointskhangnd63 comments

> 7.css is a CSS framework for building interface components that look like Windows 7. It is built on top of the GUI backbone of XP.css, which is an extension of 98.css.

Just an absolutely lovely line of text.

98.css: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

XP.css: https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/

Sort of mimics Windows itself - you famously have to do some archeology every time you want to change an important setting, and will work your way through many iterations of windows ui components as you do

Yes, I thought this was beautiful too. Art imitates life, as they say.

Very nice. Does anybody else find it a bit striking how gracefully this look has aged? With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.

Modern UI design could stand to take not just a few pages but the majority of the book from both the Windows 7 variant of Aero and the OS X 10.9 variant of Aqua, in my opinion. Legibility, information density, and communication of interactability and widget function have all been lost as we’ve careened towards egregiously thick padding, low contrast, and low differentiation.

I concur, I think the successor flat design trend has nailed on reducing the styling visual clutter and keeping the user just focused on the "substance" from the app UI whilst keeping the UI itself minimal with no distractions.

The problem is that minimalism and maximalism in UI design exist on a kind of horseshoe curve. Extremely maximalist UI is indeed distracting, but past a certain point of pruning so is minimalism, just in a different way. Instead of having your eyes drawn away from the content by flashy widgets, you’re poking and swiping to find the function you’re looking for, like someone feeling around trying to find the exit in a pitch dark room.

I used Windows 7 in my formative years, so I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for it.

That said, I really do think the Windows NT era had the best UI in terms of brute usability.

Again, I love Aero's faux glass, cyan highlights, high gloss, etc... but it is indeed a lot of noise and I think it's a bit distracting.

The 95-like look (of which I think the 2K variant is best) does have a bit of an edge in terms of usability, but it also looks considerably more dated. A similarly legible theme from that era that I think time has been more kind to is Platinum, the theme used by Mac OS from System 7.6.1 through Mac OS 9.2.1.

Any new UI design looking to incorporate Aero’s good bits would be smart to tone the look down a little.

The default theme from QTCurve and a good color scheme.

On flat themes, I like Zukitre, which I modded the highlighting color to black instead of blue. It's the only usable theme I found not being either blinding light nor often unreadable dark. It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).

> It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).

Modern day “light mode” would benefit from taking notes. The surge in demand for dark mode lines up pretty cleanly with the advent of the stark white themes that the flat UI epidemic ushered in.

Liquid glass is the new faux glass

Windows 11 beta 1 I think had a mix of aero and windows 10s start menu and felt two to three times speedier than win10. I wonder what happened to ditch the transparency

They retained it so they can stack apps with a sliding-scale of transparency on HoloLens and other frontends,

most likely.

Who do I assign blame to for horrible modern UX design? Is it the hubris of designers who believe that the constraints of the human body should be felled by minimalist purity? Is it bean counters who weaponize industrial psychology to create flat, boring UI to increase engagement/addiction? Is it the average technology user who has simply become too stupid to use anything other than a touchscreen? Why does it seem like everyone I've talked to about this agrees that basically all modern technology products are boring and uninspired compared to just 15 years ago, but it also seems like we keep building (and buying) boring, uninspired technology products?

I’m a dev not a designer, but I’d personally point to a few things:

- An influx of print/commercial/etc designers into UI design, who lack the full suite of knowledge and skills to design usable UI, crowding out the UI designer old guard

- The likes of Dribbble and other social media kicking off self reinforcing minimalism trends within the field

- The rise of “UI as branding” which places brand identity far above practical usability in terms of priorities

There are other factors like indie devs not wanting to hire a designer for their projects and just phoning that part in (which flat is conducive to), but they don’t have nearly as much sway on industry trends at large.

MacOS X 10.4 was peak Apple UI design from my personal experience. That metal look was pretty…

Android, Windows and iOS all look similar now… macOS is shifting that way…

Bring back skeuomorphic design…

> With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.

This little bit of tuning is called Shine 2.0 and is still the most modern desktop user interface, even though it was published in 2010:

https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...

There were quite a few nice looking XP and 7 themes on DeviantArt. It’s too bad that there’s no good way to browse the modern day version of that site, with how they’ve removed categories and search being somewhat broken. Snapshots from archive.org provide a small window into that era, though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140511174529/http://www.devian...

That's because Windows 7 was the last release purely focused on usability on desktops. We all know what happened with Windows 8; Windows 10/11 still have to account for multitouch displays.

Also, they screwed up the start menu/screen search in windows 8 and it has sucked since then. :(

What's bizarre is not seeing any mention of Windows Vista, when it laid the foundation and had most of these design aspects and elements people fawn about.

All true, but 7 was a bigger hit and saw poplar usage for much longer than Vista did. A lot of people skipped straight from XP to 7. With that in mind it makes sense why 7 has the stronger association with Aero.

True,7 had a lot of polish, but Vista in its black version was very striking when it arrived.

I'd like to see someone create the longhorn vision though.

Every time I see something about windows7 coming up, I feel a little sad. 7 imo was the last good windows ms came up with. I remember upgrading to it was something worth bragging to your friends in school. There was so much excitement around it. After 7, something felt, broken, new features felt unnecessary, things got more user hostile, the magic, it was just gone!

Older people feel exactly the same way about windows2000... or sometimes 98... or 3.1...

more about xp than 2000

For me more about 2000 than XP. 2000 still felt like a Workstation OS and it was very responsive. XP themeing was the first thing I removed once I could not continue on 2000.

Yeah, most people wouldn't say that about Win2000, but XP, definitely. XP Service Pack 2 was excellent.

I used all of those versions but I'd still agree that Win7 was the last good one. I still love the 95/98 aesthetic the most and it's what I try to replicate with my systems now, but the dropoff after Win7 is still much greater.

I think the usual adage is that every other version of Windows is pretty good.

I hadn't read anyone talk about how UI peaked at Windows 3.1 through. Perhaps most people just start their desktop computing journey with 95.

Yeah. I feel like the main thing was it was the last version that still had essentially user-controlled updates. By default it would auto-update, but you could have it not do that, or have it download the updates but not install them until you decided to, and you could deselect individual updates and just skip them.

I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.

I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.

On my personal laptop, I run Windows 11 in a virtual machine. Sometimes I intentionally choose "Shut down" instead of "Update and shut down" because I just want to turn it off ASAP and pack up, and it cracks me up when it proceeds to install updates anyway. I just close the virtual machine, powering it off instantly, and later I can restore from a snapshot from before my brutality and let the update happen properly.

I don't find it funny when it's bare metal! On my work laptop I put Windows to sleep 100% of the time, and restart for updates when I'm forced to with 3 hours notice before a mandatory reboot.

This battle with Windows doesn't even need to be happening! I am very good with updates and go looking for them in the settings without needing them to be pushed, at least on less hostile OSs! I run beta iOS on my old phone, and get a little disappointed when I see no changes required when running an update through apt or nix-env or whatever.

I highly recommend running virtualised Windows somewhere for the sanity preserving feeling of vengeful control :)

Did you have a Windows 7 Launch Party?

https://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-windows-7-launch-party-v...

As developer I was a bit less excited as it kind of settled the victory of COM over .NET after the Longhorn/Vista civil war at Redmond.

So while it was indeed a great version of Windows, having COM as the new way of shipping Windows APIs wasn't that welcoming, it is kind of incredible how for such a critical technology on Windows development, Microsoft keeps shipping cluncky frameworks to write and consume COM.

There was even the famous Hilo sample that was praising this as the way forward,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

https://github.com/microsoftarchive/msdn-code-gallery-micros...

I wonder if this can be integrated with Electron and Tauri to provide native-looking user interfaces.

Combined with a theme-to-CSS convertor, imagine an Electron app looking like a Windows app on Windows, and a GTK app on Linux, while following the colours and styles of the custom theme the user has selected in their OS.

The reason I started hram.dev was so I could have a native platform to port 90s.dev to. I love the idea of having native host for retro GUIs. But I am not a huge fan of html/css/js combo. It feels tacked on because it is. I came up with a relatively novel and I think truly innovative GUI methodology in 90s.dev that I did not know how to explain so I haven't truly shared with people how exciting it potentially is. Tomorrow I plan to put up a github-sponsors link with a few different projects, where for each $50 that I receive for a given project, I will work two hours on that project. This way the community can help sponsor me turning these things into realities.

I don't think you could 100% nail the Win7 glass or Win11 mica material without having transparency effects that have access to the compositor pipeline. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get close enough!

The checkboxes doesn’t look quite right on iOS

Added an issue to address this: https://github.com/khang-nd/7.css/issues/124

This is awesome. I love that the readme contains pictures of everything.

These visual elements have to be protected by intellectual property somehow. Has Microsoft ever legally persecuted these types of projects before? Or projects built upon such libraries?

I'd be wary to build on top of these clones only to receive a cease and desist, but that's a fear of mine, I don't know if it's founded.

It can be more difficult to claim copyright over shapes and patterns than you think.

And somehow Tetris Company succeeded it..

Only for the original Tetrominos, and even there there are just so damn many Tetris clones and spin-offs... that battle is lost.

Side note: the iOS version of Tetris is an ad and gambling ridden hellscape, and that's a licensed spinoff.

I have a gallery of cease and desist orders. I would love to add MSFT to the list.

Unfortunately some of the elements aren't compatible with DarkReader.

The last dialog looks crazily realistic. Is it possible to distinguish it from a real OS dialog without trying to move it? It looks awfully practical for phishing.

When I saw the last dialog box, my first thought was, is this toolbox's primary use for phishing?

Super cool. Anyone know if a similar library exists for Aqua?

its crazy how good this library and Windows 7 in general looks even today. nice framework

I wonder if the Microsoft "glass" look influenced the recent Apple work.

Great work and idea! How can I use it without having tailwindcss changing all css?

Don't use tailwind

why nobody tries KDE or GNOME?

KDE and GNOME weren't as popular as Windows 7. Unless you mean porting Windows 7 to KDE as a theme?

they also change theming too quickly sometimes. windows 7 is set, it's not going to change, ever

And used by phishers to make you think you got a Windows prompt.

this is pretty cool, nice

this is pretty cool

Ah yes the days of "aero ui". Sad to hear Apple designers are taking cues from _old_ windows designs now.

Everything new builds on top of the old.

Aero it's a blatant copy of Aqua.

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