Hacker News Reader

Comment by ygra | Hacker News Reader

The start button itself never was restricted to just the space of the button. The lower-left corner has always worked the same way (well, not in NT4 and not in XP if you had the language bar in the task bar). Still, for a very long time and at least for US customers the lower-left corner has worked to bring up the start menu.

View on HN

Fair enough, but I would hazard a guess that most users in versions previous to Windows 8 attempted to click on the center of the button, a slower movement than hitting the bottom left corner of the screen.

not in XP if you had the language bar in the task bar

So that is the reason. I've never understood why the lower-left corner thing worked on some XP machines and not others. Now I know, Thank you!

Fun fact: The lower-left corner isn't actually the start button. Instead your mouse cursor gets moved a little up and to the right when you click so that the click occurs on the button (the movement is always in the direction of the button, even if you click next to the button instead of the corner(. You can still see this when the language bar is docked in the task bar, except that the pointer movement on click is not enough to overcome the added height due to the language bar.

This trickery only works at the very edge of the screen, though. So if you click just a pixel below the start button (when it's moved upwards by the language bar) then nothing will happen.

I suspect that was once a rushed usability fix after noticing in testing that people apparently couldn't hit the button if they just moved their mouse right into the corner. And moving the pointer by a bit was perhaps deemed less likely to break anything than simulating a click on the button.

Or Microsoft just wasn't that good with testing back then (I think the language bar was introduced in Windows 2000, along with the problem), since most US users won't have multiple keyboard layouts or languages configured. Most users in other countries however do – at least I always got the US keyboard layout installed alongside with the German one (which leads to people being very confused about why their keyboard produces strange symbols because they happened to hit Alt+Shift by accident).

Uhm, I guess I got a little side-tracked here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com