Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file
movq.de
movq.de
> Now there's a big gap. I don't have access to anything between Windows XP and Windows 10. So, Windows 10 (2015) is next
I'm guess these are just what the author already had set up. They're not really difficult to find or set up in a VM...
It seems like quite a good idea now -- if I remember correctly, Windows as of current seems to suggest a generic Bing search, which brings up all the spam "What extension is XXX?" sites.
That could have changed; I haven't really used Windows after 11's debut.
Suggestions were vague and they only made sense with well-known filetypes.
There's a screenshot of how it looked here: https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I'm pretty sure it was introduced in Windows 8 along with swipe gestures from the sides of the screen (like the "charms bar") with the tablet use case in mind and with little consideration given to the mouse experience.
Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen.
But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive. The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron.
Edit. See OP's previous article here, he managed to capture what I was trying to say in more details, with nice screenshots: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html
Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit
IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back.
One problem I see is that while the UI itself has been simplified, incidental complexity has crept in other ways. Most importantly, the OSes themselves as software systems have clearly grown ponderous and unwieldy so that today they are more bugs and more of those bugs can be subtle and surprising. Also, there is less uniformity in UX across apps (and UI frameworks).
If you take today's interfaces to an extreme, you would get a white sheet. Very clean, but unusable. I wouldn't call interfaces "clean" where users increasingly have trouble figuring out what's clickable, how to scroll, move or resize a window.
Have you been in nature recently? We've evolved to deal with very busy pictures and parse relevant information from them.
New UIs often don't have relevant information - like what is clickable or scrollable - and that's a problem.
It used to be that grandpa couldn't find a button with his poor eyesight, since everything was cramped and too tiny on the small screens we used to have.
Nowadays the clickable label is hidden behind a tiny hamburger menu that you can't tell apart from a mere stylistic flourish on the massive screens we keep mostly empty. Now neither of us can find the button.
That's progress? Every time I open an old application I breathe a sigh of relief because I can feel the cognitive load decreasing. Not having to put myself in the headspace of the designer to figure out what random geometric shape happens to be interactive is like taking a vacation.
Have you ever played "spot the bird in the forest"? Let's not turn our interfaces into that. OTOH, I do grant that there are personal preferences in play as well. There is, for example, the phenomenon of Japanese web design previously discussed here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122789
> New UIs often don't have relevant information
That information is usually implicit. You're supposed to know that a scrollbar will materialize once you've moved the pointer to just left of the right edge of the bounding box. We've interacted with these elements enough to be able to not be confused just because that particular element is not always in my face. Same for 3D buttons, a well-designed interface doesn't need such heavy cueing. A "Send" button shouldn't need any more than the semantics of the word already implies to make it clear it's clickable. Unless one wants to start clicking buttons before reading (and understanding!) the text. It's the UX inconsistencies, design flaws and general bugginess I've already highlighted in my comment that are making this more painful than it needs to be. Though it's not scrollbars that frustrate me on latest macOS, that part works comparatively well as far as I'm concerned.
I think it's much better than hidden features practically. But now we've developed this cultural aversion to complex-looking things. Probably started when the iPhone came out with just a flat screen and a button.
Or the lack of it, FWIW
They can do better. Eliminate any distinction between elements and between background and foreground. Cleanliness at its best. Computer are toys anyway, nobody "works" on them anymore. /s
Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a find across a whole document or getting a word count took time.
Remember windows used to have an hourglass cursor? You used to have to watch that thing flip and empty multiple times when doing things like emptying the recycle bin.
Windows 9x was typically not running on a permanently networked computer. The computer wasn’t running a bunch of background network tasks like checking for updates or polling your email - generally it was just being slow because it could barely cope with running more than one program at once.
It was on a 20Mb hard drive, and the file was small enough to fit on a 1.44Mb floppy.
Turns out it was an obscure defect in Word: if you had quick save on, and the last page had a diagram or image, it would choke. Quick save or fast save - I forget what it was called. This would append deltas to your file, I think.
I have no idea where that false memory is coming from, I also remember being utterly frustrated by Windows 98 on 450 MHz with 64 MB RAM. The only systems ever which felt performant to me are modern minimalist Linux on modern hardware.
In general everything ran fast... except stuff that had to do a lot of disk access, obviously (i.e. installers and such). But i never though that the system didn't feel responsive.
Also many modern programs have splash screens too. E.g. have you tried to launch Gimp or Krita recently? Or Eclipse? "Heavy" applications never stopped having those.
Of course computers are much faster now, nobody is saying otherwise. What people are saying is that it often doesn't feel so. If my Pentium III can open Visual Studio 6 faster than my 3700X can open Calculator, then yes, things do feel more performant on the Pentium III running Windows 98 even if the modern machine is much faster.
VS6 was mentioned in a sibling comment - Casey Muratori's project loading and watch window stories come to mind. He had a video, which I can't find any more, showing him loading an identical project, compiling, starting the debugger, and watching a variable while single-stepping in VS6 on Windows 95 on Windows 95-era hardware, and the same on Windows 10 on Windows 10-era hardware. Guess which one was faster. It wasn't Windows 10.
Yes when we talk about the past there's an element of nostalgia-tinted glasses but there's also an element that stuff is just fucking worse now, and for no good reason. (I blame landlords - think about it. The whole economy is being pushed to do more with less because the value extraction related to land keeps increasing.)
Discord today does not load more quickly than MSN Messenger used to.
Windows was fast because the machine was slow. Now we're in a situation where Windows is slow in spite of running on a machine that outclasses every computer in the world combined 30 years ago.
It wasn’t efficient it was limited.
It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.
Computers are doing so much more nowadays.
Then just jump ahead to WinXP. It too flies if you put it on an SSD, and has solved all of your problems. It ran fine on a Pentium III (MS's minimum req is a Pentium 233, a Pentium III is more than twice as fast).
Now we have computers that are over 300 times faster than that, but yet we're still stuck baseline stuff like 'how make ui not be slow'.
There's not much I can see that prevents us from having both a UI that doesn't feel like shit and is featureful. Linux isn't too far off in many cases. The whole idea that modern Windows is slow because it's packed with features is one I reject.
It’s true that things could be slow on those old machines, especially when it had to hit disk. It’s true that things were often single threaded and would stall.
But what’s also true is that this old code was orders of magnitude more efficient. Put that code on even a modest machine from today with an SSD, even a Raspberry Pi, and it would scream. Everything would be instantaneous.
Some of the reasons for this degradation are unavoidable, like high DPI displays and feature depth, but a lot of it is just bloat on top of bloat on top of bloat.
Just like today, without the progress bars. And some "apps" even cheating by being preloaded in memory.
Modern apps that ship with browser engines just to show some UI are hugely bloated by comparison.
You also didn't have dozens of different telemetry, update, crash collection etc. services constantly running in the background eating up resources and I/O's. Go into Event Viewer, Services, and Scheduled Tasks on a pre-Win7 era workstation and you see how much less crowded it is.
God thank you, yes, I actually do think that most have actually forgotten what UI was like back then. Rose tinted glasses are such a weak point for people.
I have an ancient Windows 98 computer which I used to use at my grandparents' home until a few years ago. All the problems you mentioned did exist. However, the machine still felt more responsive than today's laptops. Something being objectively slow is very different from it feeling slow when you use it. As an example, I never had Word autosave turned on. It was always explicit (even if this meant I'd usually lose what I was working on when the computer lost power)
Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista.
They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.
Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.
His no-nonsense attitude towards fixing known bugs was sorely missed in later versions as Windows quality began its decline.
I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state.
XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success. Many despised the colorful UI, I actually like it. They started moving things around, but annoyances were fixable. Microsoft has adopted more of a "my way or the highway" attitude since.
It also had many multimedia features for burning CDs, editing videos, etc..
(FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).
2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.
NT has always had both server and workstation versions.
That was Win2k (DirectX). XP was full of bugs and holes before SP2.
I think what you describe as responsive are 2 things:
1. absence of animations. I don't know about windows but on linux DE you can disable them, it feels snappier but more raw and I think most people still prefer the animations.
2. Visual and audio clues. Back in the days we were on spinning disks so anytime you'd click on somethimg you would hear the disk moaning in pain and see that disk led blinking. You knew that something was happening, even if it took a long time. When SSD were introduced, everything became instant and silent for a few years, it was pure bliss. Then over the last decade apps continued growing and growing in size and as fast as they were SSDs and NVME started not feeling that fast because so much stuff had to be loaded into memory. Nowadays many apps are still starting much faster than before but the biggest one still take a substantial time. Worse, we have lost all visual and audio clues that something is happening.
Also there was a trick which I don't remember that allowed to apply the theme on all applications.
Now, the notion of theme don't even exists anymore. It's just web and css and branding colors for whatever software you run.
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.
Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser never told me that; it just silently failed to download anything, I could not choose any local file for file upload. I only found out eventually, but when I found out, the fix was easy, but still, the question is why such things break silently. This is simply incredibly poor engineering and design, and that happens on linux too. That way they'll never achieve linux desktop of the year. The decision makers here are just horribly bad at designing anything. The whole GTK team fell victim to this, now that it is a GNOMEy toolkit only.
When we ever get one-toolkit-that-fixes-everything (well ...), hopefully they are really allowing only mega-smart people who can think objectively and try to IMPROVE things rather than regress or take away functionality willy-nilly style (as the GNOMEy devs do).
The latter kind of evolution events, while very rare, had a greater importance by being the origin of various kinds of very successful living beings.
Your example shows that because evolution proceeds through random search through the space of solutions, inside the neighborhoods of the starting point, followed by the choice of the best solution among the candidates, it frequently fails to find a global optimum, but it remains stuck on a local optimum.
However, octopuses were not before mammals. Both octopuses and mammals had appeared around the middle of the Mesozoic, but this is not really relevant for their eyes, which already existed in much older ancestors, hundreds of millions of years earlier.
Cephalopods and vertebrates with complex eyes already existed during the Ordovician. Chordates with complex eyes might have already existed quite early during the Cambrian, most likely before the separation between cephalopods and other mollusks, at a time when mollusks must have had only simple eyes that could detect light and perhaps the shape of shadows, but which could not form images.
When cephalopods separated from the other mollusks, they did this by evolving the ability to swim, instead of being forced to crawl on the bottom like most mollusks. (Swimming was achieved by filling their shell with a gas, which made it buoyant, while the other mollusks were held on the bottom by the weight of the shell.)
Chordates have also separated from their ancestors by evolving the ability to be fast swimmers (the elastic and incompressible dorsal chord reduced the energetic cost of anguilliform swimming in comparison with that for worm-like bodies that need to contract a muscular layer in order to prevent the shortening of the body when it is flexed).
This is likely to not be a coincidence, so the evolution of complex eyes in chordates and cephalopods is likely to be linked with the evolution of swimming in both groups, which made important the detection of objects located in various directions, while for a bottom crawler it could have been sufficient to sense when a shadow appeared due to something coming above it.
One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
Definitely not. We have GNOME 1, GNOME 2, GNOME 3, GNOME 4, GNOME 5, so they definitely _are_ trying. But, why every version is worse than its predecessor, realy bothers me.
Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.
And GNOME really shines here. I'm on X11 though. Wayland lagged my mouse when I tried it years back, so I gave up on Wayland. Maybe they've fixed the lag spikes.
It is. I happily use a GTK desktop environment and it is not GNOME.
(Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
I don't know that either, but I remember there were websites specifically for that purpose, where you could look up a file extension and what program to open it with.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
I noticed I am afraid of clicking without opening new tab today because so many times the UX is broken and loses it's spatial position.
If I recall correctly, in Windows 7 they removed the File Types Manager and you had to either edit the registry directly to adjust existing associations, or resort to a third party app.
By Windows 10 even simply creating a new association for an unrecognized extension seems to require more clicks and scrolling down to a hidden option.
I would love to meet the mastermind morons behind this himan-unfriendly UI and give them a piece of my mind.