Microsoft U-turn sees Start button back on Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft U-turn sees Start button back on Windows 8

bbc.co.uk

72 pointspmjoyce81 comments

It's like MS is being obtuse on purpose. People complain about having the entire focus of the system switch to tablet mode, just to find a document or launch a program. Not because of the few pixels representing the start menu. They obviously know this.

At first, I thought Win8 start screen would be nearly equivalent to the start menu. It is not. First, on RDP, it is an utter and total nightmare. Whoever thought Windows Server should use the start screen should be sacked. Last week I lit up 2012 servers for a client, and they thought the shell was a joke, literally. Even MS TechNet admits that doing things might be a bit of a hassle.

On normal desktop, it's extremely distracting to flip to start screen instead of opening the start menu. Also, the search feature is broken. Instead of having one global search, you need to type the query, then arrow down a few times to select the kind you wanted (like settings).

Finally, even when you get results, they're in tablet-tile mode, which is an annoyingly cartoonish way, and in case of long names (as MS likes), you get the name clipped.

If MST3K was reviewing it, this would be a part they just sorta chuckle and say "They really did that."

Not that it makes the Start screen any less wierd, but win+W keys open up search for settings, without having to press down at the end.

easy to remember cause it's short for Win+Wtf?

Your post is spot on. The search, the frigging search is completely broken on Win8. I hate it that you can't have a universal search so much that I've started using Launchy. Alt-Space for me to search anything is a pretty damn good two key replacement for the one-key search button. I tried binding it to the pause/break button on my laptop but it doesn't receive the key except when the desktop is in focus.

I hate the non-inclusion of the universal search, it is annoying, I heard Apple has a patent on that but then MS and Apple have some kind of agreement too.

Steve Sinofsky was, undoubtedly, ultimately responsible for the 'no Start button' thing. Sinofsky is now gone.

Microsoft, like any other company, is made up of people.

I second this. Main reason I switched back to Windows 8 was broken search. MS just broke something for sake of change.

In Windows 7, to change proxy settings, I just write proxy and hit enter.

Windows 8, write proxy, hit down/move mouse and then do it.

For someone who routinely changes system settings, this is a nightmare.

That said, the settings search did actually become much better. You can search not only for the names of control panel screens, but for what you want to do. I've been pretty impressed, they've had somebody enter giant lists of weighted keywords somewhere.

Searching for what you want to do seems to work pretty well on Windows 7.

I think the difference is that Windows 7 has easy search for what you want to execute, where 8 allows you to search for intent.

Searching for things like "Change network" in Windows 7 seems to work just fine - you get a list of common tasks. They might have added more aliases in Windows 8 based on feedback or research. I don't think it's anything fundamentally new.

Yeah I hated that about Win8 as well. As downgrading seemed like too much of a hassle, I recently found out that you have to use Win+W to search settings.

Why they separated settings and applications is beyond me.

Ah. Now that was a shortcut I could use. I think I'll stay with 7 for some time now. 8 has apps and all but some features are quite broken.

Seperating Settings, Applications and Files is indeed very strange. They just broke lot of things with removal of start button!

I really dread new MS Server releases, every one comes with major improvements so they're a no brainer but have three or four jaw-droppingly bad regressions.

On RDP, the hot corners was such a problem that MS had to update the client to present a menu with the charms. Restoring the Start button would fix this.

You shouldn't be using RDC on Server 2012 with or without Metro. You should be using either Powershell and or RSAT. In general the interface on 2012 is a marked improvement over 2008 R2.

The Start Button is just a symbol for the larger issue, which is the shafting of Desktop users. There were only a small handful of things in Windows 8.0 that I felt offered an improved Desktop experience, whereas there were tons of things that I felt required more buttons clicks, more steps, etc

I hope 8.1 addresses the Desktop users in more ways than just the Start Button.

What requires more steps?

seeing the desktop.

Searching for things that aren't applications. In 7, everything was visible in one result list. In 8, results from the control panel don't show at all until you click a category switcher button.

Powering down

In Windows 7: Start > Shutdown In Windows 8: Charms > Settings > Power > Shutdown

Powering down Windows XP+: Press power button, walk away

Pressing the power button will do one of three things: suspend, hibernate, or power off. Do you know which one it does on my machine? Because I don't.

Who uses power down anyway? Just close your lid or press the power button once. The type of power down can be configured for both these actions.

I maybe shut down fully or restart once every second month and then i actually don't mind if it takes one click more.

Desktop users.

Press the power button.

Madness!

"In the 8.1 update, the area will be more visible. A left-click on the tip will bring up a tile-based Start Screen - formerly known as the Metro interface - designed for touch-screen users, while a right-click will display a small menu of other options such as Event Viewer, Device Manager and Disk Management."

It already behaves that way.

Also, searching to launch an app isn't that much different than the old start menu. Mouse to the bottom left, left click, start typing.

I don't run Windows 8 at home (still on 7) but I did encounter an eye-opening experience when I visited my father-in-law last weekend. He used the start screen to launch the apps that were immediately there, but when he needed to find a non-obvious application he opened explorer and navigated to the Program Files folders!

I thought Microsoft always heavily user-tested their UI changes but I can't see how that was possible at all with Windows 8 and Metro.

Same way as before, open start screen and type the program name.

You know that and I know that but I know a lot of people who never thought to type in program names even on Windows 7.

The big flaw in Windows 8 is that you have to already know how to use Windows 8 in order to use it. It gives you almost no hint on how to do anything or where to find anything.

True. A tutorial other than two screens at the beginning would have saved a lot of hassle. I learnt a lot of shortcuts through Yash Tolia's blog. Regarding programs, every program installed leaves a clutter of things on the Start Screen, that is one major annoyance for me too. Among the main shortcut will be, read me's and other nonsense.

If you need a tutorial, you've already lost.

What is this kind of thinking? Really? It is better than fiddling around. Let me not read books/manuals on how to make iOS apps, general relativity, and how to set cruise control on KIA Forte since wvenable says I have already lost. There is an adaptability curve, and it is important to list all the improvements in one place through a tutorial rather than finding new things after two months of using OS in old way.

You might need a tutorial to build a nuclear reactor but you shouldn't need a tutorial just to launch applications on a desktop OS that has been around for 20 years.

If I need a tutorial for your web app, then it was poorly designed. If I need a tutorial for your OS, the freaking give me one!

You can't say that an OS is naturally an intuitive thing to use. If it's fully-featured, it's going to either include so many things that you're going to need to know how to access in a specific way or it ends up being KDE, giving you a button and shortcut for everything until your eyes cross.

An OS is a naturally intuitive thing to use if you've been using one (the same one) for 20 years. People are adaptable but you can't just throw them off a cliff.

That's not intuitive, that's just familiarity. Intuitive means someone who has never seen it before can pick it up and go without too much training.

Windows 8 fails at being intuitive and it fails at being familiar.

It passes the 3-year-old test better than Windows 7, in a personal experiment. My son knew exactly how to tap an icon to open a game he wanted. He does not understand a mouse or keyboard, really, other than knowing what the letters are and that the mouse makes an arrow move. I would say it succeeds at being intuitive, and fails at being familiar. Most learned people can't separate the two.

That's a flawed test. If you pinned an icon to the taskbar or placed it on the desktop in Windows 7 he'd have just as easy of a time.

With a touchscreen, maybe. The current crop of toddlers have no use for a mouse.

My toddler (3) can operate a mouse just fine (better than some adults). He can click on the start button, find SCUMM VM launch it, pick the game he wants, and run it. This is on Windows XP.

If your son doesn't understand the keyboard and mouse it's because you never exposed him to it not because it's some great obstacle.

I never type the program name. I've just never got on with typing things in the start menu. Single-key shortcuts, yes. Clicking pinned stuff, yes. Mousing through and clicking, yes. Typing things... no.

Generally, Windows has generally been pretty good at accommodating all sorts. Like many, I'm sure, I never even realised that my workflow was for the chop, since it's been supported in some form by all previous iterations of Windows. So I'm a bit disappointed to see MS's Windows department suddenly come over all doctrinaire, and I don't - again, like many ;) - think this will be good for them in the long run.

Hyperbole. If you don't want to type... fine, look for things on the Start screen, mouse and click through.

For me, Start Screen changes nothing, it is a welcome change from the menu. Windows 8 possess excellent work flow for me, and i adapted well to the changes. Windows 8 does not look monolithic to me, it is good to see some design language in Windows, but it seems that the internet is always there to make sure it remains a skeleton after all. Seeing new console announcements, internet forums panned them all..be it Wii U, PS 4, XBox One. Ludicrous for me, i know there will not be approval of anything but such a hateful stance at anything new is not harbinger of trust in these forums. I used to think HN has good discussions, but to be frank this place is also riddled with old man stances that i expect from my dad. Which is expected, but I want to see progressive stance too.

I'm not sure why, but this doesn't always work. Stuff that worked just fine for me back in win7 won't always come up for me in start search on win8.

You have a valid point. I've been using Windows 8 for some time and it became a lot easier when I discovered that if you right-click the Start screen that you get a button that says, "All Programs" that will look familiar to you. That button should've been there without having to right-click a bare part of the background.

In my experience with Windows 8, you get used to the interface after an hour or so of using it. But your point is very valid - a better design would not have this issue for basic tasks. Comparing it to my iPhone - all 3 of my children knew intrinsically how to do basic tasks on it. There was a lot to discover after that but the UI was intuitive for almost every basic task.

I think a lot of Microsoft's recent design considerations are based more on moving from familiar designs to unfamiliar designs to increase the friction of moving to alternatives. For examples, refer to the ribbon control in Office and the inexplicable button moving in recent versions of IE.

Huh, I never tried right clicking on the lower-left corner of the screen before, that's pretty handy.

Too bad it doesn't work right: despite every shortcut in the list being a shell object they don't have right click property menus, instead right-clicking invokes the item. Ugh.

>However, it will not offer all the functionality previously associated with the feature. Instead it will bring users to the recently-introduced "Metro" interface.

I don't understand how bringing users to the Metro interface is not offering all the functionality of the previous start button. The old start menu was a list of shortcuts. The Metro interface is a list of shortcuts. It might look different, but where is the loss of functionality?

You could argue that the disorientation and loss of context caused by completely replacing the entire desktop with a list of shortcuts is a loss of functionality. Previously the start menu was kind of like looking at the index in a corner of a map that gives grid references for every location, in that you still could keep your location on the map (and thus understanf the context of your surroundings) in view. The new start menu is more like having to completely flip off the page with the map on to look at the index on another page. It's vastly more disruptive to a continuous workflow.

Edit: real-world example: I'm on a web page with a list of prices and want to do a quick sum. On 7, I'd hit win-key, type 'calc' and then enter the prices, all the while keeping my eyes on the numbers I want to add so I don't lose track of them. On 8, it will flash my entire screen full of icons. I lose view of the numbers and therefore may lose track of the numbers I want to add up.

I wouldn't consider that to be "not offering all the functionality" like the article suggests. It's merely a different way of getting around.

If your anecdote is true in the spirit of the original complaint, then Windows 7 doesn't offer all the functionality of Windows XP. I recently got upgraded at work from Windows XP to Windows 7. I've been so used to hitting the windows key, pressing R to open the run menu, then typing 'calc'. Now when I do that, I get distracted when a window pops up searching for something names 'rcalc'. In 7 I don't need to hit 'R', which breaks my workflow and I guess that is a loss of functionality.

Hold WIN and press R to bring up the Run menu (Win+R). Win+D, Win+E, Win+Left, Win+Right, etc. are all global shortcuts I use all the time.

I'm not being serious in my complaint, I'm trying to highlight the absurdity of "breaking workflow" being linked to "removing functionality".

I found this quite a lot. For the first few days of using Windows 8 I often found myself suddenly coming to, staring at the start screen. Wait... what's going on? Why am I here? What am I doing? (etc.) I'd have been concentrating on what I was doing, just working through it, then decided I'd needed something from the start menu - and the sudden obvious visual mode switch had snapped me out of my trance and broken my train of thought.

Then I'd go back to the desktop and straight away remember what it was I was thinking of. Very strange.

Fortunately, most of the time I just wanted another command prompt or explorer window, so I've just got into the habit of middle-clicking one of my existing ones. (This is still slower than the way I used to operate the now-vanished "classic" start menu with the keyboard, so for all the general improvements I'm still feeling like the latest versions of Windows have been something of a backwards step.)

Part of the "functionality" was UX. The start menu was designed to be easy to use with a mouse. The layout was compact, it was heirarchical and made heavy use of hover as a mechanic, and it tended to weight important things toward the bottom left quadrant of the screen, where the user's mouse already was. Metro is designed touch-first: full-screen, spread out, no hover events, heavy use of drag and swipe. Yes they fill the same basic need with the same fundamental abstraction, but on a traditional desktop with a mouse as the main pointing device using Metro is a much worse experience.

The continue UI change from desktop to metro back to desktop for all kinds of things is the most jarring thing I've ever experienced.

The metro interface is a list of live tiles that you put there. The start menu was a list of all programs you have installed, plus several useful tools. They're completely different.

My start screen is full of shortcuts to every program I have installed. I haven't encountered a program that didn't put a shortcut in the Metro start screen.

This is still less than optimal. Just give the desktop users what they want. To me Windows 8 is a half baked attempt at striking a balance between desktop users and tablet users. Combining these interfaces is not going to work well no matter which way you try it. Its actually awfully reminiscent of using an old windows phone that essentially brought the desktop user interaction of Windows to mobile.

The first thing any technical person I know that uses Windows 8 on a desktop does is install Classic Shell: http://www.classicshell.net/

I still can't get used to that metro interface and switching between the modes in desktop mode.

I prefer http://startisback.com/

We've had positive experiences with Start8 as well http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

Why do you prefer it?

I look at start 8 too... I choose start is back because it uses as much of the ms api that are already installed, so is the one that produces the closest start button... now they even have a xp mode with the cascade menu... I missed that, I really don;t like the scrolling because the cascade allows me to point and click without having to search first.

I'm technical. Why would I install that? You just press the windows key and start typing what you want exactly like you did in Windows 7.

Do people actually use the Start Menu for anything beyond searching? I guess shutdown? What else? Anything?

I use the start menu to launch apps. Other than calc, i rarely type a program name. I'm visual and icons work great. But screw me, right? :)

I love Windows 8 and hope they leave the option to keep the task like it currently stands. The negativity is bloggers, using Macbooks, trying to rekindle the Vista days for page views.

I love Windows 8 too. It feels refreshing just to see the lock screen on this bad boy. I can play hydro thunder, gravity guy, and then go back to writing my paper and churn out MATLAB calculations. I can press start button and look at weather in a snip. I can have a simple to-do list right on my start screen. It has improved my workflow, but alas I do not have a blog where I can ridicule existing technologies and make sponsorship money. Seeing the snarky comments/headlines makes me feel like a kid among bunch of grandpas.

Bloggers, regardless of what of laptop they have, have a platform to voice their legitimate gripes about an operating system, where consumers only have the power of their purse, and can choose to not buy - which is happening. It's not like their making up their grievances, and many are in alignment with my usage of Windows 8, despite my lack of status as a blogger.

>can choose to not buy - which is happening.

Except that Windows 8 is selling in massive numbers.

I wouldn't hate re-learning the Windows interface if they had actually improved the experience.

The Start Button wasn't a big issue to me, as I long ago moved to a keyboard-centric workflow -- using the Windows key, typing a few letters of whatever I wanted to open and hit ENTER.

The big problem here is that this no longer works in Windows 8. Now you hit the Windows key, type a few letters of whatever you want to open and you have to arrow or tab a few times to get to the actual item you cared about.

For those complaining about the cumbersomeness of getting to system settings, I agree. That's why I urge users to learning about the Windows key+x keyboard shortcut.

More excellent tips from Scott Hanselman at: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8ProductivityWhoMovedMy...

It's funny to see two threads on the front page contrasting 'continuing the Windows 8 vision' with 'Microsoft u-turn'. I doubt many outside of Redmond are going to conform to the former viewpoint.

On the other hand "returning a single visual affordance" is a hell of a cry from a u-turn.

Nobody ever writes a press release announcing that they screwed up and are reversing themselves. Press releases are always about success, even when they're about failures.

My grandpa and grandma bought a Win8 machine. Worst day of my life - trying to explain to them how EVERYTHING worked was/is impossible. They don't even understand basic navigation since they switched computers. I've been using computers for roughly 20 years and still haven't found an effective way to make use of Metro. I just go win+d and use keyboard commands.

Metro is okay on mobile devices but laptops and other computers should have the option to boot directly to desktop.

My grandma loves her new Windows 8 computer. She hasn't called me for help at all since she got it--a vast improvement over her old Mac laptop and XP desktop.

I don't get it. Why are they doing this? This is not what people have been asking for. Are they just doing this so the headlines say "Microsoft brings back the start button" and trick people into buying Windows machines again?

Because it's clearly just for show, and doesn't resolve any of the issues people have had with Metro on a desktop PC.

Everyone is asking for it. The entire Metro UI is one gigantic design mistake. Hell people were complaining about it an entire year before Windows 8 was released. Since then it's been like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

This isn't exactly what people are asking for. While showing the start button at all is an improvement, most people would prefer that the mode shift from desktop to metro didn't happen.

We're getting a crash course in why people prefer non-radical changes to whatever benefits they gain from omg!1 flat design. Pay attention kids, there will be a pop quiz the Monday after next to see who retained the material. I'm fairly confident the top comment in every keynote thread will be criticizing them for not going far enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com