Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement.
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).
evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammals
Biological evolution has indeed lead much more frequently to simplified, streamlined structures good for a single purpose, which had evolved from more complex and more versatile structures, than to more complex structures that had evolved from simple structures.
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.
at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.
I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive.
Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file),
was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME.
Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..
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?"
> 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.
What's the problem with GNOME's approach to file system dialogs? I really like their portals approach. On GNOME you get a Nautilus based picker, on KDE a GNOME app gives you the KDE file picker and if a platform doesn't provide a file chooser portal you get the GTK internal fallback picker.
Most works GNOME did are somewhat invisible to users. GNOME is the main driving force behind immutable OS and containerised sandboxed apps, both are intended to make the OS maintain itself and simplify software management to single/zero click.
Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.
I daily drive GNOME on Ubuntu 22 on a daily basis and its UX is the favorite of all the UIs I've ever used, and I've used classic mac, OS X, all windows versions, xfce, kde and a trillion programs. And both android and ios devicess, both from early versions onto recent.
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.
You need a separate UI to handle things like entering the file name and filtering for appropriate files. Windows was designed so that the same file browser component is used in the Explorer and in open/save dialogs (but with Windows 7-era UI), but on Linux, which file manager should GTK use? GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME.
One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file...
(Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
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.
I’ve been buying the same model of Brooks (the Ghost one) for _years_ because they fit well for me and while they release a refresh every other year or so they feel the same to me when I buy a new pair.
Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit
This is because back in the 90s GUI development was still driven by hard research, not by "emotions" (e.g. actually sitting very diverse groups of people in front of computers, asking them to perform specific tasks and then analysing where exactly they got stuck or became confused).
IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
> 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.
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).
"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."
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.
> I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture.
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.
I think this is a consequence of cultural changes in the last decades. It used to be normal to be able to open a settings window, or any other window, and read it, top to bottom or in any other order, and then you'd know what was there and where it was and which parts you don't care about.
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.
Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have.
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.
Thanks for reviving the reality of it. I saw the hourglass icon so many times, that I am able to picture all of its frames in my mind. Windows 9x might have been close to peak UI design (for me I'd say Windows 2000 is the sweet spot, and I always configured "Classic Style" on Windows XP and 7), but 95/98 was not responsive. And that's when it wasn't crashing.
Word 2.0 forever made me distrust Microsoft with an error: "File too large to save."
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 a running Windows 98 PC with P3 550MHz and SSD connected via IDE adapter. The drive is a bit out of place, but it’s legitimately the fastest booting, most responsive computer in my house. Its only speed issue is that it can really do just one thing. Any heavy task (including large file/network operations, apparently) will render the system almost unresponsive until it’s finished.
That depends upon the type of SSD. There’s compact flash which is natively IDE, and the controllers are extremely weak, then there are modern TLC SATA drives where the controller would probably be a bit more powerful than the machine’s CPU.
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.
For a long time i had a small Pentium III PC (released in 2000, though the hardware inside wasn't the best you could get at the time as it was meant to be compact instead of performant - it was in an almost pizzabox sized case) running Windows 98 for retro games and software (though mainly games). At some point i installed Visual Studio 6 to it too - and IME it launched instantly[0].
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.
Windows 9x achieved performance only a small factor slower than what we've got today on 1000x faster hardware.
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 itself was snappy and when it was slow it was because the machine itself was slow. This was communicated to the user by the machine making a hell of a racket doing machine things.
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.
But it didn’t do much? This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.
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.
> This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.
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'.
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.
> 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.
Just like today, without the progress bars. And some "apps" even cheating by being preloaded in memory.
By 2000, Windows 98 felt extremely performant. By 1995, Windows 95 was the bloated thing trying to replace Windows 3.11 that would take ages to boot and needed minutes to respond to a click at random.
With those slower drives, programmers tended to be more careful about not wasting those preciously expensive I/O's - they had to put more care into architecture, often resulting in more optimized, efficient code. And since lags were expected, they handled waits more elegantly - hence the hourglasses and such. This immediate feedback even when there was a delay is what made the experience feel more responsive.
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.
This is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did.
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'.
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.
XP was quite ugly though. 98 or whatever was the best looking, but 7 was probably best overall (because they’d at least somewhat improved the UI and the system was generally more stable and modern).
(FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).
People also forget… XP had more than the one tonka-toy theme from Frog Design. There were several themes. Some appealed to my visual tastes, some didn’t… but I do think they were well designed, which is more than I can say for most UI design today.
I'd replace 9x by windows 2000. It was the only decent windows. 9x were BSOD crashfest, 2000 was stable as NT but without the enshittification of XP (ugly default themes, stuff above calling internet services with zero value).
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.
It's interesting how many people don't like the XP theme. I think it was cool, it was productive yet colorful, but I have to wonder if that's just because it arrived when I was at a certain life stage, the same way I had no problem with the COVID lockdown. We used XP in high school computer class the whole time I was there.
It was directional and trendy - which meant it was short lasting. Like building your UI based on floaty 3D shapes 5 years ago, except these days it's much easier to change when you start to look silly.
Ah, yeah, I can see how if you had worked with the 9x theme for 10 years you'd prefer it didn't change. (Conversely I don't think anyone is clamoring for the 3.1 theme back) But XP did include that theme and it was pretty simple to select it.
I imagine that the database for the online file association service for Windows XP has been lost to time, but for those who remember it: was it any good?
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.
I wish this was more of a full tour than a random sampler of Windows versions. For instance I feel like Windows Me introduced the online search but it's been like... 26 years... since I've used it.
> 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...
> Sadly, I don't know anymore what kind of web service that was.
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.
It also closes when you click/tap outside the dialog, unlike most other Windows dialogs. I actually can't think of another Windows dialog with the same level of functionality that behaves this way.
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.
On Win 11, if you disable the Vibe Notepad it refuses to let you associate .txt files to any program, and popups an error. Instead you have to go turn off a specific file association toggle elsewhere (as i recall) only then you can you reassign it
Good post but those images are way too small for me to see anything without having to open a new tab or navigate away, neither of which is fun to do when there are 10+ images
Fun fact: on modern Windows, if you uninstall modern notepad using the Settings app to get the old one, you won't be able to associate .txt files with notepad.exe without a registry trick: https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-typ...
What were the internal politics at Microsoft at the time that resulted in the .NET branding being pushed more aggressively than Copilot today, everywhere from the login screen to file associations?
Windows has had a few of these "look online" options for decades now, to look up unknown extensions, to find drivers for unrecognised devices, etc. Not a single time in the many, many years of using Windows did any of those ever find anything useful for me.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.
This is such a typical pattern of enshittification from Microsoft. Something Windows 3.1/95/2000/XP made easy - adding a File Type Association - became increasingly contorted over time.
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.
I swear they used to have a feature which offered to find a program that would open that type of file from the internet - it NEVER worked, but they did have the feature.
shevy-java | 12 hours ago
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).
wolfi1 | 12 hours ago
adrian_b | 11 hours ago
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.
fifticon | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
fifticon | 11 hours ago
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?"
lunar_rover | 10 hours ago
You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
inigyou | 10 hours ago
noisem4ker | 7 hours ago
wander_homer | 9 hours ago
lunar_rover | 10 hours ago
Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.
edg5000 | 10 hours ago
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.
inigyou | 9 hours ago
edg5000 | 6 hours ago
janci | 10 hours ago
formerly_proven | 9 hours ago
Kwpolska | 9 hours ago
inigyou | 8 hours ago
janci | 3 hours ago
edoloughlin | 10 hours ago
(Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
bombela | 5 hours ago
kenjackson | 8 hours ago
reddalo | 12 hours ago
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
xuhu | 12 hours ago
Aldipower | 11 hours ago
sandermvanvliet | 11 hours ago
Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit
flohofwoe | 11 hours ago
IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
pegasus | 11 hours ago
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).
vjvjvjvjghv | 10 hours ago
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.
chmod775 | 10 hours ago
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.
inigyou | 8 hours ago
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.
jameshart | 10 hours ago
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.
j1elo | 10 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 10 hours ago
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.
inigyou | 8 hours ago
exitb | 9 hours ago
bee_rider | 9 hours ago
BirAdam | 8 hours ago
bananaflag | 9 hours ago
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.
badsectoracula | 8 hours ago
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h79Bt7h5ceo
inigyou | 8 hours ago
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.
vitally3643 | 8 hours ago
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.
freeone3000 | 7 hours ago
jameshart | 7 hours 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.
Telaneo | an hour ago
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'.
api | 6 hours ago
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.
hulitu | 4 hours ago
Just like today, without the progress bars. And some "apps" even cheating by being preloaded in memory.
marcosdumay | 3 hours ago
rkagerer | 2 hours ago
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.
pjmlp | 10 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 10 hours ago
DrBazza | 7 hours ago
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'.
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.
GeekyBear | 4 hours ago
His no-nonsense attitude towards fixing known bugs was sorely missed in later versions as Windows quality began its decline.
narag | 9 hours ago
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.
reddalo | 9 hours ago
It also had many multimedia features for burning CDs, editing videos, etc..
bee_rider | 8 hours ago
(FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).
BirAdam | 8 hours ago
afzalive | 8 hours ago
2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.
Narishma | 7 hours ago
NT has always had both server and workstation versions.
linguae | 4 hours ago
prmoustache | 9 hours ago
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.
inigyou | 8 hours ago
BirAdam | 8 hours ago
nailer | an hour ago
inigyou | an hour ago
GeekyBear | 4 hours ago
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60
tentacleuno | 12 hours ago
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.
reddalo | 12 hours ago
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
formerly_proven | 9 hours ago
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
varun_ch | 6 hours ago
vivid242 | 12 hours ago
donatj | 11 hours ago
> 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...
wffurr | 9 hours ago
dang | 4 hours ago
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
amadeuspagel | 11 hours ago
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.
Dwedit | 11 hours ago
netsharc | 10 hours ago
brewmarche | 9 hours ago
discostrings | 8 hours ago
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.
petee | 8 hours ago
airstrike | 7 hours ago
bombela | 5 hours ago
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.
1970-01-01 | 6 hours ago
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
Krssst | 6 hours ago
1bpp | 5 hours ago
nailer | an hour ago
stavros | 3 hours ago
I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.
rkagerer | 2 hours ago
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.
nailer | an hour ago