For example the Services (or any mmc based) UI with no filter/search integrated is absurd. Heck they just "redesigned" Task Manager and none of the tabs have filter/search functionality which is annoying to say the least.
I suppose you can start typing with the inner tab having focus, and it SOMETIMES finds the correct thing, but it isn't reliable and is hidden functionality that people just need to know is a thing.
Props to them adding an address-bar to RegEdit though (in the W10 Creators Update) and multi-tab Powershell terminal. Very welcome and positive improvements. Wish we had more stuff like that.
I'm tired of Microsoft actively making things worse instead of actually improving what they already have.
If I suspect a nefarious app is running in the background somewhere I have to manually read the list to find it and kill it.
End of the day one of two things is happening, either no one influential at MS uses Windows or their structure is so broken that pointing out something like this it isn’t even possible to action the feature to be built.
In Win 11 22h2, if you start it as a regular user, you get the new interface. If you run it as administrator, you get the old one.
It also somehow manages to often maximize behind the taskbar. Or cut the output on the righ-hand side of the info in the performance / memory pane.
or
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq malicious.exe"
The fact that another obscure application (at least obscure to most people) can do this does not mean it is ok for task manager not to have this very basic feature.
I still remember the day I found out the envvar configuration screen had been updated, and finally:
* could be resized so you could see more than 4 envvars at a time, and had a scrollbar taller than 5mm to scroll through the list
* could be resized so you could actually see the entire envvar value without having to slowly move the cursor rightwards or copy it to notepad
* added a bespoke list editor for PATH so you wouldn't forget the separator or paste the new path at entirely the wrong location half the time
At that moment the sun started shining brighter. God was the old dialog unusable shit.
yes, examples include win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3 are all UI frameworks that MS has released over the years, all of which are still in active use, some more than others.
For example, WPF is probably one of the most widely used, even though MS keeps trying to kill it.
I believe some are no longer supported, but are still in use internally.
See https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/620045/Custom-Controls-... (I can't remember where the documentation for this is on MSDN, but I'm sure it's somewhere).
Be aware though Microsoft considers its WinUI 3 framework as the primary framework for implementing its Fluent design language and controls. (WinUI 2 will get you there too but has recently been deprecated.) Win32, common controls, WPF, WinForms, etc. are considered legacy technologies and cannot officially make use of many Fluent styles or controls.
AI could also translate mouse clicks/coordinates accordingly if it moves stuff around.
You could even have "UI themes", tell the AI to re-render in Windows 2000/XP/11 style.
EDIT: the downvotes I'm getting with no comments are funny. This will happen in the next 7 years because solving this problem once it's much cheaper than fixing all the apps one by one.
Java came out when I was young, with a huge JRE installation, slow startup times, GC pauses and Java Swing.
Then Electron came out, making a “hello world” gui app need 800mb of RAM. Electron makes Java feel light and nimble.
Honorable mention for docker convincing windows and macos developers to write software inside slow virtual machines for no reason.
Recently, despite the tireless work of photoanalysisd on my Mac, and Microsoft teams on windows, things were starting to get faster again. Thank goodness for you, parent commenter. I can worry no longer. I was starting to wonder if the curse might be lifted.
I can see it now. It’s 2026. My fans spin up as a 8gb neural net live-translates the UI of notepad.exe for the modern age. My $4000 graphics card is showing its age. My mouse lags while I try and click on the menu. The UI is rerendered because Microsoft couldn’t be bothered porting the windows 11 UI code to the new windows 13 UI look and feel. Windows 13 looks different yet again for no reason. So they do the translation live on my GPU instead because it’s cheaper (for them). Programmer time is still expensive. In the background ChatGPT quietly makes web requests to live-translate all the menu items into the new social media acceptable language. The start menu is now on the right.
What a time to be alive.
There's plenty of reasons; it's a compromise like everything else. You trade away some performance for portability; the ability to run the same code and know your environment is identical each run is a significant pro.
Docker wouldn't have gotten to where it is for no reason.
I suspect the popularity of docker as a local developer tool comes from convenience. It feels easier to install docker than fix your homebrew permissions, install anaconda or install a recent version of nodejs on ubuntu. And if you’re already using docker in production, you need a workflow to make docker images anyway.
That and it’s trendy.
Never mind that using docker makes macos sometimes not sleep properly. That it makes your program much more difficult to debug. Or that you’re throwing away 2/3rds of the performance and 1/2 of the RAM of your expensive computer in the process.
Everyone else is using it. We can’t all be wrong, can we?
People use docker and containers for multiple reasons. Reproducible dev environments, Unix development on Windows, etc. The biggest benefit is that your image is fully reproducible; you won't have random issues pop up because of edge cases being hit on dependency updates, you don't have to make sure your new devs install version X of tool Y for development, and you know your code will work identically each time you run `docker start`.
Like all other things, it has pros and cons. You may not value reproducibility, but your assessment is just that: yours. It's ok to have, but you need to realize others value things differently.
As a reminder, your argument is:
> Honorable mention for docker convincing windows and macos developers to write software inside slow virtual machines for no reason.
To say there's no benefit to Docker whatsoever is blatantly false.
> Everyone else is using it. We can’t all be wrong, can we?
If one person around you is wrong, then they might just be wrong. If everyone around you is wrong, then maybe it's you that's wrong.
Several generations of new guys later, we arrive at present day. And that ChatGPT future you described will come to pass, unless we stop using computers first.
By my measurement, that's an order of magnitude too high. My real-world Electron app uses ~77 MB on startup on Windows, across the private working sets of all four processes. Granted, my JS code is relatively lean, but still, we should be charitable, if only because Electron hate is so rampant here.
> Electron makes Java feel light and nimble.
Total rose-colored glasses. Early in my career, in late 2001, I inherited a Java-based desktop app that took so long to start that we made it start looping background music part way through the startup process (it was an audio-based app for blind people, so that was our equivalent of a splash screen). I'm confident that if we developed the same app in Electron today, it would start an order of magnitude faster on today's typical end-user hardware. Some things do get better over time. In this case, bundling of both native and JS code in Electron apps is way ahead of what we had for the JVM in 2002, basically loading lots of little .class files from several .jar files, not to mention multiple native code DLLs as opposed to the Chromium mega-binary. Of course, the JVM world now has NativeImage which is even better, but I don't think anything like that was practically available back then.
But back to the topic: The reason why UIs are no longer themeable has zero technical reason, instead it's a cultural problem (the introduction of artificial 'fashion cycles' into UI design for no other reason than justifying the existence of a 'UI designer' job role.
Imagine a UI that guesses what you are trying to achieve and optimizes itself appropriately on the fly.
(And yes, tweaks all the fonts, palettes, etc to look nice too).
UI designed by humans could be a thing of the past. We could just feed the AI references to the variables we want the user to view/twiddle and the AI would do the rest.
(I hate writing UI)
I love this idea! Having the ability to choose from decades of UI design would absolutely be a feature. However MS needs to fix all of these UI inconsistency bugs first. Second, don't use AI. Just consistently apply the UI to the OS.
The only styling in common is most of the window colours match the selected theme.
The window decoration style, layout, font sizes, iconography, buttons are all artifacts of older MS Windows and do not match the modern Win 11 design language.
I still find it surprising that in some forgotten corner of Windows we get 3.11 file dialogue. But also who cares really.
One thing that surprises me a lot, though, is that a lot of applications seem to need to be upgraded one-by-one, even if the UI is largely the same and only the styling needs to be upgraded. I never developed for Windows UI, but does it mean that there is no single reusable UI Kit, where just the styling could be changed from OS version to another? Do all these examples demonstrate that different applications are compiled with different UI Frameworks that are all in use and supported?