> The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps.

Thank the "web-devs"... instead of having native looking apps that use OS controls/widgets they want to push dumb html/css/js to "unlease their creativity"... I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you.

I want all my apps to use the same widgets and paradigme and look the same...

Exactly! Let's go back to the times when things were consistent! Remember when you couldn't tell AIM from ICQ from MSN Messenger from Skype because they looked and behaved consistently?

Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."

I think they were referring to internal consistency?

Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.

"Layered Windows" is how an application can have a window which is not the typical rectangular shape, such as the "Head" skin for Windows Media Player. That would be the "crazy things" that apps were allowed to do.

That's just a mask applied to the window, app were always allowed to do that on Windows and still are.

Exactly! We spent years training reflexes and keyboard shortcuts, only to have window borders change appearance (and get thinner!), menus rearrange, controls vanish unless moused-over, etc. It's an insult.

I try not to think about the collective time and frustration lost to companies wanting their native apps to be "on brand" and cross-platform consistent rather than native. A bunch of extra work to make it that way. A bunch of extra work to maintain it, any place dumb "look and feel" shit like specially-animated buttons or whatever made it fragile. Then on the other side, 99% of the time it's worse to use than if they'd at least mostly stuck with native widgets, so wastes time and causes frustration among users, and then there's the special case of that for accessibility, which is often a true shit-show.

All because the marketing suite can't stand not getting their fingers in something. I want to see the fucking study that says having the buttons on iOS the same shape as the ones on the website adds any number of dollars to the bottom line. C'mon, this is important enough to spend a bunch of money on, slow development, and also make UX worse, must have a good reason for it, right? Surely it's not just an exec who's never done the actual job pushing things for vanity purposes, or a variety of roles padding their portfolios, or needing to market this to toddler-like C-suiters inside the company on some damn powerpoint, right? LOL.

It’s all such a waste of human life time, an actual tragedy.

I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they did in, say, the '90s. Hell, fast food chains, too. It's like some time in the '00s marketing departments across the board received a much greater mandate and I've got this funny feeling that only some of that, and maybe not most of it, is really justified by added value in dollar terms.

But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.

I feel the same way, I feel despair when I think about all of the time wasted for such trivial bullshit. But then I'm told I'm being dramatic and to get back to my Jira stories. Line must go up, huh?

While I do think native controls are the better choice, I disagree that companies even though it's harder. They do it mostly because it's easier: write once in JS, push to web, mobile and electron on desktop and be done with it.

Yeah but look how _cool_ those css effects look. What, people actually use keyboards to navigate?

> I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you.

Amen.

You're looking at it through rose tinted lenses. I remember it getting blasted for its Fisher Price theme and ugly new Start Menu and Control Panel redesigns. Remember the search dog?

If Microsoft had a champion of UI consistency I think it'd be Windows 2000, but I wouldn't know from experience. I was given a Windows ME prebuilt.

For me, Windows 2000 and Classic MacOS were high water mark of UI design.

After that, change for the sake of change started ti creep in and then accelerated.

Windows XP had the Luna UI with its Fisher Price color scheme and OSX moved to the lickabke Aqua UI.

This may be the nostalgia factor, but XP was genuinely one of the best operating systems I've ever run.

I had the "Student Edition" and you could trim down all the services to the point that you would have a running OS using just 18 processes. Linux at the time could not compete with that. (Of course, things have changed a lot since then).

Measuring total process count seems like a bit of a nonsense metric, it seems more related to how the services are structured or what features you want enabled rather than any measure of "goodness".

From a security and robustness POV, surely /more/ process separation is a good thing?

Of course, and I recall there being a single windows process that pretty much did everything -- but at the same time I knew that there were no other processes acting in the background other than the ones I actively used, and Windows.

So the point is just “shorter list is easier to look through, and remember which processes are supposed to be there”?

In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries.

Of course, that’s very different nowadays…

Back then I was not so savvy with what every process did (over the years, of course, one learns). Windows XP had one main process, and everything else was practically userspace apps

Yeah, that makes sense. I think the (slight) backlash you get is from your original statement that that is what makes it the “best OS”, when in reality it arguably rather indicates some problems.

From what I remember a single svchost.exe process instance could be handing multiple "services" - you could see the mapping of service to PID in the Services, and there wasn't a 1:1 relationship.

So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?

But they were signed windows services, I didn't have to worry about any nefarious processes coming from the OS itself (at least, not back then...)

There was no signing at that time.

Well, some of these processes did a lot, didn’t they? Sadly, Windows also does or did a lot in the kernel that should actually happen as a process in userspace.

When was this? I used VectorLinux on a 600MHz celeron with 64MB RAM for a year at uni, and I could tell you what every process was doing there - everything else had to go.

Well, okay, puppylinux was pretty good if I recall in that respect. This was ~15ish years ago, and I think that debian and slackware were bloated in comparison to XP back then

Yeah VL was based off slack but they ripped a bunch of things out, and I carefully went over the bootscripts and removed a bit more of things I didn't definitely need.

Blog post please

I don't really blog, and I've forgotten all the juicy details at this point. It was an old thinkpad that just barely booted up windows ME and then couldn't do anything useful. VectorLinux was a really great match for it, I think they claimed to have fiddled with the kde libraries at the source level and ripped out a bunch of things to make it all snappier - I don't know to what extent that's true, but that crappy little laptop allowed me to run firefox, openoffice, skype, matlab and latex (not all at the same time - at most two) for my first year of uni.

Hearing about these esoteric Linux distros and their lore is always interesting.

I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.

oh it was a pain in the gluteus maximus, this was before alsa worked properly, so it was using oss, and you could only have one application using the sound card. this means a random flash applet at the bottom of a page on Firefox could easily hold it and Skype would just not work.

> Icons were high contrast

Seriously. Who demonized having legible color icons in exchange for blurry grayscale icons?

Ironically, having to support high-DPI displays destroyed having nice icons.

I think that’s true. I recently installed Windows 2000, also for nostalgia, and marveled at the icons. I like the Windows 3.11 (not so much the 3.0) icons even more.

They have such a charm and special style that only works through their low pixel count, but if you would pixelate icons today it would just look gimmicky and out of place with the rest of the OS.

It depends on the design of the icon. You generally can't scale Windows 3.1 graphics to higher resolutions without it looking like it's lacking details. The charm was with what you couldn't see and your mind could fill in the blanks.

Yep, that’s what I mean. Art comes from restriction, and the designers at Microsoft did really charming stuff with what they had to work with.

I still vividly remember such simple but delightful things as the Excel icon, or the icon of a stylized 386 processor for the System category in Control Panel.

> the designers at Microsoft

Susan Kare did a lot of those! I love how they're just as expressive at 16-colors as at higher color depths. https://www.stardock.com/blog/502254/the-evolution-of-comput...

Ah, thanks for telling me that. I had absolutely no idea she had any involvement, but now it makes perfect sense.

That's true. Right up until you look at Haiku and its vector icons. But I get it. Everyone has to look the same.

Vector graphics are a thing, you can make colorful graphics that can scale. You just might need multiple levels of detail depending on how large it's rendered at.

Windows Vista begs to differ. https://archive.org/details/UXGuide

> Provide icons for all ribbon controls except drop-down lists, check boxes, and radio buttons. Most commands will require both 32x32 and 16x16 pixel icons (only 16x16 pixel icons are used by the Quick Access Toolbar). Galleries typically use 16x16, 48x48, or 64x48 pixel icons.

> Be sure to test your windows in 96 dpi (100 percent) at 800x600 pixels, 120 dpi (125 percent) at 1024x768 pixels, and 144 dpi (150 percent) at 1200x900 pixels. Check for layout problems, such as clipping of controls, text, and windows, and stretching of icons and bitmaps.

> Icons are pictorial representations of objects, important not only for aesthetic reasons as part of the visual identity of a program, but also for utilitarian reasons as shorthand for conveying meaning that users perceive almost instantaneously. Windows Vista® introduces a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows.

> Icons have a maximum size of 256x256 pixels, making them suitable for high-dpi (dots per inch) displays. These high- resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons.

> In the smaller sizes, the same icon may change from perspective to straight-on. At the size of 16x16 pixels and smaller, render icons straight-on (front-facing). For larger icons, use perspective.

> Icon files require 8-bit and 4-bit palette versions as well, to support the default setting in a remote desktop. These files can be created through a batch process, but they should be reviewed, as some will require retouching for better readability.

Nice icons were destroyed after high-DPI support, for some unknown-to-me reason.

Windows 2000 was this for me, but it's true that you could opt out of the bubble gum skin and get a more conventional look from XP if you preferred that.

This was still largely true with Windows 7. Starting with Windows 8 the UI story really went to hell.

Okay, that's good to know. I was a Mac user from 2007 to 2018, so I missed the entirety of the Windows 7/8 generation— going directly from XP to 10.

10 was a bit of an improvement over 8, so at least you skipped the worst with 8. I haven’t had the heart to install 11 yet though.

Like most filthy casuals, I don't think I'm a particularly "deep" user of the OS. It's basically background chrome for web browsers and terminal windows into WSL and SSH sessions.

To the extent that the OS does anything at all, I'm usually just mildly annoyed, like it signing be out of my work VPN or forgetting how my monitors are arranged. Or eating the battery when it should be sleeping (though I understand there's been some historical finger-pointing between Dell and Microsoft about whose actual fault those issues are).

> Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design.

Ever used Win 7? Way better, and not a candy UI.

Aero is like the definition of candy

Not of candy (like XP), but of eye candy maybe.

What? I really like Win 7 but it is for sure one of the best early examples of a "candy" ui. The close button looks like a jolly rancher and everything is glassy looking. If you are talking about "eye-candy" it also stretches far into that territory with title bar blurs, drop shadows and transparency effects across the OS.

Sure, just get any of the lightweight linuxes. Classical toolbar, good contrast, captions... Some apps do have inconsistent shortcuts, but many don't.

I type this comment from old Ubuntu Mate system, but my next system is going to be Debian-based.

I doubt we'll see as tight consistency again but the cause and effect more being Windows XP released 6 years after the taskbar debuted in Windows whereas now there is closer to 30 years of stuff expecting to still run the same as it did back then rather than a change of goals. I still wouldn't mind if it were a bit better on the consistency anyways though...

My inner voice of Nostalgia just whispered: All the gorgeous pixels gone with the wind.

This, especially if you turned off the extra UI bits, under performance options.

Honestly, Windows 2000 UI with the right click menu on the start button from Windows 10 onwards would be a near perfect Windows UI for me!

I know the 3D effects are considered dated now, but I found them very useful from a separation PoV.