This appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons, this is exactly how OSX has the dock configured. Also the system info in the top right.
I wonder if the team over at Microsoft is trying to match the look and feel of OSX in order to shorten the gap between the two operating systems and reduce friction of switching between the two.
If I had to guess, I would say that the designers who have been in charge of Windows for years are twenty-something year olds who have never used Windows in their lives.
That was also my guess given the massive flaws they never bothered to fix. Like search is unusable in windows. Clearly they are not consuming their own product.
Rather than copying macOS, phone UIs come to mind. Your bar at the top with info, dock at the bottom of the homescreen with shortcuts. It's felt like phones were taking over for a while. You could perhaps argue that iOS and Android UI design was influenced by older Mac OS versions originally, I guess.
> This appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons,
It looks worse because for no reason at all they have a gap at the bottom. You can bet that it will be click-through, so you have to actually aim with your mouse instead of just bringing the mouse down tho the bottom.
Why, oh why, must MS invent a new UI for every version? They all turn out half-baked, and are never around long enough to get completely debugged and polished.
I think about how great the UI could be if they just kept iterating the original instead of coming up with new shit every time and it makes me mad. It's been a lost decade in UI design for Windows and it's only become worse.
Which is a bit of a shame IMO. I'm a bit of an apologist for windows 8.1 and the 'Start Screen', even if the Store and WinUI apps were kinda gross.
Sure, the start screen was a whole screen rather than a bar. But it was easy enough to organize into something useful, as opposed to the Win10 start menu which just feels too busy with a bunch of small tiles littering the screen.
I hated the 8.1 start screen, but I think even that could have been turned into something really cool and useful. The fact that they never iterated on that either is just mind-boggling. Only a company as entrenched and wealthy as Microsoft can afford to expend that much effort and then throw it all out a few years later, just to start over from scratch again.
Can we get an amendment to the US Constitution banning promotion-driven-development? Seriously, I feel like that would improve by 2x the output of the US economy.
"We want it to look like MacOS, but without any consistency and keeping some system components that were written for Windows XP, but we haven't bothered to update yet."
"It will require the lastest processors and 32 GB of RAM because OEMs need to sell computers and all of the windows components are using Electron (or similar memory-hungry web UIs)."
"Teams and Loop will be fully integrated to enable maximum synergy for organizations and pro-sumers."
"MSN and News will also be fully integrated to help keep users informed about current events, their favorite celebrities, and great deals that are availble when they shop with Edge and search with Bing."
You write it as a joke, but I recently got myself a PC with Win11Pro. First glance: brand new UI. Until you open some specific settings, or choose "more options" from a context menu, then it's Windows 10. Then you need to tweak something else, and it's suddenly it's Windows XP. And when you go to something in the device/hardware area, you're confronted with a dialog that hasn't changed since NT.
They've slowly been replacing these legacy interfaces with the modern UI. It seems to have accelerated under Windows 11 but it's been ongoing since Windows 8.
The people who remember how the low-level stuff works are long gone. Through a combination of received wisdom and good old-fashioned operant conditioning, the devs who are left don't dare touch any of it. It's third-rail code.
The thing that blows my mind is how settings are just straight up duplicated. Like monitor sleep settings is in the Windows 10 style display preference panel. But it’s ALSO in a weird Windows Vista looking preferences window too. You have to use the second one to switch the “profile” as well.
Because it's not like you go to the Control Panel, and when you go to "devices" that brings up an old UI. Instead you have a number of "control panels" that bring up confusingly overlapping mix of old and new UIs.
And, fun fact, these old(er) dialogs are still often better/easier to understand than the new ones.
This may be partially nostalgia speaking but I really dislike the new settings and would like to have kept Windows 7 style control panel with some improvements (e.g. resizable, layout managed dialogs). But it is what it is, on the Mac side it also started going downhill after catalina.
I found myself buying a computer this holiday season and spending over a thousand dollars on it. Then realized Windows 11 isnt the Pro version, anyway I went to add a new Windows User and the app told me to go to another app because its not supported from there in my edition of Windows, when I got to the other app, it said to go back to the first app. I literally just said screw it and installed POP OS. Steam runs all the games I have tried so far just fine (I have a 3080 so it probably helps to have a known GPU) and I dont see myself going back. I used to use Linux daily for work at a former job anyway.
I really want Microsoft to just make a version of Windows for actual Pros that doesnt pull you into their ecosystem. I want my OS to just be an OS.
Yes this is annoying. Ideally my computer should just do what I want it to, and not gaslight me into whatever metrics Microsoft program managers are optimizing for to get their bonuses…as in selling more OneDrive or Xbox live subscriptions.
9:16 is too tall and therefore tiresome shite. Source: I've been using some monitors like that. It's 2:3 or 3:4 or 4:5, otherwise your neck is going to hurt.
But hey, I embraced wide screens by using multi-column layouts, you should try them some time.
They can change it to whatever as long as it's fully consistent and doesn't have menus from Windows 95. At this point I don't even know if it's possible.
I installed Windows 95 in a VM for fun and nostalgia recently and it struck me how consistent it was. Sure the colors and styles aged but wherever you were, buttons were buttons, settings boxes were setting boxes, windows were windows, task bar was a task bar, toolbars were toolbars …
Frankly, I’d argue that changing most settings is easier in windows 95.
It wasn’t perfect but it was a solid UX base with a lot of logical concepts to evolve from.
This ^. Its remarkable how well thought out and consistent the UI was.
Been here since Win3.0 and the Win95/NT4/Win2k UI, more or less up to Windows 7 is really good even if certainly some things could be improved.
Starting with 8 its just an utter mess old man yelling.
Until you accidentally overshot by a single pixel and your entire foldout of menus disappeared, forcing you to spend time going through the whole tree again (unless my memory is failing me).
Yes, mouse navigation of deeply nested menus has that exact problem. It's like playing that old Flash jump-scare maze game where you had to be very precise with the mouse.
Keyboard navigation of menus does not have that problem.
In Windows Vista/7/later versions of 10 the solution Microsoft used was to make the tree clickable like the tree in Explorer.
In 8/early 10/11 the solution used is to forbid nesting.
What should we put in the most dominant top left position?
Why, that’s easy, the fucking weather.
Except you know it’s not going to be the weather. It will be, mark my words, a portal for advertising and sponsored content, the revenue maker in the very top left corner. If there’s a better metaphor for an insipid lack of relevancy at all times, the weather couldn’t possibly be a more suitable fit.
If they're going to block off ~20-30 pixels on the top of the screen I'd really prefer to have the option to put something more useful than weather and an omnipresent search field there.
I know they're not to everyone's taste but it wouldn't hurt to have an option to replace those with a global menubar for example, because I don't need to know the weather that often and a hotkeyed search ala Spotlight, Alfred, or Microsoft's own PowerToys Run is better than a search field that's starting me in the face all the time, but a way to escape the Curse of the Hamburger Menu would be wonderful.
Besides the gap [1] I see they keep cluttering the title bar with completely random functionality to keep you guessing where the hell can I click and drag the window.
This new breed of dribble-raised "designers" should be fired en-masse, but sadly they've taken over the entire industry
Is this a good time to ask if anyone has some good reasons to upgrade to windows 11? ( other than getting security updates past 2025) - I would love to hear them :)
The new tiling window management, when it works, is a nice tiling WM for non-nerds.
Everything else is worse. I cannot see any other change from W10 that is not a downgrade, when it's not outright features or settings that disappear totally for reasons.
They managed to make the start menu even worse than the W10 one which was already utmost garbage inherited from 8.
At this point I’m even questioning wether they became mad of if they just want to insult users.
Windows 7 was peak Windows. Sane enough defaults, power user settings still accessible _and respected_, didn't have ads or run electron everything. If MS would've stopped fucking changing everything, but increasing security instead, it would still be king and not losing market share. Instead we have this Win 11 bullshit, forced down your throat everything, because MS knows better than YOU. While it continues to be bloated and doesn't do what you want or actually need.
Microsoft is a new company since Satya Nadella took over. But one thing hasn't changed: shameless, mindless copying.
If they copied well then that would be one thing. But they don't copy well either. In Windows 10 (and 11 too) if you resize a window by dragging the bottom border, the bottom of the window does not quite touch the taskbar: there is a few pixels of gap, which is just a waste. I didn't understand why they did that... until I realized that's because MacOS has that too.
If a chimpanzee views a person perform a series of superfluous actions, along with one single necessary action, in order to obtain a piece of food, the chimpanzee will skip the superfluous action, and perform only the necessary one. In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones [1]. Microsoft isn't being as smart as a chimpanzee in their copying.
Further yet, most companies trying to be like Apple copy the superfluous actions but not the necessary one. You get the wasted space, but not the "doesn't crash and glitch around all the time".
Throwing the cursor to the bottom-left and top-right were one of my favorite design features in Windows... Not anymore I guess, at least for the bottom-left.
Apologies for this alcohol fuelled rage comment but for fucks sake Microsoft just stop redesigning shit and finish the last 11 redesigns of windows, fix all the cruft hanging out everywhere and start giving a crap about your clients from a security and attention perspective. We are not cows to be milked for upsells, telemetry and ad revenue. We are also not caged animals to experiment on. We are paying customers who need a professional grade operating system that isn't a tragic waste of cash, time, resources, compute, bandwidth and attention.
And no Windows 11 is not it.
Nadella was treated like the second coming of Jesus on here a few years back. Turns out he's another one trick capitalist trying to push up revenue of a dying turd by sprinkling glitter on it and selling it to you monthly while pocketing whatever he can make out of your data.
So Windows 10/11 is supposed to have a finished look at this point?
Just polish the damn thing and finish what you started with WSL1 instead of suddenly adding advertisement popups and sports news into a released product and creating new superficial design changes and notification features for the casual user in each and every version.
I as many others am required to use this for work, because you have already won so many platforms, the most recent being Teams. Why not just polish it, so we actually WANT to use it, so casual users would join us, too? Isn't that exactly what Apple did with the Mac?
It used to be a ~60kb executable that worked even on open files, enormous log files, or on servers on their last legs due to memory exhaustion.
The new version takes a solid second to start up, can’t open a one gigabyte text file in under a minute, and can’t even align tabs and spaces despite using a fixed-width font.
It’s the simplest text editor that is so slow that its menus visibly stutter and lag if you simply move your mouse.
If Gates was still in charge he’d have summarily fired that entire team.
If you want nice things, you can’t have nice people in charge.
I somewhat like the macOS dock. But eventually, on KDE, with all the freedom in the world, I realized that it just makes sense to have everything integrated.
Maybe they realized during a QA meeting that it was too good for their standards.
My god, Microsoft. I used to be a Windows hater for the longest time, emulating the macOS dock on my Linux desktop. I still don't like Windows but have eventually realized that the task bar just makes sense.
Guess that's why it needs to be made worse! First the start button shifting depending on how many apps you have pinned, now the whole task bar in the middle of the screen.
I can only congratulate. Maybe they could try placing it diagonally.
I am wondering, if making it more macOS like may not prevent people switching to Mac, but will accelerate the trend since it is ( on the surface ) similar.
The Windows that would get me excited would be one stripped down to its absolute minimum, only one way to do things, all the old garbage and centuries of attics and basements cleared out. A modular operating system that could run in old machines and new, with the registry removed.
I wonder if the best windows won’t turn out to be SteamOS.
I switched to MacOS after many many years of windows and one of the things I love about macOS is all the configuration is in one place, stuff isn’t duplicated in multiple user interfaces, there’s only one UI style for macOS, not random bits of UI cruft accumulated over 30 years randomly appearing everywhere. macOS knows what it is. Windows seems to have had a lifetime of personal identity crisis.
96 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI wonder if the team over at Microsoft is trying to match the look and feel of OSX in order to shorten the gap between the two operating systems and reduce friction of switching between the two.
It looks worse because for no reason at all they have a gap at the bottom. You can bet that it will be click-through, so you have to actually aim with your mouse instead of just bringing the mouse down tho the bottom.
Sure, the start screen was a whole screen rather than a bar. But it was easy enough to organize into something useful, as opposed to the Win10 start menu which just feels too busy with a bunch of small tiles littering the screen.
"It will require the lastest processors and 32 GB of RAM because OEMs need to sell computers and all of the windows components are using Electron (or similar memory-hungry web UIs)."
"Teams and Loop will be fully integrated to enable maximum synergy for organizations and pro-sumers."
"MSN and News will also be fully integrated to help keep users informed about current events, their favorite celebrities, and great deals that are availble when they shop with Edge and search with Bing."
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33954176
It’s some serious garbage.
For all its failures, the linux desktop has one of the best if not the best design consistency out there
I really want Microsoft to just make a version of Windows for actual Pros that doesnt pull you into their ecosystem. I want my OS to just be an OS.
16:9 is the most popular aspect ratio on desktop, there is no valid reason to waste more vertical space
that's poor UX
I sometimes wish portrait oriented 4:3 monitors had become the dominant form.
But hey, I embraced wide screens by using multi-column layouts, you should try them some time.
Frankly, I’d argue that changing most settings is easier in windows 95.
It wasn’t perfect but it was a solid UX base with a lot of logical concepts to evolve from.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/08/24/win95start_648.jpg
Keyboard navigation of menus does not have that problem.
In Windows Vista/7/later versions of 10 the solution Microsoft used was to make the tree clickable like the tree in Explorer.
In 8/early 10/11 the solution used is to forbid nesting.
Why, that’s easy, the fucking weather.
Except you know it’s not going to be the weather. It will be, mark my words, a portal for advertising and sponsored content, the revenue maker in the very top left corner. If there’s a better metaphor for an insipid lack of relevancy at all times, the weather couldn’t possibly be a more suitable fit.
I know they're not to everyone's taste but it wouldn't hurt to have an option to replace those with a global menubar for example, because I don't need to know the weather that often and a hotkeyed search ala Spotlight, Alfred, or Microsoft's own PowerToys Run is better than a search field that's starting me in the face all the time, but a way to escape the Curse of the Hamburger Menu would be wonderful.
This new breed of dribble-raised "designers" should be fired en-masse, but sadly they've taken over the entire industry
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34131483
Everything else is worse. I cannot see any other change from W10 that is not a downgrade, when it's not outright features or settings that disappear totally for reasons.
They managed to make the start menu even worse than the W10 one which was already utmost garbage inherited from 8.
At this point I’m even questioning wether they became mad of if they just want to insult users.
Security is just the excuse to push user hostile feutures down our throats by remote code execution from MS servers.
I don't understand Microsoft insistence on introducing a brand new design language this often. Just make one and consolidate everything under it.
Also... holy hell does that scream Mac with the icons on the top right and the dock that isnt a dock on the bottom.
If they copied well then that would be one thing. But they don't copy well either. In Windows 10 (and 11 too) if you resize a window by dragging the bottom border, the bottom of the window does not quite touch the taskbar: there is a few pixels of gap, which is just a waste. I didn't understand why they did that... until I realized that's because MacOS has that too.
If a chimpanzee views a person perform a series of superfluous actions, along with one single necessary action, in order to obtain a piece of food, the chimpanzee will skip the superfluous action, and perform only the necessary one. In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones [1]. Microsoft isn't being as smart as a chimpanzee in their copying.
[1] https://youtu.be/JwwclyVYTkk
And no Windows 11 is not it.
Nadella was treated like the second coming of Jesus on here a few years back. Turns out he's another one trick capitalist trying to push up revenue of a dying turd by sprinkling glitter on it and selling it to you monthly while pocketing whatever he can make out of your data.
Microsoft would like to disagree. They don't care about fixing bugs or ensuring consistency. They only care that telemetry keeps flowing.
Just polish the damn thing and finish what you started with WSL1 instead of suddenly adding advertisement popups and sports news into a released product and creating new superficial design changes and notification features for the casual user in each and every version.
I as many others am required to use this for work, because you have already won so many platforms, the most recent being Teams. Why not just polish it, so we actually WANT to use it, so casual users would join us, too? Isn't that exactly what Apple did with the Mac?
It used to be a ~60kb executable that worked even on open files, enormous log files, or on servers on their last legs due to memory exhaustion.
The new version takes a solid second to start up, can’t open a one gigabyte text file in under a minute, and can’t even align tabs and spaces despite using a fixed-width font.
It’s the simplest text editor that is so slow that its menus visibly stutter and lag if you simply move your mouse.
If Gates was still in charge he’d have summarily fired that entire team.
If you want nice things, you can’t have nice people in charge.
Maybe they realized during a QA meeting that it was too good for their standards.
Guess that's why it needs to be made worse! First the start button shifting depending on how many apps you have pinned, now the whole task bar in the middle of the screen.
I can only congratulate. Maybe they could try placing it diagonally.
I wonder if the best windows won’t turn out to be SteamOS.
I switched to MacOS after many many years of windows and one of the things I love about macOS is all the configuration is in one place, stuff isn’t duplicated in multiple user interfaces, there’s only one UI style for macOS, not random bits of UI cruft accumulated over 30 years randomly appearing everywhere. macOS knows what it is. Windows seems to have had a lifetime of personal identity crisis.