I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
To me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.
I think Windows XP did a pretty good job for the home market, making Windows appear friendly and easy to use to a wide audience (and without too many style inconstistencies).
Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
I remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.
I started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu…
> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP
Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP.
Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
As someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun!
Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
I hope it’s not controversial if I say that in the Apple world, Liquid Glass is, if not the first, certainly the worst regression. And I think this could have been predicted if you agreee with OP about Vista.
In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something.
I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.
I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.
Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
Coming from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
11 is a step in the right direction for a modern consistent look of Windows.
But there's still a long way to go; they still haven't managed to put all the system settings in a single app. And I wonder if they'll ever be able to get rid of the Control Panel; too many legacy applications need it.
> Note: I am skipping Windows Millennium Edition (Me) because while it had changes under the hood, visually it is pretty much Windows 98 Third Edition.
I really hated the depressing grey GUI of Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me. It looks like working in a dull grey concrete office with a grey PC and grey monitor while wearing a grey tie. I get that Windows XP and 8 look too colorful for many people (I like them), but Vista & Co, with their glass design, managed to avoid colors while still not making everything a drab grey.
I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
It’s not web but react native.
But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
Windows 11 is far from the best at that though.
It doesn’t even look good.
I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic.
If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
To me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.
I think Windows XP did a pretty good job for the home market, making Windows appear friendly and easy to use to a wide audience (and without too many style inconstistencies).
Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
> back to the classic 9x look
If i remember correctly this is the windows 2000 look.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Totally agree!
Although I‘m a Mac user for a long time, I still remember that I got work done using Windows 2000.
I‘d buy a license and switch back to Windows if we could get the productivity of this UI.
Typing this on iOS with Liquid Glass that drives me nuts
Windows 8 was a pretty big overhaul. But I agree with the author it was a most unwelcome overhaul.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
-
Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
I remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.
Mine said “Über”, which seemed very clever to me for some reason.
I started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu…
Also reminds me of the layers of UI versions still present in Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754
> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP
Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP.
Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
As someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun!
Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
Windows 11 < Windows 10?
Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
I like the “did it improve or regress” angle.
I hope it’s not controversial if I say that in the Apple world, Liquid Glass is, if not the first, certainly the worst regression. And I think this could have been predicted if you agreee with OP about Vista.
Liquid Glass is such a horrible regression. I'm holding onto my Sequoia for the time being (and maybe I'll then switch to Linux).
I think the best version of macOS was High Sierra. After that, everything started becoming bloated and inconsistent.
I think Windows XP should have shipped with the Watercolor theme, although Luna does a better job of setting it apart from previous versions
In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something.
I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.
I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.
Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.
It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
Of course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.
remember that there are still classic theme bois out there. 9x/2k is the best theme.
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
Coming from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
11 is indeed pretty good looking. Once you use it 10 feels so clunky.
11 is a step in the right direction for a modern consistent look of Windows.
But there's still a long way to go; they still haven't managed to put all the system settings in a single app. And I wonder if they'll ever be able to get rid of the Control Panel; too many legacy applications need it.
I assume there is a reason for leaving out Windows Me.
From the article:
> Note: I am skipping Windows Millennium Edition (Me) because while it had changes under the hood, visually it is pretty much Windows 98 Third Edition.
Windows 1 had hamburger menus, originally from Xerox Star.
Kinda cool
I really hated the depressing grey GUI of Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me. It looks like working in a dull grey concrete office with a grey PC and grey monitor while wearing a grey tie. I get that Windows XP and 8 look too colorful for many people (I like them), but Vista & Co, with their glass design, managed to avoid colors while still not making everything a drab grey.
Cooked take.