alt Hacker NewsOur commitment to Windows quality
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If they actually fix start menu search in addition to giving back the left side taskbar, I'll be pretty happy. I very much doubt they will though.
Can we all just appreciate the sheer amount of writing and re-writing and executive review that had to go on to make this blog post go out? Goodness, I can smell the hand-wringing and political battling represented by these words through the wire. Incredible stuff.
First April already ?
This is a smoke break before they proceed to ram more AI and subscription model down your throat.
to me it went off the rails when I couldn’t get local search from the start menu in windows 8.1
Funny, I just bought Start11 from Stardock for side taskbar placement. It was the oddest choice to remove that feature. On an ultrawide monitor it just makes so much sense.
Recently got an HP ProBook for a relative to replace his old 2011 ThinkPad with Kubuntu 24.04 and I was shocked how laggy and unusable Windows 11 was. Every menu has tons of latency, programs take forever to start, even something simple like Rufus. File Explorer is a laggy mess, the whole OS feels like you are walking through mud. After a reboot there was a fullscreen message about "finish setting up the device" (??? it's already set up) with the only options being Confirm and "Remind me in 3 days". Thankfully my relative was comfortable with Kubuntu and all his files were there (and frankly we were too lazy to set everything up from scratch again) so I just cloned his old drive and Kubuntu runs like a dream! I'm not someone who would advocate for Linux because it still has very rough edges (even more so than 10 years ago somehow) and has a higher learning curve but Windows 11 is unbelievable bad. I switched to macOS roughly around Windows 11's release so my only other experience was at work (where I constantly complain about the TWO context menus!!!).
The last performant Windows version was Windows 8, despite its UX flaws. It actually made old computers faster and it started going downhill with the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview. I doubt that MS will reach that level of performance and stability again.
Whatever, I'm just counting the time until I can drop windows entirely... right now I just need it for gaming, but I'm thinking maybe Valve's OS will be the replacement
Second raters working on a third rate operating system, offer fourth rate ameliorations for problems, their fifth rate product managers introduced.
Quality is only real if you validate outputs automatically. In data systems, I check every result against expected schemas before delivery — catches 95% of issues before users see them.
I feel like this commitment to Windows quality post is actually just copilot generated slop.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
Yea I don't believe or trust a single word coming out of that malware company.
MacBook Neo will eat their lunch.
Linux support for video games will eat their dinner.
I've never seen a more impressive effort to carry on as if the elephant is, in fact, not in the room.
Dave P. has the same take in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60
MSFT @ 52-wk low. Quality go up as they cling to fundamentals?
Back in the Longhorn (that is, Vista) days, I was friends with an engineering manager on the core desktop services team. He told me about how the "combine icons" in taskbar feature came to be. I think it came out after XP? mmm. I think yeah it came in Vista right after XP. Or was it one of the XP service packs? Anyhow, it was endlessly introduced by PMs, and endlessly cut after obnoxious reviews. Per this guy he just coded it one day and pushed it into daily build. Got in a lot of trouble but it made it.
Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.
I wish them what I wished them when Windows Vista was released, and I said to my friend something like ‘huh, we have all that in Linux’ What I meant is GUI, as I was just a beginner. Today, I don’t know, I really wanted to write LOL, like with the biggest possible font size, and some GIF that supports it, but we’re not like that here, right? So, again, I just wish them that I wished them that many years ago. And for the Linux desktop year to finally come. As it feels like we’re there already. I don’t see any point in willingly using Windows for an average Joe.
> We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it [the taskbar] easier to personalize your workspace.
Ehm, what? Windows XP had this feature. Pretty sure that Vista and 7 did too. I had plenty of friends who used the taskbar in non-standard edges.
Did they recently REMOVE the feature and are now bragging about introducing this "new" feature, or am I missing something?
I was expecting a 404
Windows will never be 7 again. It will never be 2000. Wake up
They feel like they're scrambling for any form of relevance when in reality that ship has long since sailed.
Reminds me of when they finally apologized for the train wreck that was IE6 [1] and resumed Internet Explorer development in the 2000s after Firefox came along and started eating IE's market share.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...
Reading this from the perspective of someone that hasn't used windows as a desktop for over 20 years, this reads like a list of features they removed over the years that they are putting back in, but announcing it like it's all new. What a load of bullshit.
In Ctrl+f t find "remove copilot"... Wasn't in there. Thumbs down
Funny how Windows copies KDE (features and trajectories), almost 18 years after KDE 4.0/4.1. Also makes me feel old.
Go back to Win98 UI, I know it will never happen but can you imagine...
At this point I genuinely think people would be blown away at how much of a functional improvement it would be.
There would also be a lot of bewilderment for the younger generations, and people who aren't interested in actually using computers who don't think it looks "sleek" enough or whatever. But in terms of day to day quality of life, those old UIs just got the fuck out the way, and were obvious when you had to interact with it. I have some earned hate for the underlying windows OS, but in terms of UI and desktop, we didn't know what we had until it was taken away.
Windows is just a wonderful box of chocolate that keeps expanding. You never know what you get, all brilliant frontier tech innovations like Edge, Bing, the calculator, vertical taskbar, and now the highly intelligent Copilot, up there fighting with OpenCode, CC and others...!
Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due. Windows Insider is a great program that takes a lot of effort to manage, and this mea culpa is a response to community feedback .
Windows is a fabulous operating system. I encourage people to see it as a tool and as an engineering marvel, rather than as an enemy or target of ridicule. I’ve been tremendously productive on Windows, and I have run every desktop OS , including Gentoo (when it used to take 2+ days to compile), BeOS, OS2 , Redhat on Power PC, FreeBSD and loads of niche operating systems.
If you like Operating systems, and hate Windows, I encourage you to read Show Stoppers about Dave Cutler making NT. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and will probably convert you from a Windows hater to an NT Kernel appreciator.
For gods sake, your users is not your unpaid qa.
Remove the ads from windows professional.
The obnoxious behavior of Windows update is the single biggest reason I left the platform over a decade ago. Too little too late for me.
Also there is one huge glaring omission in the article. The sneaky integration of ads embedded in the OS. I have thankfully never experienced this myself since I abandoned Windows before the ads became a thing.
I sometimes have to use Enterprise Windows 11 professionally, but I can’t ever see myself going back to it for any kind of personal computing. Basically Microsoft had a good thing and decided to enshitify it to death.
they joke with us. What we want is just a pure basic Windows experience without AI things make everything slower and not secure. What they give is taking the taskbar to left - right - top
So, we can move the taskbar, more AI, and some paint-flashing fixes
Windows is no longer on the dominant position it was 20 years ago when it had 90%+ marketshare: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
It's not sitting at 60-65% and has been slowly bleeding for the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, anyone who have figured out how to move his processes, has left the building and never checked back.
Now Windows is being attacked aggressively from multiple fronts:
- macbook neo. Apple is projected to sell roughly 5million of these this year. This is a segment that couldn't previously move out of Windows because of cost not Office.
- improvement in Linux (Desktop/Gaming): This will eat another chunk for people whom Linux didn't function previously.
- HarmonyOS Next. This is underestimated by the rest of the Western world. I think by 5-10 years most of China would have moved to its own OS. Windows highest marketshare is in Asia.
The idea that Microsoft can exist on Azure/Office alone is not valid, in my opinion. Especially for Office, Windows is your portal to the rest of Microsoft stack. If you use HarmonyOS, you'll like use their own Office system. From there, they'll own the rest of the stack.
tl;dr: MSFT is screwed and they know it. They are also going to do nothing about it.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
When did they get rid of that?
I was hoping for: "We understood the insanity and the insult of trying to replace native UI with cheap web stack imitation and it will never happen again".
#noconfidence
I think for a lot of people is already too late
this is sum' schizo article writing. totally deviates from the history of reality.
Three years too late, in my case. I've moved on.
> We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen
No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.
Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.
Ctrl+F "ads"
Nothing
Too little too late. Linux can finally handle 90% of the gaming I want to do, and I'm willing to "suffer" not being able to play the other 10%.
Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.
Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.
I'll believe it when I see it. But I hope I will, I don't want to be cynical.
Back a decade or so, the Visual Studio experience was terrible, the team promised they were going to fix a lot of it, I didn't believe them, and they actually delivered. No VS is not perfect. But it was on a downward spiral and they got it out.
I hope they deliver now, and bring back my inner Windows fan which they eroded and then killed with the abomination that is current Win11.
Isn't this the same company that fired most of their QA people few years back?
Their commitments here seem to try to bring windows back to what it was when they still had their QA teams.