Hacker News Reader

Comment by vsskanth | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

At this point I’d take the consistency of everything reverting to win95

I thought Windows 95 menu bar was quite functional once you got used to it.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/08/24/win95start_648.jpg

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com