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- Hacker News
- The loss of the theme menu and 'Windows classic' from Windows 8 onwards is dearly missed. But Windows classic hasn't gone away. If you run a 32-bit executable on Windows 10 or 11 under Windows XP compatibility mode, and set 'reduced colour mode', Windows Classic comes back. I have also noticed that when Adobe Acrobat crashes (heh) it momentarily flashes Windows classic on the title bars.
It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
- > In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them:
This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
by chriswarbo - RE: Start Menu, the article does not mention or show the obnoxious “Personalized Menus” feature which is the one and only ‘must disable’ when I use Win2k. It triggers after some number of days and hides infrequently-used programs from the Programs submenu as a workaround for the menu growing large and unwieldy when many programs are installed, but IMO I think it's even worse than what it claims to fix.by Lammy
- In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.
- I really liked when XP came out, and you could have both the clean 2000 look with advanced font rendering like cleartype. That was the perfect combo for desktop use.
I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.
by IronWolve - Design language, like any language is metaphorical.
The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
- Like the floppy disk for “save”? Or the old school phone receiver for “call”?by bromuro
- You still need some design experience and "taste" though.
I've seen some B2B apps which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray.
(I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.)
I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.
by xg15 - Why are designers not understanding this these days?
I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic.
Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
by petilon - Was this peak Windows UI?
I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.
And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.
by bluedino - I really liked the luna silver and olive green themes. They were not too bad to look at.by kreddor
- I think Windows XP looks very nice if you install the Royale theme. It's a shiny and glassy version of the default XP style.by Dwedit
- Almost. The NT5 RCs, which became windows 2000, were better IMO - not massive differences but it hadn’t been slobbered upon by marketing yet.by madaxe_again
- The title bar of windows in Windows XP was Fisher-Price. But I thought the rest was OK.by petilon
- > I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
by Telaneo - Windows Vista / 7 was peak UI for me.by cake-rusk
- Maybe more importantly, Win2k was the first windows version actually WORKED in a predictable way after years of unstable post-Win3.1 (Win95 and onward) production releases.by rib3ye
- > Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history
Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.
by nticompass - A puppy.jpg.vbs file would be shown as "puppy" with "VBScript" in the type column. The full name may be worse though. "puppy.gpj.vbs" (which is actually "puppy\u202Egpj.vbs\u202C") looks like an image extension, but is a script (as the type column also shows).
Edit: Looks like HN removes those directional override characters. When present, the text looks like "puppy.sbv.jpg"
by cstdr - Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.by nycticorax
- > which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche
KDE has been one of the two big, by far the most popular FLOSS DEs for decades, even predating the other one; how could it be "a niche within a niche"?
by seba_dos1 - I love SerenityOS so much, I wish someone ported it as a DE to the Linux kernel so I could daily it
- Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.by Narishma
- I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents…
But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.
But even then I thought it looked like shit.
The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.
But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.
I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).
What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
by the_other - You will never see a visually consistent operating system again, the material conditions that allowed for older Windows and Mac OS versions to be consistent no longer exist. The user base for desktop computers is no longer growing, so the investment into new desktop UI technologies is largely in technologies like Electron and SwiftUI that allow developers to cut costs by reusing their existing web and mobile interfaces for desktop software. The focus on cross-platform development means that developers are far more concerned about making their software look consistent across all platforms than they are about whether their software looks native on each platform it supports.by ndiddy
- Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world.
It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
by clark_dent - Of course real life has outlines. Look at these for instance:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/skala_displa...
Displays & controls are thematically grouped and/or framed, each button/rotary/switch has a color that constrasts from the background, and there are strong 3D clues to see what's a button, and what's a label or the background.
by shakow - Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward.
Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradually being replaced by art-school types, and now it seems very little consideration is given to actual UI functionality, and the driver is entirely some bizarre sense of style from people who don't know anything about Human Computer Interaction, but seem to think no more deeply than "less is more".
These UI elements had reasons to look and act the way they did. This communicated information to the user (even if the user didn't realize it), and made software much more predictable and discoverable, and ultimately, more intuitive.
- This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe.
The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI.
So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever.
And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'.
Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company...
Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...
by xg15 - > Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu:
Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.
I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?
Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
by al_borland