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- Hacker News
- I like your Windows postings, please don’t stop!by vivid242
- They finally made a CLI version of it a decade ago and it works exactly as it should when setting up a new system with a script.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
by 1970-01-01 - > Sadly, I don't know anymore what kind of web service that was.
I don't know that either, but I remember there were websites specifically for that purpose, where you could look up a file extension and what program to open it with.
by amadeuspagel - On Win 11, if you disable the Vibe Notepad it refuses to let you associate .txt files to any program, and popups an error. Instead you have to go turn off a specific file association toggle elsewhere (as i recall) only then you can you reassign itby petee
- Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement.
Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser never told me that; it just silently failed to download anything, I could not choose any local file for file upload. I only found out eventually, but when I found out, the fix was easy, but still, the question is why such things break silently. This is simply incredibly poor engineering and design, and that happens on linux too. That way they'll never achieve linux desktop of the year. The decision makers here are just horribly bad at designing anything. The whole GTK team fell victim to this, now that it is a GNOMEy toolkit only.
When we ever get one-toolkit-that-fixes-everything (well ...), hopefully they are really allowing only mega-smart people who can think objectively and try to IMPROVE things rather than regress or take away functionality willy-nilly style (as the GNOMEy devs do).
by shevy-java - How is this not an improvement?by kenjackson
- I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!by janci
- evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammalsby wolfi1
- at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.by inigyou
- One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file...
(Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
by edoloughlin - Windows has had a few of these "look online" options for decades now, to look up unknown extensions, to find drivers for unrecognised devices, etc. Not a single time in the many, many years of using Windows did any of those ever find anything useful for me.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft just put them in there to mock us.
by stavros - What were the internal politics at Microsoft at the time that resulted in the .NET branding being pushed more aggressively than Copilot today, everywhere from the login screen to file associations?by 1bpp
- Not ex-Microsoft, please answer if you are, but fear of Java becoming a universal runtime.by nailer
- I think Windows 9x was peak Windows.
Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen.
But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive. The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron.
Edit. See OP's previous article here, he managed to capture what I was trying to say in more details, with nice screenshots: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html
by reddalo - > Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen.
I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back.
One problem I see is that while the UI itself has been simplified, incidental complexity has crept in other ways. Most importantly, the OSes themselves as software systems have clearly grown ponderous and unwieldy so that today they are more bugs and more of those bugs can be subtle and surprising. Also, there is less uniformity in UX across apps (and UI frameworks).
by pegasus - This is because back in the 90s GUI development was still driven by hard research, not by "emotions" (e.g. actually sitting very diverse groups of people in front of computers, asking them to perform specific tasks and then analysing where exactly they got stuck or became confused).
IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".
by flohofwoe - I think Windows 9x was peak Windows.
I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state.
XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success. Many despised the colorful UI, I actually like it. They started moving things around, but annoyances were fixable. Microsoft has adopted more of a "my way or the highway" attitude since.
by narag - Products have to change in a visible way so people know they're new.by xuhu
- I'd replace 9x by windows 2000. It was the only decent windows. 9x were BSOD crashfest, 2000 was stable as NT but without the enshittification of XP (ugly default themes, stuff above calling internet services with zero value).
I think what you describe as responsive are 2 things:
1. absence of animations. I don't know about windows but on linux DE you can disable them, it feels snappier but more raw and I think most people still prefer the animations.
2. Visual and audio clues. Back in the days we were on spinning disks so anytime you'd click on somethimg you would hear the disk moaning in pain and see that disk led blinking. You knew that something was happening, even if it took a long time. When SSD were introduced, everything became instant and silent for a few years, it was pure bliss. Then over the last decade apps continued growing and growing in size and as fast as they were SSDs and NVME started not feeling that fast because so much stuff had to be loaded into memory. Nowadays many apps are still starting much faster than before but the biggest one still take a substantial time. Worse, we have lost all visual and audio clues that something is happening.
by prmoustache - Nah, that goes to either Windows 2000 or Windows 7.by pjmlp
- I find this take (from the guy who wrote the Windows task manager while at Microsoft) to be evenhanded.
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer.
by GeekyBear - Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have.
Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a find across a whole document or getting a word count took time.
Remember windows used to have an hourglass cursor? You used to have to watch that thing flip and empty multiple times when doing things like emptying the recycle bin.
Windows 9x was typically not running on a permanently networked computer. The computer wasn’t running a bunch of background network tasks like checking for updates or polling your email - generally it was just being slow because it could barely cope with running more than one program at once.
by jameshart - I wonder why in Windows 10 and 11 there is no obvious way to cancel this dialog. You can press Esc, but there are no buttons to do it.by brewmarche
- It also closes when you click/tap outside the dialog, unlike most other Windows dialogs. I actually can't think of another Windows dialog with the same level of functionality that behaves this way.
I'm pretty sure it was introduced in Windows 8 along with swipe gestures from the sides of the screen (like the "charms bar") with the tablet use case in mind and with little consideration given to the mouse experience.
by discostrings - I imagine that the database for the online file association service for Windows XP has been lost to time, but for those who remember it: was it any good?
It seems like quite a good idea now -- if I remember correctly, Windows as of current seems to suggest a generic Bing search, which brings up all the spam "What extension is XXX?" sites.
That could have changed; I haven't really used Windows after 11's debut.
by tentacleuno - I thought in the deep dark paste it used to take you to filext.com but it's been probably 20 years since I intentionally clicked on the link.
- I don't remember it ever finding anything. Similar to the find driver dialog (until Win10 or so).by izacus
- If I recall correctly, it was pretty bad. It used to open Internet Explorer on this page: http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?EXT={e... where {ext} was the extension.
Suggestions were vague and they only made sense with well-known filetypes.
There's a screenshot of how it looked here: https://protoweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/screen.jpg
by reddalo - Fun fact: on modern Windows, if you uninstall modern notepad using the Settings app to get the old one, you won't be able to associate .txt files with notepad.exe without a registry trick: https://superuser.com/questions/1750222/how-to-open-file-typ...by Krssst
- Modern Windows has big problems with file associasions: default to web browser, sometimes asks, sometimes it chooses a random program (for images). Old Windows (9x, 2k, XP, 7) was better.by hulitu