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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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 - 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
- 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 - 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
- I wish this was more of a full tour than a random sampler of Windows versions. For instance I feel like Windows Me introduced the online search but it's been like... 26 years... since I've used it.
> Now there's a big gap. I don't have access to anything between Windows XP and Windows 10. So, Windows 10 (2015) is next
I'm guess these are just what the author already had set up. They're not really difficult to find or set up in a VM...
by donatj