[walterlb]

The picture at the top of the article has the caption "Setting Windows 11 to one of its dark themes also darkens the background of the Settings app—but not the background of most traditional apps, like Resource Monitor".

This doesn't seem like news.. Dark theme has been in Win 10 for a while and didn't apply to old style apps. Did they specifically promise to do this?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Which is hilarious when you consider that those "old-style" applications had a lot finer-grained control over their theming in Windows95-XP.

Just another example of software developers doing what they do best these days: reinventing the wheel, but worse.

[gruez]

https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...

It's strange how "dark/light mode" was such an innovative/killer feature, when the same feature was available decades ago.

[xg15]

Like iOS gaining the revolutionary feature of displaying up to two(!) apps side-by-side simultaneously.

I also noticed that received Windows versions don't even have the option of changing the system font anymore. Even changing the font size is only possible in a tightly restricted range and is framed as an accessibility feature, not a customisation.

Sometimes it feels like customisation is removed so you can have more things available that can be announced (or sold) as "features"...

[whywhywhywhy]

End of the day the UI framework choices of the past on Windows has made a consistent UI an impossibility.

Too many parts of it from a different era that they can’t really update the UI for all seemingly built with slightly different tooling.

If there was someone with the vision to truly drag this OS forward they would be aiming to rewrite at least a handful of these tools to modern tech consistently each release.

Of course many users will scream because things are changing but honestly if they want to move forward they have to ignore them.

And by forward I mean forwards to being the best desktop OS. OSX currently holds that crown because they were willing to throw everything out.

OSX likely won’t exist anymore in 5-10 years the way Apple is heading so Microsoft actually has a chance here if they get serious.

[passivate]

>Of course many users will scream because things are changing but honestly if they want to move forward they have to ignore them.

Sorry, I completely disagree. An OS should be a dependable stable platform. The Apps are what drive productivity, and I want to keep the software that I purchased running for as long as I can. The vendors probably would love to sell you the newer version that works on OS version N+1. I don't want to keep re-buying software just because the OS vendor deprecated a library/framework. That's just my view.

I've told this story before of how we installed an XP app (i.e binary was created ~15-20 years ago) on W10 and it just worked w/o any fuss. In biotech you have a lot of very very expensive commercial software and you can't just treat the OS as the 'flavor of the month' and not care about backwards compatibility. There are many industries that are the same. We think of Autodesk as this giant company, but (correct me if I am mis-remembering) some dude analyzed their financial statements and concluded they only have like 20-30,000 paying users, but at $4,000 a pop, it adds up. If I purchased their product for $4,000 the last thing I want is some OS vendor to follow some UI fad and render my application incompatible.

[EMM_386]

> If there was someone with the vision to truly drag this OS forward they would be aiming to rewrite at least a handful of these tools to modern tech consistently each release.

The thing people miss, and that I have been unfortunately privy to, are the incredibly number of large companies that customize these older dialogs.

They add controls, remove controls, override anything and everything.

This is why something that seems simple ("scrap it and start over") does not fully solve the problem. You have thousands of customers who rely on that old dialog.

The only choice would be to run them side-by-side for a long time and warn these customers that stuff is being deprecated. If they don't move forward in a certain period of time, they can not use the newest OS.