[mikepurvis]

Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing?

Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.

[qw]

It is my recollection as well. Most applications used VB, Delphi, MFC etc. that all had the "native" OS look and feel. There were some exceptions like WinAmp and others, but from what I can remember most applications were more consistent than today.

[zozbot234]

Those toolkits would usually reimplement the "native" look and feel from scratch, or nearly so. It was uncommon to rely directly on the basic OS widgets.

[mikepurvis]

MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native, and I think a lot of stuff used native even just for performance reasons. I remember getting very frustrated around then when something would want me to install the JVM and I knew I was in for a laggy mess of an application that would have bad font rendering, strange little buttons, and its own file picker.

[zozbot234]

> MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native

Microsoft reimplemented this stuff from scratch all the time. Not just in MFC itself but Office too.

[LoganDark]

Don't modern versions of Windows contain at least 5 different widget frameworks? Like, Win32, Ribbon (I think engineered for Office as you said), WinForms, WPF, WinUI 1/2/3... I think Apple just has Cocoa (Carbon is long gone), AppKit, UIKit, and SwiftUI.

[bmicraft]

You (rightly) forgot about UWP, "universal windows platform"

[int_19h]

MFC is a thin wrapper around Win32. Delphi's VCL is a much thicker wrapper but still using (mostly) native widgets; ditto for VB6.

So, no, it was quite the opposite - it was uncommon to not rely directly on the basic OS widgets. Off the top of my head, the two toolkits that I remember that didn't do that were Borland's OWL (which quickly died out in post-Win16 era, since Delphi/VCL was strictly better), and Qt, which while not using native widgets tried to approximate that look and feel as much as possible.

Even in Java land, their first take - AWT - wrapped native widgets. It wasn't until Swing that they moved on to rendering their own, and it was widely derided as looking inconsistent with other apps as a result of that.

[btbuildem]

Early 90's, especially on Amiga -- where a proper windowing desktop env ("workbench") coexisted with the wildest custom UIs. Maybe it was the roots of the machine, heavily used as a games console and a demoscene workhorse? It seems like at that time there was so much creative design effort put into UX -- and it didn't seem to get in the way, maybe because each genre of software was kind of on the cutting edge back then, establishing what would eventually evolve into conventions. Mod trackers, image editing, disk copying, etc. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia, but it felt really immersive to pull up a piece of software you were familiar with; each UI was so distinct and purpose-built, but it also had.. flourish? style? soul? Not so much now.

[mike_hearn]

Nah, the Windows ecosystem never even got close to being consistent.

MS Office had its own UI toolkit and routinely invented new UI paradigms that weren't exposed in any Windows API, leaving people who wanted to look native scrambling to reimplement. This was particularly the case for toolbars. MS Office first invented the so-called "coolbar" and then the ribbon. Internet Explorer also rolled its own toolbar styles in ways not supported in the base Windows API e.g. toolbars with large icons and sliding sub-sections. Inventing custom toolbars was practically a sport on Windows; Netscape also did it.

At the time the most popular media players were WinAmp (totally custom and themeable to boot), RealPlayer (custom UI https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/), Quicktime (custom UI) and Windows Media Player (mostly but not entirely native).

Even the base utilities that came with Windows weren't consistent with each other. It wasn't uncommon in the Win 9x era to find programs still using Win3.1 style file dialogs ... a few are still buried in Windows today!

The problem got worse when you examined the artwork. The stock icon library in Windows was anemic, so dev platforms frequently had to expand the core library with their own. Delphi apps could be easily identified by the distinctive icons in their buttons (https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delp...).

Restyling window decorations was also very common. Microsoft themselves did it routinely, for example their flagship Encarta encyclopedia app had totally custom widgets and window styling: https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999

To get online most users were running something like CompuServe (custom web-style main UI https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...), or AOL (custom UI https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_h...), or MSN (custom UI https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/...)

Windows apps of this era were much like web apps are today: they shared some common code for things like rendering menus, buttons or widgets in their settings screens, but the main UI users interacted with were almost always custom widgets that were extremely varied between apps. Win32 was nearly impossible to style compared to HTML so this represented a large investment of developer time, but a custom branded UI was believed to be worth nearly any cost. This is something fundamental to how humans work and is pointless to fight, a lesson the web platform fully embraced giving it an advantage over other UI toolkits of the era.

[int_19h]

It was still much more consistent than things are today, though.

With respect to toolbars / coolbars specifically, one thing to remember was that those weren't kept for Office/IE use only, but rather shipped as reusable components ("common controls" etc), and so other apps could and did pick them up. Indeed, well into late 00s, the common fashion for Windows apps was to try to look like the most recent version of Office wrt menus / toolbars.

Also, I do recall that those apps which tried to look flashy with fancy custom styles etc were often perceived as unprofessional, and quite a few people (myself included) deliberately avoided them where possible - and it wasn't difficult to do, with natively styled alternatives readily available. I distinctly recall my own late-90s Windows desktop, and it was very consistent.

[mike_hearn]

IIRC most of these controls only shipped in comctl32 much later than they launched, and comctl32 came with the OS which had many-year upgrade cycles. So in practice everyone invented their own because they didn't want to wait.

I'm sure people who care could make a consistent desktop, but our memories differ on how popular that was. The theming craze was a 90s thing, so even when apps didn't roll their own brand like MS themselves did, apps often let you apply custom themes to change the look.

In theory it's easier than ever to do that. You could create a browser extension that used user stylesheets to restyle websites to have a consistent look and feel. People make that effort to build ad blockers but not to build consistent looks, so I guess there isn't that much demand.