[mjfisher]

Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss?

Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.

[johnnyanmac]

I miss my search bar actually being a dumb grep of my indexed files. It's still frustrating typing 3 characters, seeing the result pop up in the 2nd key stroke, but having it transform into something else by the time I process the result.

[optimalquiet]

Inevitably windows search fails to highlight what I’m looking for almost all of the time, and often doesn’t even find it at all. If I have an application installed, it picks the installer in the downloads folder. If I don’t have an app installed, it searches Bing for it. Sometimes it even searches when I do have the application installed!

Microsoft seems not to believe that users want to use search primarily as an application launcher, which is strange because Mac, Linux, and mobile have all converged on it.

[eterm]

The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is grouped icons.

And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state.

So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own separate windows.

But even that is something that still feels janky in most apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even VS code took a long time to make it feel okay ), and I wouldn't really miss it that much if there were no tabs at all and every tab was forced into a separate window at all times with it's own task bar entry.

[tliltocatl]

It's not like grouped icons wasn't technically infeasible on win95. And honestly, whatever they are more useful is quite debatable. And personally, I don't even have a task panel anymore.

The real stuff not on Win95 that everyone would miss is scalable interfaces/high DPI (not necessary as in HiDPI, just above 640x480). And this one does require A LOT of resources and is still wobbly.

[eterm]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Technically feasible", but it wasn't supported by explorer.

You could have multiple windows, and you could have MDI windows, but you couldn't have shared task bar icons that expand on hover to let you choose which one to go to.

If you mean that someone could write a replacement shell that did that, then maybe, but at that point it's no longer really windows 95.