[fifticon]

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

[andai]

A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10.

I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.

I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.

Fully rendered. After a single video frame.

On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.

Twenty years of progress.

[vjk800]

I'm forced to use the Microsoft ecosystem at work and the sluggishness of it is a major source of procrastination. I find myself putting off small tasks forever, because waiting for word files to open, browsing folder structures in Teams, etc. are all mildly painful experiences. I suspect a lot of people do this, and maybe all of them don't even realize why they are doing this. The effect of sluggish user interfaces on overall productivity is probably well underestimated.

The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.

[econ]

I wrote this, I find it spectacularly hilarious. It is a desktop text editor in a self contained html file. (50 lines)

https://text-edit.go-here.nl

You put it on your desktop and (assuming you have a browser running) instantly brings up a text editor that can only load and save.

If you feel you need some feature you edit the html file and add the code yourself. (Preferably using text-edit)

Unlimited capabilities:)

[iamacyborg]

> at work

A lot of performance issues are down to MDM software.

[madhato]

Windows Explorer taking multiple seconds to load and often a bright flash of a white background during the load was exactly what pushed me over the edge to Linux.

[bitwize]

Few years back I was complaining to a coworker: "I just love opening Teams and watching it draw its subwindows in one by one, like a Windows 1.0 app on an 8086."

First flat design, now sluggish window redraws... Windows is getting retro hipster. Will 26H2 take away overlapping windows?

[hunter2_]

Presumably that's to keep hardware sales up, e-waste be damned. You won't notice it taking 8 times longer when you have 8 times as many cores, or whatever.

[solid_fuel]

No I think it's a consequence of so much of the industry abandoning caring about the craft in favor of just shipping whatever garbage checks off their Jira tickets. This is the same attitude that leads to vibe coding. It's the idea that the code doesn't matter and the only thing of any importance is the business attached to the product.

It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.

[winrid]

It's mostly the result of hiring too many stupid product managers and engineers that don't give a shit.

Even if you didn't read the code if you cared even an ounce you wouldn't ship this crap.

[ruszki]

The problem is that there are more of those, than those who care. And when money pours in, it’s a lost fight. When there is wealth, it’s beneficial for you in the short term to just grab from it as much as possible, than to improve things, if you’re not good in your job. And hell, most people are not especially good.

There are still pockets, where if you don’t push it, you loose. But you need to search for it. Average developers won’t ever work at such places. They won’t ever encounter them, because almost no developer jobs needs that.

Btw, you can make such positions in every company. I did it, several times. And it’s very beneficial even salary wise.

[Ntrails]

> It's mostly the result of hiring too many stupid product managers and engineers that don't give a shit.

If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix it.

Except, they hired all these people and expect them to do Stuff. What are they supposed to do?

[throw1234567891]

Tell that to my Citrix guy.

[sunaookami]

But it's still just as slow on current hardware. Windows 11 has that latency everywhere and it grinds my gears. At my workplace I got a very recent beefy machine and every click in explorer, start menu, etc. feels like walking through mud.

[elevation]

> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs

Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

[iknowstuff]

tbh all tabs seem like a deficiency in the window management paradigm to me. Instead of tabs our WMs should just allow us to easily list and transition between all windows of an app.

[bruce343434]

HaikuOS got this right. Tabs are a property of the OS side of the window, not the application side

[Hammershaft]

Absolutely agree. Recently learning emacs with vertico/consult/orderless/embark has had me thinking constantly about how needlessly crippled most OS windowing system workflows are.

[throw1234567891]

I can’t imagine working with a browser without tabs.

[iknowstuff]

Consider that chrome is now adding a split pane too. So you have tabs, tab groups, vertical split.. surely soon they'll add horizontal split and you'll have a full tmux or a tiling window manager within chrome

Shouldn't that just be your OS? It should show a list of open windows, allow you to group them and switch between windows within a group, show side by side etc

[saurik]

But like, once you start using a better window manager (as exist on Linux for X11), maybe you would no longer be able to imagine working in a window that couldn't simultaneously mix tabs from different apps.

[fsckboy]

>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

[jessetemp]

That would actually be a great feature. Opening two file browsers to move stuff around is a really common workflow. Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”

[systoll]

> Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”

That almost feels too optimistic. Google Drive already has 'Suggest File Moves' aka 'Tell me where I should want my files to be'.

It tells me I should have a real hatred of any files being in the root directory, and completely disregard sharing and permissions boundaries.

[Romario77]

welcome to Norton Commander! Or Far Manager for more modern version.

[happymellon]

So the move from File Manager to explorer was the wrong one?

[everdrive]

People's workflows will vary but I never find myself using tabs in Dolphin. (ie, the KDE file manager) If I'm dragging and dropping, I want to see both the source and the destination, so I usually just open two windows and tile one on the left an one on the right. This always works great and is a lot like Norton Commander, which seems relevant.

[pjc50]

The tabs are fine. Tabs in "cmd" are also good.

The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.

Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?

[bigbuppo]

Oh man. the complete lack of definition or contrast from window to window is terrible. Which window are you clicking on? Nobody knows. It's especially painful when you have like three or four nested RDP sessions going on.

[marcosdumay]

The tabs and address bar on Explorer seem to actually be a copy of the default behavior of Dolphin.

If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.

The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.

1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.

[account42]

With Dolphin you don't get a tab bar until you use multiple tabs. Like OP I never saw the point of the feature though - directories aren't like webpages where I might want to open tabs to read later so anything I open should just be a new window that gets its own space.

[Legend2440]

>Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs

Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.

[RaftPeople]

Ya, I just started using them in File Explorer recently and I really like them because I frequently had multiple windows open within the same tree, this is much cleaner. I can't believe it took me so long to actually click the "+" and try it.

[zamadatix]

You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!

Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.

[contextfree]

What in file explorer is still web tech based?

[ubercow13]

Tabs and breadcrumbs are both useful features though, that almost every other OS/DE file manager has supported since forever

[devmor]

As someone forced to use MacOS Finder regular, and who hates Dolphin/Nautilus/etc, I agree with the OP on this one. I don't need tabs or breadcrumbs in my file explorer.

I need clear, well defined data in the windows and a path.

[ryukoposting]

Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.

Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.

Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.

[jollyllama]

Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI

[fidotron]

Aside from the other problems the emergent trend of shoehorning window level tabs into apps kind of indicates a failure of OS level window management.

If people really want tabs in everything then have the windows enable tabbing between multiple contained apps.

[contextfree]

This was a feature in Windows 10 preview builds for a while (2018-2019ish iirc) but it never shipped to retail.

[CagedCoder]

I was really excited when I saw tabs were coming to the file explorer, but I can't tell now if I don't like tabs in file explorer or if I don't like all the other things that made file explorer worse when tabs got added

[winrid]

Some related things I noticed just today:

- the close button in outlook is HIDDEN until you move the window

- in Gdrive they list the selected filename at the bottom. They have the entire page width to show the file name. It truncates at like 70px.

[Night_Thastus]

Join those of us using File Pilot.

It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)

Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.

[bambax]

The problem with Windows is the users aren't the buyers, so they don't matter.

I hate Windows 11 immensely. At home I use Mac, Linux and... Windows 7. But at my current client I have to use Windows 11. I have no choice; I can either accept that or leave.

So at this point Windows could send small electrical shocks with every keystroke, it would not make a difference whatsoever.

[giancarlostoro]

> so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\..."

This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.

[sunaookami]

They fired their QA team 10 years ago and thought the Windows Insider Program could replace them.

[justinclift]

They'd have to list to the feedback from the insiders though, and that doesn't seem like a MS thing to do.

[dreamcompiler]

I can understand companies other than Microsoft using Electron because of the byzantine APIs required to make a native GUI app in Windows. But why would Microsoft do this? Have they forgotten how to use their own software??

Wait, never mind. Stupid question.

[p-t]

every day i am more glad i cannot update to 11 because windows 10 seems to be better in every way

[2cheeze4u]

Tabs on file explorer is one of the most useful feature updates in Win 11.

[bionsystem]

I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.

[Forgeties79]

I've been on bazzite for a little over a year and nothing is as satisfying as turning on my computer, getting to the desktop...and silence. No alerts. No sounds. No popups. It's just a blank slate every time.

You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.

[pjmlp]

Tabs are great, especially in laptops.

Modern Explorer is a WinUI/UWP app, nothing to do with Electron, it could be worse.

[DeathArrow]

>I don't need tabs

I do use tabs in Explorer quiet frequently.

[Aperocky]

Meanwhile I've been happily using ls, find, grep like it is 1980s.

They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.

Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.

[ShadowOfThePit]

Of the things that you could complain about modern Explorer and Notepad, you choose tabs? Really? A handy QoL feature that many have been requesting?

[account42]

Why not? Not every text editor needs to be an IDE.

[osjdiwnfiwjfi]

Gotta keep the “I’m such a greybeard, I do things more clumsily than others but look how techy and old school I am” act somehow, right?