BetaArchive

I've noticed for a couple thing that makes me feel disturbed while using Windows 10. It's good that they make Windows 10 more modern and more user-friendly. But, I found something very inconsistent for Windows.

1. Old icon
Did you notice something when you look into the .dll files on Windows 10 for choosing an icon for shortcuts. They even still keeping icon from Windows 95, 98, even XP still in it. I don't know why they just got it so
Thanks to Fanta Shokata

2.App duplication
Everytime I use Windows 10, for listening music, watching videos, and daily stuff. I notice that there are two apps for that :
- Groove Music and Windows Media Player
- Movies/Films & TV and Windows Media Player
- Settings and Control Panel
- Paint and Paint 3D (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Snipping Tool and Windows Ink Workspace (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Windows Picture Viewer (shimgvw) and the Pictures app (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Internet Explorer (don't entirely sure on this existance) and Microsoft Edge (whatever it's EdgeHTML or Chromium one)
and so on
No further reason I got from that, If it is for compatibility reason? or just sit there unsued? Placeholder?

3.Design on Windows app (added on February 15th 2021)
I know the recent update on Windows Insiders about the Disk Management brought into Settings, but we take a look into the version that exist in 20H2 (accessible in Classic Control Panel at Administrative Tools > Disk Management). Compare it to the File Explorer (despite the fact that Microsoft developed newer File Explorer quietly and include it quietly by tweaking and third party "Files" app in Microsoft Store) also Metro UI Fluent Design based app. I know it's too long to migrate functions to Metro UI Fluent Design based app, but at least Microsoft may not release Windows 10 RTM back in July 2015 as "Windows 10". likely to other name such as "Windows 2015" or "Windows NT 10" or "Windows NT 6.4" if the NT version still 6.4.

If you can give me more info about this, reply and I will mostly answer that and add the edit into with credit

Everything Windows wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:55 pm

I've noticed for a couple thing that makes me feel disturbed while using Windows 10. It's good that they make Windows 10 more modern and more user-friendly. But, I found something very inconsistent for Windows.

1. Old icon
Did you notice something when you look into the .dll files on Windows 10 for choosing an icon for shortcuts. They even still keeping icon from Windows 95, 98, even XP still in it. I don't know why they just got it so

2.App duplication
Everytime I use Windows 10, for listening music, watching videos, and daily stuff. I notice that there are two apps for that :
- Groove Music and Windows Media Player
- Movies/Films & TV and Windows Media Player
- Settings and Control Panel
and so on
No further reason I got from that, If it is for compatibility reason? or just sit there unsued? Placeholder?

If you can give me more info about this, reply and I will mostly answer that and add the edit into with credit

Regarding icons I've noticed that if you look deeply into moricons.dll file, you can see that there are leftovers from Windows 3.1 and Office 2000/XP. About app duplication, I think that's for compatibility reason, though Microsoft eventually will replace Control Panel with Settings.

And then, WMP is not the default out of the box music and video player.
The Windows 10 WMP is identical to the last WMP for Windows 7. There is no major update since a long.

Joet BERNARD wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:15 pm

And then, WMP is not the default out of the box music and video player.
The Windows 10 WMP is identical to the last WMP for Windows 7. There is no major update since a long.

Windows Media Player was last updated in 2009, in the same time as Windows 7 release.

As I know, WMP is not meant to be only for playing media files. With the WMP you can burn or rip Audio CDs, synchronize your music files with portable devices, etc. These capabilities may became unnecessary today (even most computers nowadays don't have an optical drive), but there would be only 3rd party alternative currently for this features in Windows, if the Microsoft removes this app.

Fanta Shokata wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:44 pm

Windows Media Player was last updated in 2009, in the same time as Windows 7 release.

Some features has been removed from that yet, like DVD-playing, etc.

The existence of the Control Panel is almost the same thing, it contains many settings that can't changed yet in the Settings applet, if you want to change these you have to use PowerShell or regedit.

There are many other duplications like this, for example there is Paint, and Paint 3D, or the Snipping Tool and Windows Ink Workspace, Windows Picture Viewer (shimgvw) and the Pictures app - but these apps are not the same, even if they look similar at first glance.

I look some kind of tendency in this case. As the smartphones are getting more intuitive, the computers, and Windows has to follow up this trend. The using of a computer is not the same thing as 10 years ago, and the people wants to use super-intuitive, easy-to-use, and clean looking apps, and they just don't need all the capabilities that the old apps can offer. Howewer many of the oldschool power users would hate Windows without these old "legacy" apps, because they're know much more, even if they have a more complicated GUI.

Another reason for keeping these apps, that the modern apps are not perfectly expandable yet - for example you can install video codecs on your PC, and WMP plays more formats, you can install image formats, then Paint, and the Windows Picture Viewer (shimgvw) can open new kind of images. Even some programs and drivers can expand the Control Panel itself (like NVIDIA, Java, ...)

I've read in a different topic, some month ago that "Windows 10 is a system, which is constantly in beta state" - I could maximally agree with this. The new UWP apps are working, but yet, they has to get many and many updates to get closer to their ancestor in knowledge, and capabilities.

Everything Windows wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:55 pm

1. Old icon
Did you notice something when you look into the .dll files on Windows 10 for choosing an icon for shortcuts. They even still keeping icon from Windows 95, 98, even XP still in it. I don't know why they just got it so

As for the icons, the appearance of the Windows is nowadays not so definied by these icons, as it's not necessary to replace all of them to newer.

The biggest rework I guess was done in Windows 95, where almost everything got a new detailed, and uniform icon, and image set. This was kept until the Windows 2000 era with little or small changes. If they kept some icons from Windows 3.1 it should be for compatibility (like moricons.dll).

The next or big change in the icon, and picture set was in Windows XP, where the major of the stuff are changed to a higher color depth, more modern looking version - with keeping the olds icons as low resolution, low color depth versions. You can be convinced of this by opening a DLL from XP by some kind of resource editor. In the system if you are using a 16+ bit color depth display, you mostly find old iconset only in MMC, and the Windows Setup.

The next change was in Windows Vista, where many elements of the Windows (like Control Panel items) dropped the dialog-kind approach, and get a nice web-like UI - which means, that conception of the icons is changed to images in different sizes, to display these UI items. The same as for ribbon in Windows 7 Paint, and WordPad.

As for the icons, many of them has got again an even more higher color resolution version (which sometimes not displayed in the pick icon dialog), and many of appears in new DLLs, that was just not in the system before (like in mmres.dll). Therefore, the first rest of iconset seems unchanged in first glance (like in shell32.dll), but if they pick an XP like icon for a folder for example, there is a high chance that you'll get a newer version of this.

The same goes for Windows 8.x, and 10. The only difference is, the the Metro/UWP apps also more likely needs images than old kinds of icons, and these apps even store these at a different place than some DLLs in Windows folder.

I agree that some kind of iconset maybe seems nowadays odd and obsolete (like moricons.dll, without official DOS app support in x64), but these collections are not so large that they couldn't be kept in the system, for improving compatibility (for old shortcuts, and applications for example).

As to why we see windows 10 alternatices of platforms that are newer; It mostly has to do with compatibility reasons. The best example is Internet Explorer. It has been dead for a while, yet Microsoft can't simply remove it as many companies require IE for their legacy applications. Another reason is that MS would have to do an entire rewriting of an app that probably already exists, meaning they can get away with having both a Settings app and the Control Panel.
Microsoft's vision of trying to completely modernize Windows would require a completely new OS as it is, at least imo.

Kimberly5384 wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:54 pm

As to why we see windows 10 alternatices of platforms that are newer; It mostly has to do with compatibility reasons. The best example is Internet Explorer. It has been dead for a while, yet Microsoft can't simply remove it as many companies require IE for their legacy applications. Another reason is that MS would have to do an entire rewriting of an app that probably already exists, meaning they can get away with having both a Settings app and the Control Panel.
Microsoft's vision of trying to completely modernize Windows would require a completely new OS as it is, at least imo.

If Microsoft wants to make Windows completely modern, then they should create Windows 11.

But at least they don't have to claim the Windows as "Windows 10" if it doesn't really finished yet

Everything Windows wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:55 pm

I've noticed for a couple thing that makes me feel disturbed while using Windows 10. It's good that they make Windows 10 more modern and more user-friendly. But, I found something very inconsistent for Windows.

1. Old icon
Did you notice something when you look into the .dll files on Windows 10 for choosing an icon for shortcuts. They even still keeping icon from Windows 95, 98, even XP still in it. I don't know why they just got it so
< moricons.dll screenshot >

First of all, I love how that out of the inconsistencies in the Windows 10 user interface, most of which are encounterable during normal use, you illustrate a point by showing the icons in a DLL file that's sitting there completely unused since 1995. Yes, icons are a chronic problem for Windows design. Browsing icons in a resource editor is not really representative of the problem, because Windows might not be using a specific icon in a DLL, but they can't just get rid of it, because there is always that one program that used that icon and would break. That's the cause for many issues with Windows - exaggerated compatibility.

Another problem is that user experience stuff usually just hits the commonly used components. With each redesign, that's less and less of the Windows desktop. The big gap between Win32/GDI/USER and UWP is not making this any easier. As an example, see the Control Panel. With the introduction of the Settings app, the Control Panel seems to have been promoted into a power user tool, where the average redesign interval is anywhere between 5 and 20 years:


Hopefully WinUI 3.0 will solve this problem, so we might see classic Windows components taking on Fluent Design in the near future.

Everything Windows wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:55 pm

2.App duplication
Everytime I use Windows 10, for listening music, watching videos, and daily stuff. I notice that there are two apps for that :
- Groove Music and Windows Media Player
- Movies/Films & TV and Windows Media Player
- Settings and Control Panel
- Paint and Paint 3D (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Snipping Tool and Windows Ink Workspace (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Windows Picture Viewer (shimgvw) and the Pictures app (Thanks to shaglonux)
- Internet Explorer (don't entirely sure on this existance) and Microsoft Edge (whatever it's EdgeHTML or Chromium one)
and so on
No further reason I got from that, If it is for compatibility reason? or just sit there unsued? Placeholder?

I think the explanation is very simple. It's always about the older app being there for compatibility purposes (e.g. WIndows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Control Panel) or about the newer app being pretty much a completely different thing (e.g. Paint 3D). Many corporate intranet sites require Internet Explorer. Many drivers come with Control Panel applets for configuration. If you remove either of them, you are just going to make many people angry for no real benefit.

Everything Windows wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:55 pm

3.Design on Windows app (added on February 15th 2021)
I know the recent update on Windows Insiders about the Disk Management brought into Settings, but we take a look into the version that exist in 20H2 (accessible in Classic Control Panel at Administrative Tools > Disk Management). Compare it to the File Explorer (despite the fact that Microsoft developed newer File Explorer quietly and include it quietly by tweaking and third party "Files" app in Microsoft Store) also Metro UI Fluent Design based app. I know it's too long to migrate functions to Metro UI Fluent Design based app, but at least Microsoft may not release Windows 10 RTM back in July 2015 as "Windows 10". likely to other name such as "Windows 2015" or "Windows NT 10" or "Windows NT 6.4" if the NT version still 6.4.

I am not quite sure what you mean by this. The claim that Microsoft created the new File Explorer in Windows 10X by tweaking the third party Files app seems just ridiculous. Also, what would a different name even change? It's just a name.

Fanta Shokata wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 11, 2021 8:08 pm

Kimberly5384 wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:54 pm

As to why we see windows 10 alternatices of platforms that are newer; It mostly has to do with compatibility reasons. The best example is Internet Explorer. It has been dead for a while, yet Microsoft can't simply remove it as many companies require IE for their legacy applications. Another reason is that MS would have to do an entire rewriting of an app that probably already exists, meaning they can get away with having both a Settings app and the Control Panel.
Microsoft's vision of trying to completely modernize Windows would require a completely new OS as it is, at least imo.

If Microsoft wants to make Windows completely modern, then they should create Windows 11.

It might come as a surprise, but this new operating system already exists. It's called Windows 10X.

As you can see, Money and Sports icons still look like Windows 8. I believe Microsoft will update these icons in the near future.

The big take away really is Microsoft can't seem to decide on what direction to go like one example is they keep saying the Snipping Tool is moving to the Windows Store and the classic one will be removed yet it's still in the latest build of Windows 10 as of now. i started to see the message about it moving in version 1803.