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).
