It is no secret that Windows 11’s dark mode is undercooked, to put it mildly. While modern parts of the operating system support dark mode and they look fantastic with it, plenty of commonly used UI surfaces and legacy parts are still stubbornly light. Those include common file action dialogs, such as copying/moving progress, deleting prompts, file properties dialog, and more. Nearly four years into Windows 11’s lifecycle, Microsoft is finally fixing that.
↫ Taras Buria at Neowin
Many things about Windows baffle me deeply, but the half-baked, broken “dark” mode must be one of the biggest of them all. Here’s one of the largest, wealthiest companies in the world, and while introduced in 2016, the dark mode in their flagship operating system product is still effectively broken. Nine years into its existence, Windows users finally will no longer be blinded whenever they start a file operation, which is nice, I guess, but I doubt this new push to fix dark mode in Windows will cover everything.
Windows’ dark mode joins the Settings application as one of those things that’s just deeply half-assed in Windows. I find it incredibly hard to believe Microsoft couldn’t have taken like five developers from their “AI” team to comb through Windows years ago to address these issues, so my only conclusion is that they just don’t care. Windows and its user experience just isn’t a priority for the company, and this should really make Windows users reconsider their “choice” of operating system.
> Windows and its user experience just isn’t a priority for the company, and this should really make Windows users reconsider their “choice” of operating system.
As always: not everyone has the luxurious position of being able to avoid windows.
> Windows’ dark mode joins the Settings application as one of those things that’s just deeply half-assed in Windows. I find it incredibly hard to believe Microsoft couldn’t have taken like five developers from their “AI” team to comb through Windows years ago to address these issues,
Those five were put on maintaining the windows upgrade experience at the quality we have all come to appreciate.
I’ll show myself out now.
Mote,
Large organizations will have very different incentive structures. Multiple forces in there will make this almost impossible.
First AI engineers are not cheap. They would cost 2x your average coder, just for the sticker alone.
Second, the leadership in charge of the AI org will not give up “5 of their developers”.
And finally, the developers themselves will reject it. If given menial work, they can easily get an offer at Meta or some other place and work on something “exciting”
That is why engineers are not “fungible”. They have their own expertise, and don’t want to lose focus.
What I don’t quite understand is Windows XP had theming support, lost starting with Vista for “Aero”, and there was literally tons of “themes” that were fully dark (remember UXTheme Patch ?). So why breaking something that works ?
Maybe because :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w28WYueCzq0
Back in the Windows 95 days I used a slightly sepia-tinted theme for the OS. It made it abundantly clear which programs (and which specific dialog boxes within them) were using the system colors, and which hard-coded light gray, assuming that was always going to be the background color.
Microsoft did a full ground-up rebuild of the kernel and underpinnings of Windows, with Windows Vista, a project that is still paying dividends today (Windows 11 is basically Vista in a trenchcoat).
Microsoft need to get their best UI and application developers together, and start a skunkworks project to rip out all the old Windows UI and start afresh. I want Windows 13 to be a perfect re-imagining of Windows. Heck, if it’s less schizophrenic i’d pay money for it.
We need a modern day “Win95”. Something groundbreakingly pretty, consistent, and usable. No legacy Ui cruft. Just a clean, modern interface, futureproofed for any theming changes Microsoft decide to do to keep Windows “relevant” for the next 25 years. Of course backwards compatibility is a must, but i feel a lot of that can largely be done with API wrappers. I’m not even too bothered if my 25 year old app still looks 25 years old, as long as the out-of-the-box OS doesn’t look like something from the last century in places.
We have that – it’s called Linux. Bazzite, or Fedora, or Arch, or any of the modern distros – they are all more solid than ever before, and only improving. Wine is also relatively mature. The time has never been better to stop using a product for which Microsoft doesn’t even have a dedicated maintenance team, let alone a proper product team. If Microsoft doesn’t care about Windows, why should any of us?
Windows 13? You don’t know about the way MS releases windows versions? bad, good, bad, good, etc? 10 was good, 11 is bad, hopefully 12 will be good again, and 13 will be bad again.
kwanbis,
You’re right about the cyclic trends, but something we should keep in mind with these cycles is that clever social engineering lets microsoft keep antifeatures introduced in a bad cycle around even in good cycles. Make WXYZ worse in a bad cycle, then “fix” XYZ in a good cycle and viola it’s a “good” release even though W transforms windows into a worse platform long term.
I believe the W of our time are online dependencies, advertising, and tracking. Almost everyone hates this, but much like cable TV it creeps in and refuses to let go. Even the streaming services who’s appeal was breaking away from the cable-tv model have themselves succumbed to it. These nasty seeds planted into windows will grow and become worse long term despite good/bad cycles.
They surely won’t do a 13 version, they skipped the 9 version entirely;
The123king,
They tried it, and did not work.
Remember the XP mode in Windows 7? They had a clean new UI, and older apps would run in a VM which would be integrated into the new desktop. (You could have single apps act as if they were on the main OS).
It was slow and clunky.
Maybe the containerization of WIndows might allow it in the future. But today, people prefer to run programs natively. Which means keeping all the cruft that has been gathering for decades in the operating system.
It is not only about the looks, but also the behavior as well. I occasionally run into programs that behave exactly like 1995. They don’t properly scale on HiDPI (still assumed 800×600 on a 4K monitor), uses fixed positioning for variable system fonts (text is basically illegible), scrollbars and other controls act “the old way” — this is consistent with their expectation, but breaks the usual UX flow in my desktop, and of course look out of place.
It is extremely difficult to keep older software running properly on modern desktops. That is why they have a dedicated team for backwards compatibility.
One of the frustrating things about Windows 10/11 is that they are mindbendingly close to being very, very good. Dark mode is something like a textbook example — it’s a good idea, and in the OS areas where it is implemented it is implemented very well. You can say the same thing for the Settings app, for Winget, and for drivers managed by Windows Update.
I don’t have an armchair take on why Windows ends up looking and working like it does or how problems with it might be fixed, but I suspect that the issue is something other than unwillingness to commit developer hours to fixing e.g. Dark Mode or Settings. I’ll bet a dollar that there is some kind of contract or agreement that says something like “X interface must continue to look Y way for 10 years so that Z customer’s documentation does not need to be updated during that period.”
It likely has nothing to do with any official policy, but rather to do with prioritizing new features and bling over messing with old ones. This is a typical problem with large software projects, regardless of whether they have huge amounts of resources or not. The new “user stories” always take precedence, while any maintenance work or technical debt tends to stay in the backlog indefinitely.
Brainworm,
I would suggest, they do lack product focus. They used to have it back in Bill G times. But today releasing new features is more important than polishing them.
@Moochman is right here.
The underlying cause is the 80/20 rule. I personally had so many “complete” projects that took months to polish, I have learned to distinguish between “done” and “really done”.
Yes, you might hit all the required features and pass the tests. But that is just a milestone. The actual finishing of the project comes after tedious real life testing, polish, finding and fixing bugs… and only then you can release it.
But that would mean delaying the feature for the next, or next next release which could take anywhere from 3 months to a year. No engineer can do that in some organizations without taking a hit to their performance reviews.
The company culture needs to not only avoid punishing “polish” but also encourage it.
sukru,
I can tell you’ve never worked in the industry.
I’m joking of course, I hope you can take that in jest 🙂
I understand your point that perfectionism means you never get anything done, but it’s hard to see any of the giant corporations in that light. They all seem to chase trends while cutting corners to minimize costs. Maybe they should slow down a bit and release something better. But I know it’s tough when there’s deadlines, budget hawks, etc. I concede it’s wishful thinking on my part, but as a consumer I’d love for them to slow down and focus more on quality and longevity and stop trying to rush products to shelves. Wallstreet has very different ideas though, and they generally call the shots.
Alfman,
Unfortunately, yes, this is an industrywide phenomenon, and very few can escape this.
And it is driven by all levels, top to bottom. For example, which one would look better on your resume?
1 – “I have successfully implemented a machine learning based ranking system for Product ABC, increasing engagement by X%, and daily-active-users by Y%, without sacrificing quality”
2 – “I have identified and measured a long standing bug where certain sources were under-ranked in our Product DEF. Designed and implemented a solution where high quality source representation increased from XX% to YY%”
Now, both are them are good. But one of them will be liked more by recruiters and potential hiring managers.