Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> IE itself is a thin layer on top of a whole bunch of libraries that a 
> whole lot of other things depend on.

  I think it started with Win98 and went only downhill from there.

  With Win98 MS had this braindead idea that they should make the desktop
and most applications to look&feel like webpages (or at least support making
them so). This, of course, is exactly the wrong direction to go.

  Webpages are very limited in functionality because HTML is very limited
in functionality. There are many, many things you can't implement in a
webpage because HTML was and still is purposefully simple. In a desktop GUI
trying to emulate a webpage is exactly the wrong direction to go, and it
should be the other way around: Webpages should aim to work like desktops,
not the other way around.

  What I really hate about Microsoft's braindead ideas is that most people
seem happy to blindly copy them. Windows 3 had several good design and
behavior decisions which were dropped from subsequent Windowses just for
the sake of change, just for the sake of making it look&feel *different*,
in many cases at the cost of reduced usability.

  Just as an example is the behavior of menus and sub-menus: In Win3 it was
standard practice that if you opened a menu and it had a sub-menu, you had
to click on the name of the sub-menu to open it, and then it stayed open
for as long as you clicked something else.
  Well, MS had this "great" idea to change this behavior from clicking to
hovering instead: Sub-menus open by hovering the sub-menu name and they
close when you unhover. Opening it with hovering is not completely bad
(although it becomes irritating when the sub-menu has something which takes
time to build, such as some of the sub-menus of the context menu of windows
explorer), but closing the sub-menu by unhovering is the most braindead
idea ever. You hover the name of the sub-menu, then start moving the mouse
to the right (or in some cases to the left...) to get to it, accidentally
unhover the name of the sub-menu by accident, and it closes. How this could
ever be a good idea is beyond by comprehension. You have to be really
proficient at aiming with the mouse in order to keep the sub-menu open. Not
all people are.

  Speaking of context menus, that's another step backwards MS took:
Previously you could open a context menu by right-clicking and then,
while keeping the mouse button down, select the item you wanted and then
release the mouse button and it would select it. This was a nice power-user
feature. For example selecting "Back" in a web browser was fast and easy
this way. Just press, move a bit down, release.
  But no, they had to change this. Now you can't do that. You have to press,
then release, then move down, then press, then release. Not a big deal, but
very irritating when you got used to the old behavior. The new behavior is
awkward.

  The biggest problem with this is that everyone is blindly copying these
braindead design decisions everywhere, often even in non-windows software.
For example KDE has the hover-to-open-and-close-submenus idea implemented,
which is irritating.

  Fortunately other systems have yet to copy the most braindead GUI ideas
from MS. For example menus which change contents every time you use them.
(I can't even begin to imagine how anyone could think that's a good idea.
When MS wants to make changes just for the sake of changes, just to make
a new Windows look different than the previous one, they will stop at
nothing.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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