Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die
- Reference: 1725265813
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/09/02/microsoft_control_panel_opinion/
- Source link:
Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard [1]READ MORE
A living fossil in the platform's user interface, it is many things, none of them good. A direct link to the DOS app called Windows 1.0, its 40-year mission to give users the power to really muck things up, is finally ending in well-deserved ignominy.
There is still a [2]lot of affection for the Control Panel , especially among those who've spent time for pleasure or profit making Windows do what it's damn well told. You may have felt the thrill of wizardry as you right-clicked on that driver entry sporting the Tiny Yellow Triangle Of Shame. Mastering the focal point of the machine's inner working was a rite of passage for many – and, of course, there has to be that focal point, right?
That's never been true, though. The idea of the Control Panel is one of those concepts that seemed so obviously true that nobody questioned it. That it was never true is plain from Microsoft's continued struggle to make it work. It's a list. It's a window of applets. It's the lizard brain hiding behind the more evolved Settings. It knows nothing at all about that oddly enormous configuration application your new peripheral just installed. And have you met Regedit, the truly scary monster in the basement?
Even when the panel was at the height of its importance, its idea of categories may not help. It's easy to mock untutored users who don't know how to make text bigger on screen, but let those cast the first stone who have never sworn mightily at Windows going to sleep when you don't want it to.
[3]
Conversely, the panel bestows too much power on the hapless. An individual function may have a safety feature, such as monitor settings that auto-revert when a tweak has made everything invisible, but this understanding never seeped in deep enough to create a general undo for all changes. Giving ordinary users the power to completely mess up a computer may be good for support's beer fund, but that's not the idea.
[4]
[5]
The Control Panel, in short, has always been a dangerous, delusional fiction. You may be able to go there to control things, or you may not. It is a symbol of the industry's abduction of high-level design thinking about low-level functions. Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996. Having the Control Panel still around is like driving a Tesla with a set of spanners in the frunk.
The final exorcism of the Control Panel doesn't fix much, though. It will just mean that Microsoft has found out how to shoehorn the last vestigial functions into Settings, and Settings retains much of the ambiguity, frustration, and dangers of its forebears, albeit with search, which will help a bit when the contents, structure, and vocab of your Settings menu has changed since the advice you need was written.
[6]
This is true for everyone, not just Microsoft, across everything from desktops through phones to smart devices. The only exception is Linux, not because it's any better than the rest, but if you buy that motorcycle, you best learn to drive it.
[7]Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play
[8]LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape
[9]The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world
[10]Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy
Breaking out of the Control Panel and Settings mindset is hard, because it's always been that way. Go back to first principles, and there are other paths available. These things exist because you need to change your device's behavior, either to make it do something you want it to do or not do something you don't. Virtually all devices that fall into the hands of users and have a Settings menu share the same basic set of features – a screen, some sort of I/O, connectivity, storage – that the user might want to explicitly access. Yet there is no common ontology of this common space. You can't take one device that's misbehaving and ask it to learn from one that's good. You can't save your preferred behaviors in your Microsoft, Apple or Google profile, to give to new or sulky devices.
Without a shared, structured way of describing internal settings, there is no way forward. Trawling the web for solutions to a settings issue will remain tedious, manual, and painfully error-prone. With a machine readable semiotics of machine behavior, that sort of task can fall within the capabilities of whatever assistant your platform supports.
Try asking your device for any awareness of its own internal state right now, and it's like asking a toddler about mindfulness.
If you mourn the passing of the Control Panel for nostalgia, fair enough. If you think its demise is a sin against computing, you're a hyper-proficient mammal in a dying niche. If you think it's a good reason to re-examine some basic assumptions that never worked well and are just getting worse, there's hope for us all.
[11]
Sometimes, getting out of control is the only way forward. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/22/windows_control_panel_deprecation/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/27/the_windows_control_panel_joins/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZtWMxLR9G-kEi4ImCoM1TQAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZtWMxLR9G-kEi4ImCoM1TQAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZtWMxLR9G-kEi4ImCoM1TQAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZtWMxLR9G-kEi4ImCoM1TQAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/sorry_moxie_blaming_agile_for/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/12/opinion_column/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/opinion_ml_social_media_cybersecurity/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/29/opinion_column_space/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZtWMxLR9G-kEi4ImCoM1TQAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: well that was crap
This looks a lot like what we called "engagement bait" in less reputable places...
Even if it isn't, my first thought was "this is calculated to piss off the readers of this website".
Huh? If m/s have decided it's a good time for bad UI to die, why aren't we going back to the windows 7 UI? Because that was so much better than windows 10/11.
What this article means is microsoft have decided everything should look like a dull and lifeless web page and to kill of usual visual prompts, but aren't actually dealing with what needs to be dealt with - such as storing user settings outside of the registry so that when you update your machine, reinstall your favourite gam-err-software and restore everything from backup, you don't have to go through various voodoo rituals to get things working again.
And it's not like settings actually makes it easier to find anything. Because it doesn't.
I'm not sure what the author of the article is drinking, But it should probably be prescription only.
"And it's not like settings actually makes it easier to find anything. Because it doesn't."
That's even if the setting you want has actually been implemented in Settings...
Your settings are saved outside the registry, in the MS cloud where "they" want them
Drivel
What a rambling diatribe of a rant. Nothing to do with UI. Bring back AI-generated articles, at least they might have a this is better because... section.
Opinions are like arseholes…
… and like many others, Robert, yours stinks!
"it is many things, none of them good"
Oh right, so the mess that is the Settings App is better, is it?
Utter bullshit.
If Microcrap really decided that the "bad UI" should die, we'd be back on the Windows 7 interface immediately with none of the crappy leftovers from the awful Windows 8 debacle.
This article is weird and hard to understand. I get that the author disliked the Control Panel and dislikes the new Settings UI.
After that, the author seems to be telling me that he has a better idea, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is or even what it looks like.
My suggestion would be to find something that exists and that works the way the author likes, so that we have a real-world example of it.
And if it turns out there's nothing out there that matches, well, that would also tell something.
Seems like allowing the user to save settings in the MS/Apple/Google account which are then automatically applied when logging into a new computer. Already done in a way with Windows user profiles in enterprises, but difficult to do fully since many settings are per device instead of per user.
To sum up
Control Panel is bad because:
1. Control Panel didn't contain all settings and wasn't really a central place to go for all fixes
I guess I might end up in Regedit occasionally but Control Panel usually does pretty well, unlike the new Settings
2. Users could break their PCs using Control Panel
Users will break their PCs with or without Control Panel. In my long support career Control Panel misuse never registered as a blip on the chart of things user's get wrong.
3. 3rd party peripheral settings apps don't get added to control panel
I'd say this is HPs fault (or your sound card manufacturer). The manufacturer's advanced settings app often pops up when you open the related Control Panel app though.
4. Central settings apps shouldn't exist because of an unspecified 'better way'
Having one place to go to for all system settings sounds like a great idea to me (even if Control Panel never quite managed that). Having my devices store their config in the cloud so all of my devices can use that config is the type of setting I would immediately switch off on new machines.
5. At least the new Settings app has search
Yes - a search that requires you to know the exact name Microsoft has given the setting you are seeking, which negates the usefulness of a search.
Tesla
Fromt what I read, having a spanner with a Tesla is potentially a good idea
Re: Having a spanner with a Tesla
is a great idea even if it is just to disconnect the 12v battery and reconnect it again when the computer gets its knickers in a twist.
I had to do that with my Model Y on Saturday. Just turning it off and on didn't fix it but a 12v disconnect/reconnect worked a treat.
Settings vs Contol Panel
What I hate about settings is that a lot of things that should be easy to see are not, often buried between many depths of sub pages before you hit a dead end and have to go back and try again.
I do like the search option as that works reasonably well.
This reads like the author had a highly traumatic experience within Control Panel / Regedit once upon a time, and never received the post-Windows care that is still needed.
Don't worry mate, we've all been there, but to blame the tools for the underlying mess, or the flack received after the overseeing manager didn't get what he wanted, is not the solution.
I get the impression that this particular Author has never been a sysadmin. In fact he almost comes across as a mac user
I strongly suggests he reads the article from Richard Speed Tue 27 Aug 2024 // 12:16 UTC
and reads the comments to see just how far of base he really is with this one.
Default User is Administrator
I find one of the biggest bugbears trying to support friends and family is that the default user account is administrator. SO all kind of things get installed and settings changed without a thought. If a password had to be entered every time a potentially serious change is made it might concentrate the mind. Several friends simply have one account, administrator, called "User" with no password at all!
Re: Default User is Administrator
Then you'd just get morons unable to install anything, and losing passwords to the administrator account.
Why no article on the renaming of Remote Desktop
Remote Desktop is becoming Windows App
Yes, really
MS has history of fixing what is not broke
They (and they are not alone here) love fiddling with UI's just for the hell of it.. Some jerk decides that adding oodles of vertical white space in a control panel is a good thing. Yeah right... making us scroll down when we didn't need too before is a productivity gain! In what world/dimension are these people on.
Windows Server 2008 was about right. After that things got moved around and white space dominated.
I'm so glad that I gave MS the finger in 2016 before everything went to pot with the powershell. One mistake in a patch sent working MSCS clusters into a death spiral.
KISS is probably banned inside the MS gulag.
'Fixing' the control panel, means removing functionality
The control panel can't be fixed because it implements older APIs, to remove all the classic screens by definition means either reimplementing every old piece of hardware/software in the new scheme, or more likely dropping support for them.
There might be some advantage to that, but personally I'd say leave it alone. If you want to use new hardware, use entirely new hardware. Otherwise stay away from the control panel and let people with old hardware continue to use it
Then again, I don't want to move to Windows 11 given the requirements and direction of Windows, the dropping of WMR headset support etc, this is simply another reason not to move.
Bollox
I'm sitting here on my phone whilst my laptop gets another fucking by MS update. If MS spent half as much time not fucking things up instead of concentrating on dumb assed decisions, I'd be a happy boy.. . And a shite sight more productive.
What a stupid article
This article is possibly the worst that I have seen on The Reg in the last 20 years.
Time to replace Rupert Goodwins with someone who has some common sense and computer knowledge.
well that was crap
not sure what the author smoked, seems batshit insane. and seems to like the sound of his own shitty opinions.
nothing but drivel.