Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.
Nothing. Those are just touch ups of the Win95 UI. Smoother color gradients from using more colors and smoother animation.
XP was the next big change. Never liked it. Felt like I was dragging around bitmaps. It’s “heavily” for no reason - no usability improvement nor does it even look that good.
Edit: Oh right I forgot about Active Desktop and MS’s attempt to turn Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer. Not a fan of it but at least it didn’t impair usability that much. Visually it still use the same “language”.
Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer, for one thing.
But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself.
With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.
If I remember correctly turning off active desktop on 98 was almost a requirement if you wanted a ... I was going to say stable system but lets be real this was 98 the best you could hope for was a sort of stable system.
It can be turned off, but it can't be turned off. It's still there, lurking just around the corner, and still showing up in some dialogs.
And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation.
I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I remember all sorts of "improvements" over Windows 95, such as sliding menus, "shiny" icons that draw attention to themselves, "shiny" gradient title bars, and so on.
The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.
Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
I do not use Windows 98 as my daily driver, and I can't give you precise examples.
But I know that many areas of the OS, such as parts of the Control Panel, like the Display control panel require, load into memory, and include IE modules.
> I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of Win95.
The left area was used for information like file size, disk usage, and image preview. There have been better implementations. But Windows 98 could suit either preference.
Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.
