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Microsoft Windows IT

Microsoft Reveals New Windows 10 Start Menu in Accidental Internal Leak (theverge.com) 147

Posted by msmash from the oops dept.
Microsoft has accidentally released an internal-only version of Windows 10 to testers, revealing a new Start menu design. From a report: The software giant has distributed Windows 10 build 18947, meant for internal Xbox development, to Windows Insider testers using 32-bit devices. It's an internal-only build from the company's canary branch, and yet Microsoft has published it to all Windows 10 testers whether they're in release preview, fast ring, or even slow ring testing. Thankfully, it's only released to 32-bit systems, which aren't widely used, but it's an embarrassing mistake for Microsoft's Windows 10 testing efforts. This internal build appears to include a new Start menu design, that's very early in testing, without Microsoft's Live Tiles. It's something Microsoft is testing internally, but it's not clear whether Windows 10 will fully drop Live Tiles in the Start menu anytime soon.
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Microsoft Reveals New Windows 10 Start Menu in Accidental Internal Leak More

Microsoft Reveals New Windows 10 Start Menu in Accidental Internal Leak

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  • The Real Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chrpai ( 806494 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:32AM (#58979098) Homepage
    So MSFT accidentally releases a build to all three rings and the headline is start menu related? I'd be far more irritated at the inept release management / deployment practices. What happens when they accidentally release a canary build to everyone insider participant or not??

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @01:41PM (#58980216)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Yea, it's super weird. First, they picked the wrong build. Second, they pushed it to all rings. I wonder, given that it was an xbox build, if it was pushed by someone from the xbox team. I'm guessing release permissions are shared cross-org. Then someone from xbox who doesn't have the experience with the release system had to push something for their own team.. And being from xbox, they also didn't have the proper mentor/training on the system. Since we can't see their internal tools, it could also have bee

    • I'd be far more irritated at the inept release management / deployment practices.

      If you're in one of the rings then you are effectively participating in internal alpha and beta software. You don't get to complain when something changes or an incorrect build gets sent your way.

      What happens when they accidentally release a canary build to everyone insider participant or not??

      Why should anyone care? Maybe their computers will become unusable and they lose all their data. That's what insiders sign up for.

  • My new Win 10 Start Menu (Score:5, Informative)

    by Drethon ( 1445051 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:35AM (#58979114)

    http://www.classicshell.net/ [classicshell.net]

    I want a basic one with no ads or anything I don't stick in it. There may be a way to do this in Win 10, but I prefer to simply use Classic Shell.

    • It would be kind of funny if, after all the bad press around Windows 8 start menu changes and the continued live tile/ad BS that carried over into Windows 10, if Microsoft's relentless telemetry around Windows 10 finally created so much overwhelming data that nobody uses or wants a "live tile" style start menu and Microsoft actually put it back to a basically Windows 7-ish start menu.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:18AM (#58979360)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Open-Shell ( https://github.com/Open-Shell/... [github.com] ) has taken over Classic-Shell, since the original Classic-Shell developer wasn't able to keep up playing "Whack-a-Mole" with MS's bi-annual updates. He's since forked and made his code open sourced since 2013.

        I've been using Classic Shell ever since the development stopped and had no trouble with it. But that is a good point as I'm sure I'll be switching over to Open Shell eventually.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Dec 3rd, 2017 - Classic Shell is no longer actively developed.

      Woo-hoo! Finally a Windows UI that won't change!

  • Is this a reversal or are they standing next to the abyss and taking the next step?

  • Queue outraged UI experts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Code Herder ( 937988 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:44AM (#58979166)
    Just waiting for all the outraged slashdotter hating on the new design that they donâ(TM)t use anyhow because they are using Linux.

    Quote: UI design used to be much better before, none of that flat ui crap. I cant see the buttons in app x even if all the hipsters can!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm no expert but I know I dislike taking up space for the taking up space. Why the hell do I need a gigantic start menu that only displays 20 icons across the 2/3 of 27 inch monitor? That is just fucking ridiculous.

      Personally I am kind of sick of UI designers who do not consider use-case. I do not use my computer the same physical way I use my tablet or phone. It reminds of the terrible attempts to combine a typewriter and a 10 key. And why using a 10 key is not the same as using the numpad.

    • Re:Queue outraged UI experts (Score:5, Funny)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:30AM (#58979450)
      They call themselves "UX" designers now. Aside from polluting the Unix namespace, they will tell you that they are concerned with the whole "User eXperience". As a minimalist I think they are insane and I haven't seen them add value (as in *ever*). I think MOTIF interfaces are better designed than the crap I see on smartphones and "new" operating systems (read: OSX and M$). IMO, Blackbox has the best "start menu". It's a text file and it's super easy to read. It changes when you edit it. It doesn't when you don't.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        I think UX experts make a lot more sense when you are developing applications rather than operating systems, esp when you know new users are going to be interacting with your application.
        • I disagree. I think they are charlatans selling snake oil with very little justification for their ideas or the changes they make. The ones I've worked with have been very technically ignorant and but full on Briggs-Myers about it, unable to see that their advice and ideas are the worst in the room as the rest of us facepalm and sigh a lot. They think they are application experts because they have an a stronger opinion on their favorite color than most people and they just *know* technical folks design terr

          • Re:Queue outraged UI experts (Score:5, Insightful)

            by drew_kime ( 303965 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @02:05PM (#58980366) Journal

            I think they are charlatans selling snake oil with very little justification for their ideas or the changes they make. The ones I've worked with have been very technically ignorant ...

            I worked with a UX guy who was worth his weight in gold. We could always make a UI that made sense to us because we knew what we meant. He would look at it make suggestions that were obvious in retrospect. Not just look-and-feel, we'd change workflow based on his feedback.

            Good UX people are like good managers: Rare enough that most developers think they don't exist. But when you get one you know.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            The flip side of that is I have worked with a lot of technical people who think they know what 'users' want because it is what they personally like and are unable to see their advice and ideas are the worst in the room.

    • Quote: UI design used to be much better before, none of that flat ui crap. I cant see the buttons in app x even if all the hipsters can!

      Your attempt at irony kind of falls flat when it's literally 100% true.

      • Once you get used to flat design it's really not a problem. You just have to think flat, instead of looking for buttons. One of my monitors has virtual/capacitive buttons and the problem with them isn't that they're flat, it's that they didn't make the text contrast enough because what's the point of making the interface flat if it isn't beautiful? And that's what's actually wrong with modern interfaces, not enough contrast. I scarcely miss the button outlines, which really do just make things cluttered on

        • IMO: When I can't tell whether s.t. is a button or just a piece of text, there's s.t. wrong with the inyerface. The first few times (I'm a slow learner) I saw the third factor authentication page at my college's login, one of the colored areas said "Enter passcode". Ok, I began typing it...nothing. I clicked in the box next to the colored area and typed...nothing. Turns out you have to *first* click on the words "Enter passcode" in the colored area (which is a flat button, apparently), *then* you can cl

          • From your description, the only thing fundamentally wrong with that interface — and don't get me wrong, it is horribly, massively wrong — is the inability to directly select the field and type. And if it's the only field on the page, they really ought to go ahead and select it for you.

  • Live tiles were less than a half-measure. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:44AM (#58979168)

    Live tiles were created as part of a strategy to try and cross-market and brand between Windows phones and Windows computers.

    They were trying to be the indispensable interface that everyone was supposed to love and be unable to live without - same everywhere, functionality you can use whenever.

    The problem is that using them both on a touchscreen phone, and on a desktop with a mouse, you start to realize how utterly clumsy and feature-poor the basic phone experience really is.

    That psychological effect of seeing how bad phones 'felt' meant that folks got a negative impression of Windows phones - along with the usual distrust of Microsoft in general.

    Apple did better in having a different OS interface for a while - where computer users weren't hampered with making their computers feel like phones. That meant there was no bad feeling comparing feel of both devices.

    Throwing away the live tiles now seems like a very good idea.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re:Live tiles were less than a half-measure. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:33AM (#58979462) Homepage Journal

      The basic idea of tiles isn't awful - in many ways it's what people were doing anyway with a desktop full of icons. But somehow Microsoft managed to miss the most basic, fundamental point about them.

      People develop spacial memory for where things are.

      The "suggestions" list is randomly ordered, so you have to scan it every time. The alphabetical list changes every time you install something, so you have to scan it, and 80% of the stuff on there you never use anyway. It barely works on a fresh install, and the more you have installed the more useless it becomes.

      And just to make scanning the icons a bit harder, they made them all black and white. Monochrome can be good if the symbol is very simple, but the Microsoft ones are pretty complex.

      Phones basically solved this a decade ago. Arrange your own icons, throw in a search box, and an alphabetical list as a last resort. Everything else is BS, a mere distraction at best.

      • Phones basically solved this a decade ago. Arrange your own icons, throw in a search box, and an alphabetical list as a last resort. Everything else is BS, a mere distraction at best.

        Windows95 basically solved this two decades ago. Arrange your own icons, throw in a search box, and an alphabetical list as a last resort. Everything else is BS, a mere distraction at best.

        There. Fixed it for ya.

      • The basic idea of tiles isn't awful - in many ways it's what people were doing anyway with a desktop full of icons. But somehow Microsoft managed to miss the most basic, fundamental point about them.

        Well, to me, the biggest thing they are missing is their complete "We don't give a damn about screwing up your system" attitude. They need to lose that tude. But back to the tiles.

        Yes, tiles are sort of similar to desktop icons as you note. Only kind of random, and I pick what I want on the desktop, not they place something there that I have to get rid of. As well, those people I know who put everything on the desktop would never be able to emulate that in tiles.

        So I hope that the new look tiles can

        • " The alphabetical list changes every time you install something, so you have to scan it,"

          Perhaps I'm missing the point, as I rarely open that menu, but what exactly would you expect an alphabetized list to do when you install a new program?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

        Microsoft pioneered a lot of research into UI usability. But they forgot everything their research taught them. A great example is that when changed MS Outlook from icons-only to icons+text, based on the research, 10+ years ago. Well in the most recent update to outlook, they switched it back, undoing years of UI progress. [uxmyths.com]

      • Arrange your own icons

        No, that's not a good design. Programs should be automatically organized in categories. Like this. [linuxmint.com]

    • Live tiles were well researched in both psychology and UX. It wasnâ(TM)t just to unify the phone and PC. This was an era when touch-screens were suddenly becoming a thing in laptops, and Microsoft was losing market share to the iPad for consumption of information (web surfing, newspapers, etc). So the Surface and Surface Pro began, in addition to providing touch services on general touch screen laptops. The resolution on touch devices wasnâ(TM)t even as good at the time, and so the tiles were mayb

      • Live tiles were well researched in both psychology and UX. It wasnâ(TM)t just to unify the phone and PC.

        And howbow that successful world changing Wondows Phone? If it was so well researched, there would be no reason that it would need changed now. Asd well, did teh reseaarch show that the previous UI - the one that worked so well for earlier systems was bad? Why did everyone hate W95 through W7 UI's,

        Seems that that earlier interface had it's part in Microsoft's success. But for some reason, people must have hated it, but kept their mouths shut.

        Now what I think a lot of people don't know about MacOS is th

        • > a company that at present offers 8 different versions of Windows 10

          They offer ?8? SKUs of Windows 10. There is only one Windows 10 code base and product. They add active directory domains and other enterprise features to charge more to corporations and provide a cheaper product to end users. Other than that the other SKUs are regulators doing their thing by unbundling Microsoft software (while allowing Apple and Google to do it).

          • > a company that at present offers 8 different versions of Windows 10

            They offer ?8? SKUs of Windows 10. There is only one Windows 10 code base and product. They add active directory domains and other enterprise features to charge more to corporations and provide a cheaper product to end users. Other than that the other SKUs are regulators doing their thing by unbundling Microsoft software (while allowing Apple and Google to do it).

            What's your point? A company that goes to the very trouble that you describe, should offer a choice. Unix can do it, I have baked in choices on my Macs, I can implement it easily on my Linux machines depending on my distro.

            On my Windows machines, it's an ongoing fight. And rather than build yet another UI, I'd prefer that Microsoft work on fixing what their updates do to people's computers. Right now, my group is dealing with W10 updates renaming all the sound drivers to the first one it finds, and serial

    • Live tiles were created as part of a strategy to try and cross-market and brand between Windows phones and Windows computers.

      They were trying to be the indispensable interface that everyone was supposed to love and be unable to live without - same everywhere, functionality you can use whenever.

      The problem is that using them both on a touchscreen phone, and on a desktop with a mouse, you start to realize how utterly clumsy and feature-poor the basic phone experience really is.

      That psychological effect of seeing how bad phones 'felt' meant that folks got a negative impression of Windows phones - along with the usual distrust of Microsoft in general.

      Apple did better in having a different OS interface for a while - where computer users weren't hampered with making their computers feel like phones. That meant there was no bad feeling comparing feel of both devices.

      Throwing away the live tiles now seems like a very good idea.

      Ryan Fenton

      The first step I always take upon creating a new Win 10 profile is to unpin (delete) all the tiles and drag the right edge of the menu all the way to the left. It actually becomes quite nice at that point.

    • "you start to realize how utterly clumsy and feature-poor the basic phone experience really is": Well, if you're having trouble using your thumbs on your desktop, you should get a swipe keyboard. Adapt. It's New, and therefore Better.

      (In case someone was taken in by Poe's Law, I am in agreement with Ryan about the (non-)benefits of the Same Interface Everywhere.)

  • Vista and Me at least had sensible start menus. It remains to be seen if the phone ui on desktop fad truly goes away, but it looks like it is happening slowly.

  • Revert Revert Revert (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just put the damn Windows XP or Windows 7 style menu back and be done with it. Let the users customize folders and shortcut icons in a hierarchy. Get rid of all of the other crap. What's so hard about it? 99% of the time when I click the "Start" button, it is because I have in mind a very specific program I want to launch. Why put all this other shit to get in the way of that? Why not let me organize them how I want? Ridiculous. Yes, I use Classic Shell... because the alternative is intolerable.

    • Better yet, just put the Server 2008 UI on top of Win10's internals.
      Call the SKU "Windows 10 old fart edition", I don't even care.

  • Phones are the future! Giant icons for everyone! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fuck the billions of people who have actual computers. Phones are the new hot thing. Make the computers look like a phone! Make the icons big, goddamnit! I want that 30" screen to look exactly like the 4" screen I have in my pocket. Twelve goddamn icons is all my phone can display, so that's all the computer should display. I don't care if the icons are larger than a legal pad as a result, just get it done!

  • A good start (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:52AM (#58979224)

    Now get rid of the entire garbage UWP subsystem. Gigabytes of wasted space for useless fullscreen apps with no functionality.

  • Continues to function in windows 10, that is what I'll continue to use. MS is just pushing people more and more into Linux. I find myself using Linux Mint more and more.
  • I still like and use the Windows 7-style start menu using Open Shell (which is a fork of Classic Shell): https://github.com/Open-Shell/... [github.com]

    Never had any use for the tiles on Windows 10, and this doesn't look much more useful.
  • I feel like most M$ users at this point have total Stockholm Syndrome. They aren't going anywhere no matter how many advertisements show up in their start menu, no matter how much telemetry is sent, and no matter how many times they get hit with ransomware. They luuuuv that shit. They can't get enough abuse. Nothing is going to keep them from humping Microsoft's leg. Apple fanboys are just as bad. Both groups get physically ill and offended when they see my dumbphone. Fools.

  • Its crazy how screwed up microsoft is on this. Its like having to learn how to drive a car again ever few years. If microsoft made cars they would constantly be moving around the brake pedal and accelerator in order to appear new and relevant. I know you can install third party menu systems but screw that. Thank goodness I only have to work on their crap at work.

  • Am I missing something in this screenshot, or is there not a list of software on the machine? Does this mean I have root through all these pictures to find what I want? The pictures don't even seem to be in alphabetical order.

  • Please drop live tiles. That was a bad idea, and is the first thing I turn off on any new Windows build, even before installing an alternate browser. They're bulky and distracting and have very little function besides cuteness.

    If you want to bring back something "cute", I wouldn't mind seeing a return to the Aero look and feel -- rounded corners, transparency.

    Metro has always struck me as a giant step backwards. Like anyone my age, I like some retro things, but not that.

    You could make it easy to return t

  • My top-of-the-line Windows computer will be made to look like an early 2000's Blackberry. I should say thanks?

    Window Vista/7's Aero harnessed the power of modern PCs and was beautiful and modern-looking. What happened in the past few years??

    Oh, and this is real and where Microsoft is going. Just look at the latest version of the ribbon in Office 365. Same monochromatic ugliness.

  • With the current version you can't just click the Start button and start typing "Server Management" otherwise it loses keystrokes. Apparently you have to click the Start button, wait up to five seconds for everything to finish drawing, then type "Server Management". Much easier to just keep a Server Management icon on the Desktop or the Task Bar.

    In the spirit of Microsoft "Innovation" the next version will support Dark Mode by putting black program icons and names on a dark grey background, being almost com

  • and it's still not a Mac.

  • Beat this: (Score:3)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @06:48PM (#58982016)
    In windows 95 through Windows 7, I could launch any program on the machine from the start menu in ONE CLICK. Now Microsoft is just wasting our time.

  • It is redundant to describe an "embarrassing mistake" and "Microsoft's Windows 10 testing efforts"

  • Wait, internal testers like MS' QA testers that they got rid of in the past?

  • gnome? (Score:2)

    by sad_ ( 7868 )

    it looks like Gnome3 ! *rofl*

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