Microsoft Has Scrapped Edge's Big UI Refresh With Rounded Tabs (windowscentral.com) 53
Microsoft has abandoned plans to overhaul its Edge browser interface, scrapping the design choice unveiled in February 2023. The redesign -- featuring a sleeker look with rounded tab buttons and increased blur effects -- aimed to give Edge a distinct identity as the company pushed into AI services. The new design never officially launched and the company has no intention to launch it later, according to Microsoft-focused news outlet Windows Central.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Windows Central that the company is moving away from the rounded tabs concept. Some elements of the redesign will remain, including webpage borders and a repositioned user button, but the majority of the proposed changes have been shelved. The decision marks a retreat from Microsoft's efforts to visually differentiate Edge from Google Chrome and align it with Windows 11's design language.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Windows Central that the company is moving away from the rounded tabs concept. Some elements of the redesign will remain, including webpage borders and a repositioned user button, but the majority of the proposed changes have been shelved. The decision marks a retreat from Microsoft's efforts to visually differentiate Edge from Google Chrome and align it with Windows 11's design language.
Edge (Score:3)
I don't see how there's any edge at all if it's just the same product but worse.
Economic loss due to UX need to recreate (Score:3)
What's the 15 year economic loss due to UX needing to recreate, redesign, recolor, and otherwise neverendingly change things which have limited or minimal impact on the product's users?
One has to question, where is the diminishing returns line in UX changes?
How much extra electricity is used worldwide by Microsoft or Apple pushing out a trivial UX change to a widely used app?
Community suggestion (Score:2)
Community suggestions: Start calling UX reskins as "uncompelling non-features" when you discuss products, upgrades and timelines.
Hopefully, vendors will come around to not pushing "UX reskin" as the main feature for a release as has been done by Microsoft and others for the last decade.
Skins, UX changes, etc are no compelling features. If your company pays $10,000,000 a year in maintenance for a Microsoft product, getting only a UX reskin and a token trivial feature and a to be unused integration hardly wa
Re:Community suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not minimal impact. Every UI change makes it harder for the user, either only at first to learn the change, or always because the change is counterproductive.
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Yes what is the economic cost of moving settings to different places, changing icons. Say even if you it only takes the average user 10 minutes to adjust, which I think is way to small, multiply that across 2 billion users that's 100 million hours wasted. That doesn't even include all the documentation/videos that on the internet that needs to updated, the wasted time that results in finding some documentation that doesn't quite apply to your version. Or the real problem it causes for old people who have di
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The economic benefit is that consumers like shiny and new. If it looked like Windows XP, while it may be functional it wouldn't encourage people to upgrade.
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Flamebait? Really? C'mon moderators - thoughtful expression of an opinion which happens not to coincide with yours is NOT a justification for downmodding.
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"Our suck is prettier suck"
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It's "sleeker" (Score:2)
Floating tabs (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad MS abandoned that idea. Now if only Mozilla would come around and abandon it too on Firefox.
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Glad MS abandoned that idea. Now if only Mozilla would come around and abandon it too on Firefox.
Just an hour or two ago I made some userChrome mods to make FF less sucky. Now it's a little less sucky, but still not good. The FF user complaints that I read while looking for userChrome mods, in combination with your comment, led me to a realization.
I really believe - and I'm not being sarcastic here - that Mozilla devs go out of their way to make UI changes with the express purpose of pissing off their users. Their behaviour in this matter has been so utterly consistent, for so many years, that I can no
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Sunken cost - we've spent all this time and effort developing this thing, so we're releasing it regardless of whether it's a good move or not, and
arrogance - I made a decision and we're sticking to it.
A stroke of genius? (Score:3)
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Our genius PHB spent the budget painting the walls instead of replacing a clunky leaky app. The PHB is close to retirement such that if the app bursts, they'll just retire instantly. The kiss-up math is that the paint job is definitively visible and makes them look like a "doer", but the leaky app only has say a 20% of bursting any year, so the PHB did play the logical odds: kiss-up math "works" on superficial humans.
"Windows 11 design language" (Score:2)
Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
So, Microsoft could make things faster, or they could make them more secure, or they could change whether corners are round or not. Hey MS, priorities.
And, if there's a debate as to how a UI element should look..... just make it a user preference.
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i mean rounded corners was supposed to be the security feature to take the edge off a bit...
that is called security by design, but now we are left with same old sharp edges.
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UI/UX fluff is window dressing execs can wrap their head around, so they fret about it a lot more than nebulous stuff like "performance" which isn't easily measured by subjective means.
But a new UI change? Your colleagues can tell you over drinks at the executive off site, "hey I heard your redesign really bombed, way to fuck that up"
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I do not think MS can make things more secure. And they probably know that. So they try to woo people with irrelevant detail.
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I feel like Microsoft has completely given up on trying to make things better.
Who purposely uses Edge? (Score:2)
It gets launched here but only because it's hard coded for certain situations.
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"Who purposely uses Edge?" - the same people that purposely use Windows 11. You know, the Sheople.
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"Who purposely uses Edge?" - the same people that purposely use Windows 11. You know, the Sheople.
I would counter that the many people who use Windows 11 most likely do it because it came with their computer when they bought it, and/or if you are like me in a professional environment, that nearly all of your daily-use software is written for Windows only and there is simply no alternative.
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Yep, hence, you are part of the { set:Sheople }
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Yep, hence, you are part of the { set:Sheople }
Those who have Windows on their own personal-use computers might, in some circumstances, legitimately be called "sheople". Those whose choice is between using Windows and being unemployed, are not necessarily Sheople.
Re: Who purposely uses Edge? (Score:2)
At work I can use chrome or edge. Edge is standard. Chrome is even more irritating with more ads and is the same engine underneath anyway, so I use edge.
Um.... (Score:2)
how about stop treating eber ui redesign (Score:2)
make the tabs go to the top damn it (Score:3)
I'm tired of grabbing the window when I'm trying to grab a tab and drag it out into its own window.
Microsoft UI designers are universally ass clowns.
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I'm tired of grabbing the window when I'm trying to grab a tab and drag it out into its own window.
Microsoft UI designers are universally ass clowns.
They always have been. It just has become more noticeable. MS is really looking older and more incapable every day.
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Windows consistently had the best default-configured mouse GUI there was from Windows 95 through Windows 7. Their operating system was defective in many other ways, and still is, and is now also defective in that way. I would say that Windows 7 was the peak, in that it was all of attractive, easy to use, reliable, and powerful. They never did quite nail search, but they've gone backwards on that as well with inscrutable GUI changes to... save screen space? At a time when we have more pixels than ever? Sigh.
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Yep. When I recently talked with a coworker and mentioned that MS stiff does decrease productivity these days, he just said "I wish I could contradict you". I agree that Win7 was pretty reasonable. Had they stayed on that path, they may have eventually gotten a good OS. But not so. Their stuff is getting worse, compared to the state-of-the art.
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Microsoft UI designers are universally ass clowns.
This isn't Microsoft UI designers. It's a whole world of trend following UI designers. It's like a lobotomy is a mandatory component of whatever degree these waste of braincells have.
Bike-shedding (Score:3)
This seems like bike-shedding raised to an industrial level.
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Indeed. This is just irrelevant crap, at best.
What kind of crap "news" is this? (Score:2, Troll)
It seems Microsoft has nothing to offer that actually has relevance...
I liked my FIREFOX rounded tabs (Score:2)
I was sad to see them go. For a while I was able to bring them back by editing the (FireFox) chrome files, but alas, that's also gone...
Would have I switched to Edge for rounded tabs? No, but it wouild have made the experience of using it as an alternate browser for stuborn sites (like one of my banks) more palatable.
2 years of work... (Score:2)
border-radius: 20% 20% 0 0;
1 year later, after daily meetings of belly filling with lots of back patting, Team Tab-Rounders realized that they would no longer have a job if they delivered on their difficult task:
People want "just a browser" (Score:2)
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Internet exploder lasted because people are dumb. They could get a better browser any time. Also because some people in charge are dumb, and they chose to use ActiveX instead of Java. Java was no peach at the time but it was still a better call than COM.
aww did I hurt your fee fees? (Score:2)
Microsoft maintained its dominance at the time Aieeee! was relevant through antitrust.
Cry harder, Microsoft fanboy. (How in fuck does such a thing even exist?)
They do have a brain! (Score:1)
Why are apps constantly changing the interface? (Score:3)
Seriously stop it. It's an investment to learn an interface. Stop making me relearn apps over and over. The first one did everything I needed it to.
Instead make the interface modular. So old interfaces and new interfaces all work with the same core app's functionality, and updated security. When you really need a feature that isn't compatible with the interface your know then and that's when your motivated to learn to a new one.
For example if I wanted the windows 3.1 interface on Windows 11 then I should be able to use that. Let's say I'd been in a coma for 30 years. Same for Win95 or Windows 7 which was a classic. There should be helper apps to adapt newer features and options into the paradigm of old interfaces where possible.
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Functionality engineers always have something to do. Bug fixes, new features, security improvements.
UI engineers have very very little to do after release 1.0 and get bored.
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Seriously stop it. It's an investment to learn an interface. Stop making me relearn apps over and over. The first one did everything I needed it to... There should be helper apps to adapt newer features and options into the paradigm of old interfaces where possible.
And Microsoft says "Oh, we're sorry! We sincerely apologize if we ever misled you into believing either that our operating system is for your benefit, or that we care about your user experience. Your opinion, and your success or lack thereof in adapting to our arbitrary UI changes and ongoing monetization efforts, are utterly irrelevant to us. Sorry, not sorry..."
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For example if I wanted the windows 3.1 interface on Windows 11 then I should be able to use that.
Windows 7 had that. The OS had support for themes. Yeah, you had to use a patcher to enable support for arbitrary themes, which was dumb. But it worked pretty well, and you could definitely have a Win 3.1 theme. A launcher to match would be easy enough. Just one more reason that 7 was peak Windows, FWIW.
On the other hand, you can definitely make Linux look and behave like absolutely anything else...
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Now, the Windows 10 UI is literally less customizable than Windows 2 was. That's how advanced Microsoft has become. They can't do things they were doing 35 years ago.
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Yes, everything about the UI has gone backwards since 7 and the technical improvements in no way make up for the loss of usability. I had acceptably few crashes with Windows 7 (for gaming anyway) so to my mind it's all been downhill since then. I use Windows 10 for work and it's awful, and I expect to be "upgraded" to 11 soon and dislike it even more.