Isn't it confusing how in recent versions of Windows,
the Settings app exists side-by-side with the old-school control panel?
Come to think of it, there are a number of Windows features that look pretty dated at this point.
I mean, these icons that you can pick for your shortcuts are literally unchanged since Windows 95.
What gives with that? To find out, we went straight to the source,
so we'd like to thank Microsoft for shedding some light on this situation.
A big part of this mixing and matching of old and new user elements or UI elements
is the fact that Windows is worked on by a huge number of distinct teams at Microsoft.
Combine that with the fact that Windows has been developed in a fairly piecemeal fashion for the last 30-plus years,
and it's not super surprising that each release of such a massive operating system
has consisted of incremental improvements rather than full recodes from scratch.
In fact, each team that works on Windows uses a guide on how to modernize a setting
if they want to make whatever it is they're working on more congruent with the rest of the OS.
It's a real process, meaning that Microsoft
has to prioritize what to redesign and what to just leave alone.
To do this, then, the company is continually collecting user feedback to figure out
which elements users interact with the most. For example, the taskbar is almost unrecognizable
from what it was like when it debuted in 1995, and the reason it's been revised so often
is because most folks are interacting with it almost constantly.
But even parts of the OS that aren't as front and center can be attractive targets for a redesign.
Task Manager, for instance, has had performance graphs,
startup programs, and per-process resource usage added
because enough folks who regularly go into Task Manager wanted to be able to keep tabs on exactly
what their programs were up to. But hold on a second.
Even if people aren't demanding an overhaul of some other Windows feature,
is it really that hard for Microsoft to just make everything look like
it's at least part of the same OS? It turns out that lots of the legacy UI elements
that you see actually rely on older software frameworks,
basically the underlying code, that don't always play nicely with a redesign
unless you rebuild the entire feature from scratch.
And with as many requested Windows improvements as there are turtles holding up the earth,
redesigning a feature that not many people are clamoring for
simply isn't a main priority for Microsoft, which might explain why 28-year-old icons
are still hiding inside the OS. But even if Microsoft had more resources
to throw out the problem, certain UI elements are actually left
the way they are on purpose. Some customers, particularly business or enterprise users,
rely on having these legacy features remain exactly as they are.
In fact, certain organizations use custom scripts,
which assume, for example, certain settings in the control panel will be present.
So Microsoft doesn't wanna break software that other folks have written.
And then other organizations will reach out to them to tell them that these older elements in Windows
really need to be kept as they are, not to mention that Microsoft also wants
to keep things familiar for all users instead of changing too many things at once.
So then, does that mean the classic control panel is gonna be around forever?
Well, Microsoft, unsurprisingly, did not want to comment on
if and when it'll be phased out entirely. But what we can tell you is that they are continuing
to try to chip away at migrating as much as they can
over to the new settings app, which is good news for the neurotic among us
who are really bothered by the weird mix of old and new.
Part of me thinks, though, the control panel is gonna find a way to hang on into, like, Windows 20.
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