> My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing.
Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then.
Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
On those forums, it's not just that there'd be no follow up; in my experience there'd typically be someone with a username marked as a "Community MVP" who would paste long walls of generic troubleshooting text for 2 or 3 replies insisting that the user go through a long list of steps that usually seem not to resolve anything (or indeed introduce additional variables and problems), often including completely irrelevant suggestions that seem to indicate the user's report was not actually read in its entirety to begin with.
Don't forget that they need to spend a few sentences in the lede describing that they're a 50x MVP who is happy to help and make sure to upvote the answer because otherwise they won't be a 51x MVP
Like, can I please go back to paying for Windows again so you can afford to not make it such a piece of crap? I know the tech elite always sneered at MS/Windows but trust me, it wasn't this bad.
But why do I have to run the scan? Why doesn't it run automatically in the background. What happened that lead to whatever it's fixing... is the telemetry working???
I also find it amazing when the windows store manages to end up broken and need to be reinstalled... Why doesn't it fix itself? And what with all the signature verification stuff, why doesn't whatever is corrupting the files not fail the signature check.
Windows power users are sometimes their own worst enemy.
The top cause of broken Windows Update or Windows Stores is in my experience people either running malware as part of pirating stuff (it's not zero-daying their browser), which then nukes the background services needed for Windows Store/Update to work. Or they deliberately run scripts that stop Windows updating because they find it annoying not realizing that they corrupted their system by doing so. Or they do other things that break Windows like changing the permissions on c:\Program Files\WindowsApps which is meant to be private and managed only by the OS, but power users hate that idea so they mess with it and then things break.
Windows shouldn't allow itself to be reconfigured in ways that let users deliberately break it, but ultimately it's just software and can't stop users fucking with its internals if they try hard enough.
On macOS things are much better. Apple transitioned to immutable system images and de-powered the root user a long time ago. They also managed to create a culture where even power users recognize that SIP is good for security and don't turn it off so there's way less of a culture of random hacks. Their security is way better as a whole so there's less malware and it's less invasive. And their OS engineers are just better so they don't tend to ship updates that botch stuff like Microsoft do.
Easy example: disable the Windows license check background service, and the Security app no longer opens. There's no error message, just nothing happens at all when you click it. Why does Microsoft allow users to do this? Well the whole OS is just in maintenance mode due to tech debt bankruptcy so fixing anything has become nearly impossible, let alone the kinds of huge moves Apple has made.
I remember a Yahoo article where they supported getting rid of their testers as the metrics showed the number of new bugs was greatly reduced after. It left me wondering why they were paying those testers to put the bugs in the software in the first place.
It's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag in opening the picker, and—unlike 10 where you could immediately start typing to search—on Windows 11 if you start typing before it's fully open, it just types your search text in the focused window and never opens the emoji picker. It just totally cancels it if you type too fast.
> It's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag
I think you can pretty much say that about everything in Windows 11. Seeing the XP emulation on the front page yesterday reminded me how grotesquely slow 10 and 11 are. Honestly I wonder if you ran one of the old Windows versions on period hardware how it would compare to now. And then keeping the period hardware but if you swapped to an SSD I bet it would fly. But maybe it's rose-tinted glasses.
Personally I preferred Vista to 7 (7 took away a bunch of nice things). Even as bad as Windows Me was from a stability point of view, it at least added new features. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that Windows 11 does better than before.
I definitely thought that was less than two years ago...sigh
That video touches on something else that drives me crazy: the decay of keyboard shortcuts
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All that being said, I will play devil's advocate for at least one modern luxury that I wouldn't want to live without that I can understand makes performance more difficult: per-monitor DPI that can change on the fly. But still: 8.1 (with ClassicShell) was fairly snappy
Now, holy smokes - what a dumpster fire. Most of the time it doesn't get me out of trouble anymore. Here are some of my favorite Windows 11 UI changes:
- complete waste of space on the side now. it doesn't even save any vertical space because of how bloated it is
- nonsense iconography on the side (services, startup apps in particular)
- Processes: "..." overflow has one item, View. I get that they want it more touch friendly but even then how clunky is that to navigate?!
- Performance: Resource Monitor was right there, now it is again buried in a stupid "..." menu, again to save space for...nothing?
- Details: The column picker is preposterous. It was already annoying before, mostly because you couldn't resize it, but they didn't fix that, no. Now you can see only 5 columns at a time. I seem to remember the column selection used to be a bit better before Windows 8 or 10 (like there was some other way to get that menu besides right-clicking the column headers) but I can't easily check
- In general I find that "Processes", "Performance", and "Details" all disagree about CPU usage
The UI for taskmanager was never great. Your link says so too. It's full of stuff like
"If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph, double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode"
and
"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc."
and
"If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it. Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT, and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh"
How to discover any of this except by reading a reddit post by the developer?
"There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed."
Why is this even necessary? It's a part of the OS, it should not need One Weird Trick to kill processes.
Many such cases. I'm trying to ward off Windows 11 for as long as I can, as I did with Windows 10 before it. Windows 7 is still the peak of "get out of my way and let me get things done" OS from Microsoft.
Edit: The latest attack came in the form of a full-screen system level (covered the taskbar) advert for Windows 11 when I logged in a few weeks ago, complete with all the dark patters we expect from our tech overlords in 2025. Now the windows update status icon also has a constant blue dot on it. Clicking it lets me know I should upgrade to Windows 11 ASAP. Realistically, I'll probably reluctantly switch once Steam stops supporting Windows 10.
Even with gaming, monitoring the nvidia subreddit around new drivers, it seems like Windows 11 is not nearly as solid. I think there was some MPO (multi-plane overlay) thing that has plagued 24H2 for months?
Also can't avoid mentioning Windows 11 gaming without the middle finger that is discontinuing Windows Mixed Reality and bricking the headsets. Thankfully someone looks to be making a SteamVR driver for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...), but what a pathetic shame he's doing it on his own time rather than MS paying the pocket change it would have taken to do it
They can afford it but it probably won't increase Windows revenue, which is anyway only ~10% of their income. If they could make upgrades that people would pay $$$ for like in the Win95 days they'd be motivated to try but desktop OS is a mature segment, and people expect updates to be free now, so it kills the incentives to do anything.
I drank the WinRT Kool Aid between Windows 8, Windows Phone and the clear failure of Project Reunion.
Still I keep myself around, expecially to warn newbies that whatever Microsoft is selling for WinUI, regardless of the shiny cover, the book inside is roten.
Whatever I have learnt from community calls and endless Github discussions, is that most new interns never did Windows development before landing on Windows team.
The calls are available on YouTube, mostly young, puzzled looks when questioned about feature XYZ coming to Windows, not even understanding issues that come from Windows 8 and 8.1 UAP model, that predated UWP, among other possible examples.
I would dare to say they did all their studies in UNIX world, Apple, Google devices, before landing a job at Microsoft.
So Web technologies it is.
Note I am not blaming them, each one gets to learn what they can, how they can.
The blame lies on upper management of a 4 trillion valued company, that isn't able to put in place the resources and learnings, so that the team can actually deliver, as it used to be during the 3x "Developers!" dance.
I spent a good few hours contemplating this over the last couple of years and the only rational answer I can find is that they are, apologies for language, just complete fucking morons.
While we are complaining about Microsoft and Emoji's -- they need to grow a spine and bring back Emoji Flags. If you weren't aware Microsoft removed all flags to avoid geopolitical backlash over Taiwain, etc.
Country flag emojis are actually just specialised glyphs for pairs of characters, taken in pairs to form a country-code. If the system doesn't know how to render a given country code, it will just fallback to displaying the country code (often stylised as white on blue tiles) instead.
Moving to windows from ChromeOS or MacOS really makes you notice how many basic UX quality of life improvements Windows simply lacks. From inability to paste tables from PPTs into text input fields but ability to do the same from xlx to having multiple desktops show different active app icons and window where you can’t share a window in a different desktop from a MSTeams call running on a different desktop pane. It’s really impressive how much the business world tolerates their crappy UX in the pretense of trying to work with a serious platform. And don’t get me started on the forced updates and the need to run some crazy VPN UX for security. This is not a serious OS.
I would really ask HN about how you manage "feature bits" (like the BugFix_123456::IsEnabled()in TFX ) .
I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).
There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
IMHO, first it needs to be stated that feature flags are only truly useful when you have a process to change the flags that's faster than deploying a new version of code. I've seen some environments where a flag configuration deployment is the same work as a code deployment, and so why bother.
Also, these things need to be temporary, and you should enforce that somehow. Otherwise, chances are very few permutations are being tested, which makes it hard to use the flexibility you tried to build. Some teams automate this in some fashion... require an expiration date comment, fail the build if it's in past the date, or if you like things spicy, have a bot remove it on expiration.
Sometimes you end up with a feature that's done in your code but waiting for something else and you end up with the behavior disabled for a long time. That's not fun, but it's life.
Otherwise, I like feature flags to live for about one release... Put it in, push the feature, once it works, remove the ability to turn it off. That should be part of the post-release acceptance process.
> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug
There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.
Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.
Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
Since Server 2012, some parts of server manager crash if you don't have your keyboard set to a qwerty layout. The bug is still there in later Server versions too.
It’s the year 2059, and medical charting has been replaced entirely with emojis. Medical training is now completed through TikTok videos. Primary care is delivered in mobile pop-up clinics. Lab results are shared with patients through Instagram stories.
They added loads of skin tones and family types to be "inclusive" but not my skin tone or family type. I spend a lot of time choosing the "gender" of emojis that I neither care about nor can identify the "gender" of. There are too many Japanese things.
Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
> Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
I thought this happened outside of Unicode... Apple switched, then everyone else did too. (Microsoft was using a ray gun at the time Apple switched; but Microsoft switched to a depiction of a revolver the day after Apple switched to a water pistol)
That's on the authors of emoji pickers. You can always not include skin tone modifiers, or use a stylized emoji font that doesn't show gender or skin color (unless you're on macOS, then shitty rasterized emoji are forced upon you).
Yeah I'm with you there. Someone sent out some professional communications to me about a week ago and it was a bullet list where the bullets were emojis. And signed it with a smile.
Just no.
Appears a lot of people write something up then throw it into chatgpt or something to spice it up with the things as well.
The thing has practically never worked for me in the fiest place. Only very few inputs actually receive emojis from it. I have not once been able to use it when I tried. I usually google emojis and just copy them…
I have yet to find a suitable alternative for the W10 emoji picker that works on linux. I like to use emojis as color codes for errors etc in some of my scripts and I find them very useful as location markers since a visual element is always faster to be recognized by the eye than pure plain text. This tool is also useful when you use multiple messaging applications because you share the same "most used" emojis panel. It also frustrates me that the W11 emoji picker got downgraded, it's much more limited and has less of a minimalist design (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
You could probably vibe-code one appropriate to your setup in about ten minutes. It's a very simple application. Otherwise use the one from your DE. KDE's isn't bad.
Is this a safe place to complain about the emoji picker on macOS? The one on Sonoma was... Fine, if not very laggy. But macOS 26 Beta replaced it with the CHARACTER VIEWER. A separate application that does auto focus into the search box and does not auto quit after selection. Those are table stakes for a picker.
> I think software engineers often get annoyed by percieved imperfections and inefficiencies in the world. There’s nothing wrong with questioning things, but choosing to believe others are incompetent or malicious is unhealthy.
> I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface.
This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
Microsoft account service logins for 365 are also currently, actively broken for any accounts receiving "Let's keep your account secure. We'll help you set up another way to verify it's you."
I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."
--
Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.
--
I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.
The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
> What about regression testing, anway?
> My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing.
Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then.
Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
On those forums, it's not just that there'd be no follow up; in my experience there'd typically be someone with a username marked as a "Community MVP" who would paste long walls of generic troubleshooting text for 2 or 3 replies insisting that the user go through a long list of steps that usually seem not to resolve anything (or indeed introduce additional variables and problems), often including completely irrelevant suggestions that seem to indicate the user's report was not actually read in its entirety to begin with.
Don't forget that they need to spend a few sentences in the lede describing that they're a 50x MVP who is happy to help and make sure to upvote the answer because otherwise they won't be a 51x MVP
Like, can I please go back to paying for Windows again so you can afford to not make it such a piece of crap? I know the tech elite always sneered at MS/Windows but trust me, it wasn't this bad.
Please run sfc /scannow and try again
Ok well, rant time. The forum stuff yeah ok.
But why do I have to run the scan? Why doesn't it run automatically in the background. What happened that lead to whatever it's fixing... is the telemetry working???
I also find it amazing when the windows store manages to end up broken and need to be reinstalled... Why doesn't it fix itself? And what with all the signature verification stuff, why doesn't whatever is corrupting the files not fail the signature check.
Thanks for reading my newsletter.
Windows power users are sometimes their own worst enemy.
The top cause of broken Windows Update or Windows Stores is in my experience people either running malware as part of pirating stuff (it's not zero-daying their browser), which then nukes the background services needed for Windows Store/Update to work. Or they deliberately run scripts that stop Windows updating because they find it annoying not realizing that they corrupted their system by doing so. Or they do other things that break Windows like changing the permissions on c:\Program Files\WindowsApps which is meant to be private and managed only by the OS, but power users hate that idea so they mess with it and then things break.
Windows shouldn't allow itself to be reconfigured in ways that let users deliberately break it, but ultimately it's just software and can't stop users fucking with its internals if they try hard enough.
On macOS things are much better. Apple transitioned to immutable system images and de-powered the root user a long time ago. They also managed to create a culture where even power users recognize that SIP is good for security and don't turn it off so there's way less of a culture of random hacks. Their security is way better as a whole so there's less malware and it's less invasive. And their OS engineers are just better so they don't tend to ship updates that botch stuff like Microsoft do.
Easy example: disable the Windows license check background service, and the Security app no longer opens. There's no error message, just nothing happens at all when you click it. Why does Microsoft allow users to do this? Well the whole OS is just in maintenance mode due to tech debt bankruptcy so fixing anything has become nearly impossible, let alone the kinds of huge moves Apple has made.
> in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference
Unfortunately, this was a widespread industry trend
I remember a Yahoo article where they supported getting rid of their testers as the metrics showed the number of new bugs was greatly reduced after. It left me wondering why they were paying those testers to put the bugs in the software in the first place.
Wow, that's not unlike the contemporary decommissioning of systems to monitor air pollution.
Some people are just natural problem solvers
It's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag in opening the picker, and—unlike 10 where you could immediately start typing to search—on Windows 11 if you start typing before it's fully open, it just types your search text in the focused window and never opens the emoji picker. It just totally cancels it if you type too fast.
> It's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag
I think you can pretty much say that about everything in Windows 11. Seeing the XP emulation on the front page yesterday reminded me how grotesquely slow 10 and 11 are. Honestly I wonder if you ran one of the old Windows versions on period hardware how it would compare to now. And then keeping the period hardware but if you swapped to an SSD I bet it would fly. But maybe it's rose-tinted glasses.
Personally I preferred Vista to 7 (7 took away a bunch of nice things). Even as bad as Windows Me was from a stability point of view, it at least added new features. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that Windows 11 does better than before.
It's not rose tinted glasses, someone on twitter recently did exactly that.
Windows 2000 was snappy. Incredibly so.
I'd try to dig it up but search is so fundamentally broken these days I can't find it.
Probably this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933
I definitely thought that was less than two years ago...sigh
That video touches on something else that drives me crazy: the decay of keyboard shortcuts
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All that being said, I will play devil's advocate for at least one modern luxury that I wouldn't want to live without that I can understand makes performance more difficult: per-monitor DPI that can change on the fly. But still: 8.1 (with ClassicShell) was fairly snappy
Thanks, I think that was it.
Yes, there are always "reasons", but things have got dramatically worse, with especially 8 -> 10 -> 11.
It particularly annoys me when apps/widget/utilities partially load in and sit there with nothing but a blank chrome, slowly partially rendering.
It's a plague that has affected everything, even Task Manager.
Oh man, don't even get me started on Task Manager. Which used to be pretty-much bulletproof, because they understood the assignment: https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote...
Now, holy smokes - what a dumpster fire. Most of the time it doesn't get me out of trouble anymore. Here are some of my favorite Windows 11 UI changes:
- complete waste of space on the side now. it doesn't even save any vertical space because of how bloated it is
- nonsense iconography on the side (services, startup apps in particular)
- Processes: "..." overflow has one item, View. I get that they want it more touch friendly but even then how clunky is that to navigate?!
- Performance: Resource Monitor was right there, now it is again buried in a stupid "..." menu, again to save space for...nothing?
- Details: The column picker is preposterous. It was already annoying before, mostly because you couldn't resize it, but they didn't fix that, no. Now you can see only 5 columns at a time. I seem to remember the column selection used to be a bit better before Windows 8 or 10 (like there was some other way to get that menu besides right-clicking the column headers) but I can't easily check
- In general I find that "Processes", "Performance", and "Details" all disagree about CPU usage
Tip: `taskmgr -d` runs the previous UI
The UI for taskmanager was never great. Your link says so too. It's full of stuff like
"If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph, double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode"
and
"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc."
and
"If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it. Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT, and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh"
How to discover any of this except by reading a reddit post by the developer?
"There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed."
Why is this even necessary? It's a part of the OS, it should not need One Weird Trick to kill processes.
> the decay of keyboard shortcuts
Also happened on Gnome.
There's a general anti-keyboard conspiracy.
>> Honestly I wonder if you ran one of the old Windows versions on period hardware how it would compare to now.
I have a feeling if you high-end hardware of that period, it will feel faster than win11 on high-end hardware now.
However, the other software also evolved. You almost cannot use modern internet with old browser.
I'm on Win11 Pro and I have no lag at all.
Many such cases. I'm trying to ward off Windows 11 for as long as I can, as I did with Windows 10 before it. Windows 7 is still the peak of "get out of my way and let me get things done" OS from Microsoft.
Edit: The latest attack came in the form of a full-screen system level (covered the taskbar) advert for Windows 11 when I logged in a few weeks ago, complete with all the dark patters we expect from our tech overlords in 2025. Now the windows update status icon also has a constant blue dot on it. Clicking it lets me know I should upgrade to Windows 11 ASAP. Realistically, I'll probably reluctantly switch once Steam stops supporting Windows 10.
Even with gaming, monitoring the nvidia subreddit around new drivers, it seems like Windows 11 is not nearly as solid. I think there was some MPO (multi-plane overlay) thing that has plagued 24H2 for months?
Also can't avoid mentioning Windows 11 gaming without the middle finger that is discontinuing Windows Mixed Reality and bricking the headsets. Thankfully someone looks to be making a SteamVR driver for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...), but what a pathetic shame he's doing it on his own time rather than MS paying the pocket change it would have taken to do it
Which SKU of Windows 10?
I bet it is yet another component that has migrated away from UWP/WinUI into Webview2, hence the lag.
Waiting for Windows 12, where the entire UI will run in an electron container.
Then I’ll wait for Windows 13, where all of it has been rewritten in JS.
Initially that was a big preposition for WinRT, actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinJS
When Windows 8 was initially previewed at Microsoft's developers conference, .NET wasn't still part of the overall picture.
I wish someone would explain to me the rationale of spending time and resources migrating to something to make it worse.
Talent pool
How many people are proficient enough in C nowadays to maintain the old shell?
Surely if Microsoft was consistently hiring devs proficient in C, there would be more devs proficient in C, no?
It’s the world’s most popular desktop operating system. They can afford to hire capable software engineers.
They can afford it but it probably won't increase Windows revenue, which is anyway only ~10% of their income. If they could make upgrades that people would pay $$$ for like in the Win95 days they'd be motivated to try but desktop OS is a mature segment, and people expect updates to be free now, so it kills the incentives to do anything.
As if, see recent offshoring issues with US software delivery.
Like the sibling comment points out.
I drank the WinRT Kool Aid between Windows 8, Windows Phone and the clear failure of Project Reunion.
Still I keep myself around, expecially to warn newbies that whatever Microsoft is selling for WinUI, regardless of the shiny cover, the book inside is roten.
Whatever I have learnt from community calls and endless Github discussions, is that most new interns never did Windows development before landing on Windows team.
The calls are available on YouTube, mostly young, puzzled looks when questioned about feature XYZ coming to Windows, not even understanding issues that come from Windows 8 and 8.1 UAP model, that predated UWP, among other possible examples.
I would dare to say they did all their studies in UNIX world, Apple, Google devices, before landing a job at Microsoft.
So Web technologies it is.
Note I am not blaming them, each one gets to learn what they can, how they can.
The blame lies on upper management of a 4 trillion valued company, that isn't able to put in place the resources and learnings, so that the team can actually deliver, as it used to be during the 3x "Developers!" dance.
I spent a good few hours contemplating this over the last couple of years and the only rational answer I can find is that they are, apologies for language, just complete fucking morons.
[dead]
While we are complaining about Microsoft and Emoji's -- they need to grow a spine and bring back Emoji Flags. If you weren't aware Microsoft removed all flags to avoid geopolitical backlash over Taiwain, etc.
So what happens when they need to display a flag?
Country flag emojis are actually just specialised glyphs for pairs of characters, taken in pairs to form a country-code. If the system doesn't know how to render a given country code, it will just fallback to displaying the country code (often stylised as white on blue tiles) instead.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
Moving to windows from ChromeOS or MacOS really makes you notice how many basic UX quality of life improvements Windows simply lacks. From inability to paste tables from PPTs into text input fields but ability to do the same from xlx to having multiple desktops show different active app icons and window where you can’t share a window in a different desktop from a MSTeams call running on a different desktop pane. It’s really impressive how much the business world tolerates their crappy UX in the pretense of trying to work with a serious platform. And don’t get me started on the forced updates and the need to run some crazy VPN UX for security. This is not a serious OS.
I would really ask HN about how you manage "feature bits" (like the BugFix_123456::IsEnabled()in TFX ) .
I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).
There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
IMHO, first it needs to be stated that feature flags are only truly useful when you have a process to change the flags that's faster than deploying a new version of code. I've seen some environments where a flag configuration deployment is the same work as a code deployment, and so why bother.
Also, these things need to be temporary, and you should enforce that somehow. Otherwise, chances are very few permutations are being tested, which makes it hard to use the flexibility you tried to build. Some teams automate this in some fashion... require an expiration date comment, fail the build if it's in past the date, or if you like things spicy, have a bot remove it on expiration.
Sometimes you end up with a feature that's done in your code but waiting for something else and you end up with the behavior disabled for a long time. That's not fun, but it's life.
Otherwise, I like feature flags to live for about one release... Put it in, push the feature, once it works, remove the ability to turn it off. That should be part of the post-release acceptance process.
I think this is the natural end state of code bases over time and it’s very hard to fix without dedicating lots of time (and getting buying from management to dedicate that time) https://jyn.dev/technical-debt-is-different-from-technical-r...
> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug
There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.
Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.
Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
> I’m sure many users don’t know it exists.
I'm one of them! I didn't know it existed until this moment.
Since Server 2012, some parts of server manager crash if you don't have your keyboard set to a qwerty layout. The bug is still there in later Server versions too.
I refuse to provide any help or even sympathy to people who insert emoji into documents.
It’s the year 2059, and medical charting has been replaced entirely with emojis. Medical training is now completed through TikTok videos. Primary care is delivered in mobile pop-up clinics. Lab results are shared with patients through Instagram stories.
What did the Unicode Consortium ever do to you?
Username is a clue. Pretty hilarious, actually.
Edit: I assume it’s a joke related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
No, username is a coincidence.
Coincidences do happen.
Since your comment was not a joke, I'll point out that documents aren't the only target for emoji's. This is a system-wide issue, right?
Yes, I dislike emoji almost everywhere they occur.
(U+1F44D)
They added loads of skin tones and family types to be "inclusive" but not my skin tone or family type. I spend a lot of time choosing the "gender" of emojis that I neither care about nor can identify the "gender" of. There are too many Japanese things.
Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
> Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
I thought this happened outside of Unicode... Apple switched, then everyone else did too. (Microsoft was using a ray gun at the time Apple switched; but Microsoft switched to a depiction of a revolver the day after Apple switched to a water pistol)
That's on the authors of emoji pickers. You can always not include skin tone modifiers, or use a stylized emoji font that doesn't show gender or skin color (unless you're on macOS, then shitty rasterized emoji are forced upon you).
Everything they could think of.
This picker is also useful for Unicode symbols that are not on the keyboard. Also, there is nothing wrong with an emoji here and there.
The Windows emoji picker is also useful for entering all sorts of completely legitimate and well-respected typographical symbols…
Why, actually?
o.O
Do you normally associate emojis with creating documents?
I meant document in the broad sense to include a tweet, an email or an HN comment.
It would probably have been clearer if I'd written "people who use emoji".
chatgpt does.
Yeah I'm with you there. Someone sent out some professional communications to me about a week ago and it was a bullet list where the bullets were emojis. And signed it with a smile.
Just no.
Appears a lot of people write something up then throw it into chatgpt or something to spice it up with the things as well.
The thing has practically never worked for me in the fiest place. Only very few inputs actually receive emojis from it. I have not once been able to use it when I tried. I usually google emojis and just copy them…
I have yet to find a suitable alternative for the W10 emoji picker that works on linux. I like to use emojis as color codes for errors etc in some of my scripts and I find them very useful as location markers since a visual element is always faster to be recognized by the eye than pure plain text. This tool is also useful when you use multiple messaging applications because you share the same "most used" emojis panel. It also frustrates me that the W11 emoji picker got downgraded, it's much more limited and has less of a minimalist design (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
You could probably vibe-code one appropriate to your setup in about ten minutes. It's a very simple application. Otherwise use the one from your DE. KDE's isn't bad.
I've never come across that before. Super+. opens it.
It seems to copy the emoji to the clipboard rather than inserting it directl.
Does it run in wine? Can you hold your nose and ignore the license? (Don't take the cursed build obviously)
Is this a safe place to complain about the emoji picker on macOS? The one on Sonoma was... Fine, if not very laggy. But macOS 26 Beta replaced it with the CHARACTER VIEWER. A separate application that does auto focus into the search box and does not auto quit after selection. Those are table stakes for a picker.
> I think software engineers often get annoyed by percieved imperfections and inefficiencies in the world. There’s nothing wrong with questioning things, but choosing to believe others are incompetent or malicious is unhealthy.
> I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface.
This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
oh safety and quality will become much worse, this is just the beginning
Microsoft account service logins for 365 are also currently, actively broken for any accounts receiving "Let's keep your account secure. We'll help you set up another way to verify it's you."
You will get stuck in a loop on https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register and never be able to sign in.
It's been months.
I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."
--
Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.
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I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.
The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
I've noticed, on my LTSC system. Apparently no one uses it?
Any app/website/program/whatever where one might typically use an emoji usually has a button next to the input for selecting one.
So, yeah, I've never needed a dedicated emoji picker myself, even though I've had Rofimoji installed for a while.
Or maybe we’re so used to random things breaking that we don’t give it much thought. I know I wouldn’t.
Yeah, evidently it's fully broken now, but since it's been flaky as long as it's existed I chalked it up to it having a bad day as usual