Microsoft's CVP of Design and Research for Windows and Devices, Marcus Ash sat down with the Windows Central Podcast to discuss ongoing work around Windows 11's UI, and how the company is moving to finally eradicate the OS of legacy cruft while maintaining backward compatibility where possible.
We started with Control Panel, which is everyone's go-to as a measurement for the progress the company has made to modernize Windows. Microsoft first began modernizing the Control Panel with Windows 8 over 13 years ago, and the work still isn't complete over a decade later.
Unsurprisingly, Ash says that the reason this has taken so long is that Microsoft prides itself on compatibility with legacy tooling and workflows, so it can't just rush in and modernize everything without first ensuring the modern replacements maintain functionality with what came before.
"That's why things like Control Panel get tricky, because if a customer has a driver or has something that depends on that legacy functionality, we just have to be careful about not breaking that compatibility promise," Ash said. "When we finally get things in Settings, we will then deprecate places say in Control Panel where we don't need that function anymore, we can carry it forward."
Ash highlights that modernizing legacy interfaces is as much about designing and building the new interface as it is about developing the tooling and UI frameworks to support the functionality required to build that modern interface, all while carrying forward the same capabilities, featureset, and performance.
"It also requires us to do work in WinUI 3 and some of these frameworks so that we can move things over at a rate that we think, one, customers can adopt and not break promises, but also just make sure we can test and we have the framework that supports all the things that our customers need. So we are pushing really hard to try to modernize, but we're also proud of the progress."
Ash says that legacy support in Windows is a strength of the platform, not a weakness. With that said, the company is exploring ways it can modernize legacy apps and interfaces while maintaining that legacy support. "There will be cases where, because of a customer that wants something that's important to them, we'll have some legacy UI, but even there we're trying to look and see: are there ways that through tooling and through better approaches we can just reduce that over time?"
In case you've ever wondered how Microsoft goes about choosing which legacy interfaces to modernize, Ash breaks down the process, confirming that "it's based on usage, telemetry, feedback. It's based on: where do we think the tooling is ready to move that surface forward? ... we just keep going through that and trying to make sure that over time, the amount of legacy UI that a customer would see in their day-to-day experience just gets smaller and smaller."
"We look at user journeys. Like if you were to look at File Explorer and you were to think about all the functions that happen in File Explorer, we then look left-to-right and say, okay, for this particular dialogue, where did the user start and where does the user end? So it's not just pick one dialogue, it's pick the full user journey of the things that the customer is trying to do."
Ash even teases that the company is looking at how it can evolve its tooling that that one day it can tackle modernizing apps like the Registry Editor. "I would say the common things that we look at are the top things that users/customers want: File Explorer and some of the big apps. But even things like Regedit and some of the tooling, we're already starting to take a look at and figure out: how would we attack this problem so that we keep a compatibility promise AND we can modernize these frameworks."
It's clear that Microsoft is eager to move Windows forward with modern designs that are consistent with its current design language, but that the company must ensure that these modernizations don't interrupt workflows or break compatibility. That's ultimately why it's taken so long for Microsoft to modernize legacy UIs across Windows, because the UI frameworks and tooling required to do it need to be built-out to ensure legacy support first.
Our interview dives into more topics, including optimizing the OS for 8GB RAM devices and why Microsoft sometimes chooses WebView2 over WinUI in certain apps and interfaces. Be sure to watch the whole interview on our YouTube!
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