The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern"

25 pointsposted 2 days ago
by paulmooreparks
(devblogs.microsoft.com)

30 Comments

ahmedfromtunis

9 minutes ago

> The ListView control? It started out with the more tedious name “modern collection control”, which got shortened to “MoCo.”

A missed opportunity to call it "MoCoCo" which, if you ask me, has more flare and personality to it. What a waste :/

caryme

2 minutes ago

Can confirm, I worked on MoPho. It was a weird time.

usermac

29 minutes ago

A bit off-topic but I super enjoyed the UI on the Windows Phones at the time. Only topped by the WebOS from Palm even before it I recall.

tonyrice

16 minutes ago

Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.

copperx

18 minutes ago

And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!

joe_mamba

9 minutes ago

Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.

Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.

Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.

mr_toad

25 minutes ago

I read somewhere that the visual design of Windows 8 was based on the works of Mondrian, because they wanted a design that didn’t just look like the Swiss School that Apple had adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl

I don’t know if the idea of calling Windows 8 modern stemmed from that, or if they decided to pick Mondrian having already decided to go with modern.

LarryDarrell

an hour ago

They were so busy trying to create modern that they forgot what made things classic.

akikoo

43 minutes ago

The solution to Windows 8 UI issues was aptly named, Classic Shell

arethuza

37 minutes ago

My name for the Windows 11 experience is "Linux Mint"... ;-)

phreack

7 minutes ago

I spell it KDE but it might be regional variance (:

ux266478

26 minutes ago

Hot take: I liked Windows 8. It used less memory than Windows 7, increased battery life, the file manager and task manager were much improved, I could mount ISOs without third party software, among other things. In truth, I didn't even mind the start screen. And I certainly liked Metro as a UI paradigm much more than Aero.

Of course it was still Windows at the end of the day, but 8.1 was my last Windows. The laptop I ran it on is slowly bitrotting in a storage locker somewhere on the other end of the country. I didn't like the look of Windows 10, several aspects of it were hard dealbreakers, so I never swapped to it. Eventually I just changed over to using Linux as my primary OS and haven't really looked back.

bikuto77

17 minutes ago

I wonder if they also made a modern system to handle 'hosts'.

nailer

27 minutes ago

The final name was also called Modern. I know this person worked on Windows 8, but as a member of the public we definitely knew the Windows 8 UI was called 'Modern'.

sixothree

21 minutes ago

I thought Metro was appropriate. As in, the name fit the design style.

excalibur

an hour ago

When you put "modern" or "new" into the name of a thing, you're basically announcing to the world that it was designed for the short term, and when it is no longer new it will no longer be relevant.

embedding-shape

33 minutes ago

Adding "fast" is similarly fun, it's probably true when you came up with it, probably won't be true in the future anymore.

usui

4 minutes ago

What do you mean? Fast Ethernet is fast, and it'll stay that way forever! It's in the name! 100 Mbit/s!

mr_toad

19 minutes ago

Modern in the art & design world is actually quite retro.

moduspol

12 minutes ago

This is from the same company that brought us Windows NT (New Technology).

NopIdoN

24 minutes ago

It doesn't fit now and it won't work later.

nailer

27 minutes ago

No. Modern like 1950's modern. Unadorned, functional.

NooneAtAll3

an hour ago

https://xkcd.com/3089/

bee_rider

22 minutes ago

I sort of like the term “early Modern” in history. Putting the “early modern” period 250 years ago causes us to reflect on how much life has changed over that time, which is useful because it’s so tempting to imagine what life was like during the Renaissance or Middle Ages. Of course, every period has massive change, so the experiences of people on either end of a period are as different as somebody in the early modern and… actual modern… eras!

kgwxd

an hour ago

"Modern" = something that ruins perfectly good stuff in the never ending pursuit of "progress". UI doesn't need to change every few years. It should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago.

jan_Sate

42 minutes ago

This. I don't see the point of constantly changing UI as an end-user. The old one just work. It works perfectly. Now that you changed it and thing breaks. :|

mx7zysuj4xew

30 minutes ago

I wish violence on every one of the people involved for the pain they caused