Worlds Violently Colliding

Windows Inconsistencies

One of the criticisms I constantly hear about the "Linux Desktop" is that it features many different toolkits. I always hear things like "If even Windows can be consistent, why can't Linux?", or "Windows has a consistent look and feel, why doesn't Linux?" It's my opinion that people who say this are dead wrong though.

Initially, Windows may appear to have a consistent look and feel. The menus work identically, the toolbars look the same, the dialogs are all crafted in the same way. Or are they? Let's identify some discrepancies.

For my first set of tests, let's look at a Windows 2000 machine with IE 5.5 and Office 2000 installed (My old Windows installation at home).

Note the main menubar in Word; each menu item has it's Accesskey already underlined, regardless of pressing ALT. This differs of course from programs like IE and Notepad, which only show the Accesskey once ALT has been pressed.

Word 2000:

IE 5.5:

Notepad:

In the same vein as pressing ALT, try this test in Notepad. Press ALT, then down. This will drop down the File menu. Now press Left. You'll get the Window dialog, displaying options: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, and Close. Now try this in Word. Pressing Left gives you...the Help menu. There is no way to get to the Window dialog using the keyboard. This behavior is the same in IE and the MMC.

While on the menus in Notepad, go to the Format menu, and turn on Word Wrap. You'll get a check box in the menu. Mouse over that check box. Compare this to the checkbox you'll see in the Window menu of Word. Now compare this to the menu in IE, when you have the Status Bar turned on.

Notepad:

Word 2000:

IE 5.5:

Note the gripper on the toolbars; one vertical line. Mouse over it, and you'll get a 4-way move cursor. This of course is different from a program like Microsoft Visual Interdev, which has 2 vertical lines for grippers, and doesn't change the mouse cursor when you move over them. Additionally, when you click on the gripper in Word 2000, the toolbar does not have a bounding box appear around it. In Interdev, it does.

Visual Interdev Toolbar Gripper:

Go into Notepad, click Help, then "About Notepad". You get a simple looking dialog with a standard OK button. Do this in IE, and you have an OK button that behaves like a hyperlink.

Then of course, we have dialogs. Compare the following file open dialogs. The first is from Notepad. You have a Look In dropdown up top, a few buttons such as View Type and Folder Creation, a left navigation menu, a File Name and File Type section, and finally an Ok & Cancel button with a window resize gripper below it.
Now look at the dialog for Word:
1) Same Look In dropdown
2) Different set of buttons, complete with a Tools option and a vertical separator after the first two items
3) A different left side navigation that not only includes different items, but also different graphics for the matching items (look at Network, for instance), in different color depths!
4) Differently sized & spaced File Name and File Type area
5) An open button that sports a drop down feature on the right side, as well as a graphic on the button.
6) No resize gripper, and you can't resize the dialog by dragging the edges either.
In Interdev, selecting Open Project will give you an open dialog that looks nothing like any other Windows Dialog, giving you a tabbed interface with Open, Source Control, Cancel, and Help buttons. The Open File dialog will look almost identical, without a Source Control button.
Finally, compare this to IE, where the open dialog looks almost identical to the Run dialog! (In fact, with that check box there, it looks more like the NT 4 run dialog than the Windows 2000 dialog.)

Notepad Open Dialog:

Word 2000 Open Dialog:

IE 5.5 Open Dialog:

The options dialogs:
In Word 2000, you have a double-row tabbed interface with Ok and Cancel buttons.
In IE, you have a single-row tabbed interface with Ok, Cancel, and Apply buttons.
In Interdev, you have a tree interface with Ok, Cancel, and Help buttons.

Help Systems:
In Notepad, choosing Help gives you a relatively simple help screen, with topics on the left, a tabbed interface, and 5 buttons with no toolbar. IE will give you roughly the same, with a few minor cosmetic changes. Word 2000, on the other hand, with give you a monstrosity that fills almost half of your screen, and adjusts the size of your working window. The buttons on this help screen are a much smaller size than the buttons on Notepad & IE's help. Of course, if you don't have the very large MSDN libraries installed (which are over 1 gig in size), Interdev won't display any help whatsoever.
While in the Help dialog for Notepad, try clicking the Options button. Note that you receive a flyout menu, but the button doesn't appear to depress. Compare this to IE with a Mail, Edit, or Size button on the toolbar.

Notepad Help:
IE Mail Button, Depressed:

Then of course, there are other programs which completely stray from the Windows Look and Feel, such as Windows Media Player, Trillian, and Winamp.

Now then, if you've read this far, you're probably saying to yourself "But Mike, that's an unfair test, you're not using the newest Office Suite, or OS, or version of IE & Interdev! Surely they must have fixed a lot of these problems in their new versions!" Actually, the problem is even worse.

Let's take a look at Windows XP with IE 6 and Office XP installed.

First off, the entire OS, as it comes by default (with the XP Luna theme running), is plagued by what I like to call half-assery; I suppose cruft would also work, but I like my phrase better. Take a look at Outlook XP. Click on the inbox. The scrollbars for the inbox are classic themed. The scrollbars for the preview pane are XP themed.

Outlook XP:

On top of this, the Office XP suite has yet another toolkit applied to it. Hover over the File item, and you'll get a shaded bounding box around the word File. Click this, and you'll see the File menu has a shadow underneath it, but so does the actual File portion of the menu. The icons on the left side have a shaded area underneath them. This isn't even close to the rest of WinXP, which has a solid-color hover (much like Windows 95), no shaded stripe running down the left side of a menu flyout, and the menu item does not become 3D.

Office XP Menu:

Notepad XP Menu:

The toolbar grippers in the Office XP toolkit don't even look like grippers, but instead look like rumble strips on the side of a highway. They don't beg clicking, like the previous versions do. The grippers on IE, however, look like a series of vertical dents. Different from Office, and less intuitive compared to previous versions. And even worse than Windows 2000, the grippers on the taskbar are yet a THIRD type, a series of vertical dents which alternate in a zig-zag pattern.

Office XP Toolbar Grippers:

Windows XP Taskbar Grippers:

IE 6 Toolbar Grippers:

ActiveX controls, such as Microsoft's own Calender Control which can be used in IE, also suffer from half-assery; they use the classic Windows look for the month and year dropdowns.

Lastly, even the icon sets didn't get away unscathed in WinXP. Take a look at your WinNT directory. You'll see something like the image below. They updated most of the icon set, but left several images from previous versions of Windows. They look horribly out of place.

Windows XP Icon Set:

I'm sure I'll find more examples of this over time; I've only scratched the surface with XP. So before you go on a tangent about how consistent Windows is, take a better look at it first. It might be better than a Linux desktop, but it's certainly not what I would call consistent.