Microsoft to Kill the start button

the 15 year old staple of the windows interface is strangly missing from the next consumer preview of Windows 8

It looks like Windows 8 is quickly joining the same annoying to use category as Gnome 3 and Unity

http://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/5/2768471/windows-8-start-button-removed-consumer-preview

 

But whyyyy? The start menu in Windows 7 is actually super helpful! ;-;

 

I almost never use my start menu to be honest, so that doesn't bug me at all.

Actually, it kinda makes sense to me, with the evolution of the desktop interface as well as Windows pushing to make Win8 more suitable to touch devices. (As they've said)

Start menu is really just a legacy that was firmly established and people have just gotten used to it being there, so they don't want to let it go. Trust me, you'll hardly miss it. (I certainly won't be missing it)

 

True, but I'll like it. <.< I pretty much auto hide mine and rarely look at it. lol. So the hotspot will be better, even if I almost never use it.

 

Ill be honest I have been dealing with "We want to become more touch friendly" interfaces for about a Year and a half now and i am not convinced that it is a better approach. When you use them they are just Clumsy ass oversised interfaces

To me it feels like the Whole Goddamn industry has lost its mind and is fllerting with a fad that will not pan out
Do you know what will kill touch? The internet, the text based nature of hypertext will not translate well to touch interaction.

 

The less incentive the common consumer has to write something on the internet, the better.

 

The start menu (actually screen now, I guess) isn't gone, as Enigma says, it just only shows up on mouse-over. I'm not convinced it's a good thing, as there are now more than a few things in Win8 that are utterly invisible until you mouse-over corners of the screen and things like that. Isn't that a recipe for confusion with older PC users?

 

Mac hot corners are a pain in the ass. On the odd occasion where I have to use one, I end up disabling them all.

 

I don't use the Start Menu much at home but at work I tend to switch between applications. We recently upgraded to Win7 and I like "pinning" on the Taskbar so I'm relying on it less and less.

 

I'd be happy without the start button but I still use it all the time, for obvious reasons

 

What? nothing newly implemented in windows 8 even closely resembles anything on Mac.

 

They are in there. Unfortunately.

 

Windows sucks, so does Gnome.

Gentoo KDE 4 FTW!

 

Hot corners are a Mac OSx term. You can set up, in the control panel, each corner to do different things: screensaver, lock screen, open spaces ui, blah blah blah. Yes, its on mac.

 

Hmm. Well, I guess if people can use OS X without bitching about "but how do I do anything?", there's some hope yet. I just thought it was good UI design to give visual cues that something exists so that you can find them even if you don't know to look there.

 

I agree. I actually had to retrain myself to find some new habits when i switched over to OSx for a year or so. I found myself using the search bar called Spotlight on my mac and just typing in the name of the program I was looking for. A few letters in, it would generally pull up the application in the results list and work just fine. I actually do the same thing now in Windows 7. I hit the windows key and just start typing. Works pretty well. Hope that feature doesnt go away. The way games and tools are starting to be developed for mac these days, I may just ditch PC all together.

 

They were in KDE first and they orignated the term