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einrlast Monday at 8:41 AM1 replyview on HN

It's a little interesting that they would pick Office 2000 as an example, since Office 97 and onwards do not use standard OS widgets -- it reimplements and draws them itself*.

The menu bar in Office 2000 does not look like the standard OS menu bar, for instance. The colors, icons and spacing are non-standard. This is only slightly jarring, because it's pretty well done, but it's still inconsistent with every other app.

This was kind of the beginning of the end for Windows consistency -- when even Microsoft thought that their own toolkit and UX standards were insufficient for their flagship application. Things have only become worse since then.

* This becomes very obvious when you run Office 97 on NT 3.51, which generally looks like Windows 3.1, but since Office 97 renders itself and does not care about OS widgets, it looks like this: http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png


Replies

vladvasiliulast Monday at 9:03 AM

This is funny because Teams on Windows uses its custom notifications instead of the system ones. But running it in a browser under Linux, I get my native notifications!