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points by senfiaj 2 days ago | 0 comments
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
[–] paulryanrogers 2 days ago
You can scroll without focus in Windows 95 with the Tweak toolkit from Microsoft.
[–] kbolino 2 days ago
Windows 95 didn't even have scroll wheel support in the first place. Tweak UI allowed you to turn on focus-follows-mouse (aka X-Mouse), but that's a different thing.
[–] M95D 2 days ago
Win95 did have scroll wheel support! Win311 didn't.

TweakUI indeed doesn't add support for scrolling inactive windows. I used IntelliMouse driver for that feature.

[–] kbolino 2 days ago
Note: I've deleted this once, and edited it even after reposting it, apologies for rapid changes

I've been trying to piece together what was actually there based upon some historical sources [1], [2], [3] and it's quite murky to me. As far as I can tell, scroll-follows-mouse was not truly possible in Windows 95, because the custom MSH_MOUSEWHEEL event lacked a way to carry the keyboard state, and an unfocused window would not have received the keyboard events to infer it correctly, so it would have been broken in a lot of edge cases. Then, Windows 98 added the standard MS_MOUSEWHEEL event, which does carry the keyboard state, but only 32-bit applications are able to access it, so the O/S locked scrolling to the focused window. Finally, Windows 10 pulled the plug on 16-bit compatibility, and so could and did make true scroll-follows-mouse possible.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080806-00/?p=21...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070503040017/http://msdn2.micr...

[3]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160420-00/?p=93...

[–] paulryanrogers 2 days ago
Perhaps I'm misremembering then. I too did have an Intellisense mouse. So that may have been a factor. It's also possible I was thinking of focus follows mouse, which I believe is in TweakUI for Win95.
[–] M95D 2 days ago
IIRC, the mouse driver attached a .dll to all programs to do the scrolling.