1 and 2 are part of the same Vista/7 era Control Panel UI.
3 I believe is even older than that, maybe since 95
4 is the MMC. The MMC is actually great and I am disaponted to see it lose favor. You can even use the MMC to remotely admin other computers. The MMC is somethig I miss on other OSs.
Microsoft should have really invested time in creating template projects used to migrate from the 95 era panels to the Vista/7 era panels. And then again for Win10. Because even if they migrate all windows settings to new panels they are still stuck with 3rd party panels using the old infrastructure (Synaptics, Flash, others still use the 95 era panels). And now migration across all the versions means a complete rewrite effort. And I am not even sure it is possible in all cases. So they are stuck maintaining old infrastructure.
Mac OS fairs better because they had a clean break from 9 to X. And eventually X had pluggable 3rd party panels which proved to be a pain during the transition from 32bit to 64bit. Did Mac OS 9 and earlier have plugable 3rd party panels?
Linux for a long time just didn't care. I belive KDE Plasma has this capability since 5 (not sure it was there in 4).
It is the same with Windows (File) Explorer. It is incredibly plugable. Way more than alternatives on other OSs. There are namespace extensions, context menu extensions, icon overlay extensions, online storage support (since 10), etc..
Being stuck with supporting old infrastructure is a consequence of creating that infrastructure in the first place. The less you create the less you have to maintain. But, as a user, I will take more over less.
> Microsoft should have really invested time in creating template projects used to migrate from the 95 era panels to the Vista/7 era panels. And then again for Win10.
A lot of the problem just feels like they've repeatedly given up halfway through converting old settings UIs to newer ones and fallen back to bundling the old UIs into "advanced" or "additional settings" windows. The Personalization settings are a perfect example of this -- there's a Windows 10 Settings applet, which defers to a Windows 7 Control Panel applet for some options, which internally defers to a Windows XP era dialog for setting colors (which are mostly no-ops on Windows 10, but I digress). What they really need is a concerted effort to finish the job.
> Did Mac OS 9 and earlier have plugable 3rd party panels?
Ooooooh boy. Tangent time:
Control Panels and Extensions were perhaps one of the most terrifying part of Classic Mac OS from a modern development perspective. They represented modules of code which were loaded system-wide at startup, which could patch any (ANY!!) part of the operating system with their own code to add custom functionality -- for example, some common ones would add a screen saver (After Dark), add custom system-wide menus (Now Menus), or change the appearance of system controls and windows (Kaleidoscope). Conflicts between different cdevs/extensions were commonplace; System 7.5 added a first-party Extensions Manager utility that could be used to temporarily disable extensions, and a number of third-party utilities existed to diagnose startup crashes caused by conflicts.
The only difference between a Control Panel and an Extension was that a Control Panel could be launched as an application, typically to change its settings. There was no special UI framework for third-party Control Panels; they used the same UI toolkits as any other application.
3 I believe is even older than that, maybe since 95
4 is the MMC. The MMC is actually great and I am disaponted to see it lose favor. You can even use the MMC to remotely admin other computers. The MMC is somethig I miss on other OSs.
Microsoft should have really invested time in creating template projects used to migrate from the 95 era panels to the Vista/7 era panels. And then again for Win10. Because even if they migrate all windows settings to new panels they are still stuck with 3rd party panels using the old infrastructure (Synaptics, Flash, others still use the 95 era panels). And now migration across all the versions means a complete rewrite effort. And I am not even sure it is possible in all cases. So they are stuck maintaining old infrastructure.
Mac OS fairs better because they had a clean break from 9 to X. And eventually X had pluggable 3rd party panels which proved to be a pain during the transition from 32bit to 64bit. Did Mac OS 9 and earlier have plugable 3rd party panels?
Linux for a long time just didn't care. I belive KDE Plasma has this capability since 5 (not sure it was there in 4).
It is the same with Windows (File) Explorer. It is incredibly plugable. Way more than alternatives on other OSs. There are namespace extensions, context menu extensions, icon overlay extensions, online storage support (since 10), etc..
Being stuck with supporting old infrastructure is a consequence of creating that infrastructure in the first place. The less you create the less you have to maintain. But, as a user, I will take more over less.