In general, it is even smoother than the real Windows XP. Kind of a magnetizing experience, and I do not know why. There is something attractive in this idea in terms of UI/UX, aside from the obvious nostalgia.
Another interesting aspect of this particular implementation is that it blends naturally with a browser tab hierarchy, it does not try to overrule it, it just blends in. Probably thanks to a distinctive taskbar, or maybe it is due to the startup screen/login/sound that set up a distinctive boundary "you are here now, and this is a friendly place to be".
> There is something attractive in this idea in terms of UI/UX
Very fast response time for the UI interactions. "Modern" UIs can have a few fast transitions but the overall interactions with the different components have a human noticeable lag that make them uneasy.
Windows (or anything) is nice when its fast. Most things should work in under 20ms so I don't notice a delay.
20ms is faster than a fly reaction time, it's about the same time which 60HZ monitor takes to refresh the frame, 10 times faster than a typical human's reaction.
Everything under 150 ms is pretty much indistinguishably fast to a normal person.
I uh guess I’m not a normal person then
Working with soft synths, the difference between 65ms, to 15ms latency, 8ms latency, and 2ms latency - time from pressing the key to speakers emitting the sound - is agonizingly noticeable.
The numbers I’m quoting are ones I remember from various gear and upgrades over the years. It’s crazy to think about the levels of latency I was stuck with when I was a poor college kid. These days I wouldn’t settle for more than 10ms latency, and I don’t have to, thank the maker.
I would say when working with synths, the difference between 15ms and 2ms is just swing, it is noticeable but it doesn't feel wrong, just makes things more interesting.
When a drummer plays drums all the hits are off-timing 10-40ms, and it is still considered natural-sounding swing, if it is agonisingly noticeable for you – you have a quite robotic sense of rhythm, it's very subjective after all.
If this were true, then a 10fps movie clip would be indistinguishable from a 24fps or a 60fps one. I have written several years ago about how optimizing my shell prompt from 50ms to 5ms was definitely a noticeable impact on how snappy the shell felt: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters.html
The context was about UI interactions, not at all about movie clip which is a totally different thing.
I've occasionally spent time doing and even fighting for latency optimisations that supposedly don't matter in the great scheme of things, but that resulted in customers leaving positive feedback about how the product is noticeably more responsive and/or feels more polished than the competition in those specific areas. It can definitely make a difference.
Reaction is not the same as perception. The typical human perceptual threshold is around 16ms, although persistence of vision "smooths" that out to around 40ms.
You're wrong. You can clearly see a difference between 20ms reaction time (as instantaneous as it gets because of what you say, 1/60 = 16.6666...), whereas 150 ms is a fast reaction but it definitely is a noticeable lag. I wish your opinion didn't exist because how can we expect to get rid of the lag everywhere if some people even claim it doesn't matter.
Well, most of this sub 150ms lag everywhere in the interfaces is actually artificially designed, and believe it or not, some people do prefer it like this, so it's being designed like this. I'm personally for making everything as fast as it would be, but for most people it really doesn't matter.
So you're saying there could be a designed behavior that I misinterpret as a lag? Sure, but unlikely (rarely), because I'm quite perceptive in this regard as I programmed a lot of GUI myself. If I press a button and an animation starts after a while (sometimes in javascript after around a second!) then it's not by design. Similarly if someone is bad at optimization but not as bad and the animation starts after ~100 ms.
I am aware there could be something like a non-linear alpha animation, and so there could be a period of time where the alpha is so little, and it accelerates so slowly, that I could miss the first 100 ms of it - but then again because I'm experienced in gui programming, I would consider that.
For the most part people are just bad at optimizing gui, especially in HTML.
Nice troll.
"Faster than a humans reaction" time is different from "indistinguishable".
Yeah of course it is different. My wording was not really correct here – I was rather meaning "irrelevant" in context of a user interface
I am not talking about usability or accessibility but rather just a nice feeling of using the UI. Of course that is subjective but if I click and it appears as close to zero time perception then to me that is much better than lag and/or animation.
Instead of pointlessly trying to convince you how horribly wrong you are, I dare you to interact with any software at 20FPS and report back.
That would indeed be pointless because I was originally replying to a single UI interaction, where it doesn't really make a huge impact whether it happened in 2 or 5 frames.
You're trying to bring in continuous changing of frames here which is obviously perceived differently.
This is about input, not visual frame rate. 20 ui ticks per second? For anything but gaming I'm probably good.
obviously the nostalgia is a huge factor but you might be onto something with the login sound haha. did you try logging out? :)
My thoughts exactly. I'm on macOS 26 Beta and this Windows XP felt like an upgrade. I think that's because it's simple, fast, intuitive and I know everything about how it works. Old Windows was also bad at multitasking due to single cpu core, which is better for the user to focus. In modern OS I have 20 windows open with hundreds of tabs, distributed over 6 different workspaces and 2 monitors. They all fly left to right with cool animations. I can't focus on anything.