You would think that after 30 years of Windows, many of the obvious and consistent flaws would be fixed. Are they unfixable? Or are the people at Microsoft who can fix them uninterested?

There is a belief within the tech community that Microsoft lost control of Windows years ago as the company turned over personnel—including the programmers who actually knew the base code of Windows itself. It has long since become what people call spaghetti code—a tangle impossible to unravel. Every patch has to be run through a regimen of tests to see if anything breaks. One thing is fixed and soon something else does not work right.

This is exacerbated by the never-ending attempts by evil-doers trying to hack the system to compromise individual machines. This used to be done for kicks and vandalism, but now it is done to create huge armies of online machines called to action remotely to attack other machines or to send spam. These bot armies were unimaginable 20 years ago when the Internet was becoming the next big thing.

I've given up on the software merchants finding a way to neutralize this bot phenomenon. But how about they, at least, find some simple solutions to annoying little problems that plague one machine or another with no consistency?

Whatever Windows computer you own, it will have the simplest anomalies that make no sense. I have one machine running Vista—which I have come to appreciate as an excellent highly backward-compatible OS. With the exact same browser used on other machines, the Vista unit cannot seem to warm up to Adobe Flash. It simply crashes all the time and demands a new install of Flash despite the fact that the latest Flash is already installed.

(Every time this happens I'm reminded of the promises of HTML5 to rid the world of Flash. It has failed to do anything of the sort.)

Then there is the fabulous "Stop Script" error message that will appear in a browser that seems to be hanging because you have too many tabs open. This can happen on any browser at any time because the world has gone gaga over Javascript. Nobody expected Javascript to become so important, but it did. This is largely because it can do anything—and often attempts to do everything. One script executes missing a byte and nothing works.

None of this is helped by the boneheads in marketing who demand the coders do things they shouldn't. On websites, this includes running videos down at the bottom of the page utilizing delayed auto-start. You have a browser running with a bunch of tabs and suddenly the speakers blare as a video starts. There is no way of finding this rogue video without examining the entire page of each tab and often you still cannot find the blaring video (unless you're on Chrome).

Then you also run into the two-videos-at-once phenomenon, where a website will have video content you want to watch, but a video advertisement in a side column auto-plays. The company doesn't care about your experience; it just sold a video view for Tide laundry detergent!

The counter argument to all these issues is that we should all be happy as a clam that these machines work as well as they do. This is a valid perspective, but my problem is that the providers of software too often add gewgaws and cool features before they work on bugs and confusing anomalies. Is a drop-down menu really a better idea than showing all the options without having to roll over something? There are far too many drop-down menus miscoded so you have to hug one side of the menu to keep the drop down from popping back up. The scaling was miscoded or ignored in favor of some bad default.

It's hopeless. The problems have become a bottomless pit.

I invite readers to add their observations to the comments with weird anomalies that bug them.

Further Reading