Windows 8 Means no More Widgets or Start Menu

Microsoft is really taking a broom to Windows 8 with all of the changes coming out. In hindsight, these changes makes sense and I’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who will miss them.

The first victim is the Start menu. In a blog posting on Building Windows 8, Alice Steinglass, group program manager for the Core Experience Evolved team, explained why we won’t be moving our mouse to the bottom left corner any more.

“The Windows 7 Start menu is just a simple flat list. But, as people collect more and more apps, the ability to organize and group apps together becomes more important,” she wrote. “It affords limited customization, provides virtually no useful information, and offers only a small space for search results,” she added.

She is not kidding about th

e Star menu’s limitations. First off, you don’t need it in Windows 8. If you want to run Chrome, simply start typing “Chrome” on your PC and the smartfilter will narrow it down. When you see Chrome highlighted, hit enter and it runs. As someone who types quickly and dislikes using the mouse, I find this agreeable.

Also, with the Metro UI, Microsoft’s new Start Screen design will allow users to organize apps into groups. The groups can contain a number of live tiles that are stored in their own section.

The new Start Screen will do more than just launch apps, which is all the Start menu can do now. “The Start screen is not just a replacement for the Start menu—it is designed to be a great launcher and switcher of apps, a place that is alive with notifications, customizable, powerful, and efficient,” wrote Steinglass.

Also getting the ax are Gadgets. A posting on the Windows Live Gallery says gadgets are officially retired. “In order to focus support on the much richer set of opportunities available for the newest version of Windows, Microsoft is no longer supporting development or uploading of new Gadgets,” said a statement on the site.

This isn’t much of a surprise, or a loss, really. The Gadget site was never well maintained. Searching was a nuisance and the HTML on the page was atrocious.

Microsoft introduced Gadgets with Windows Vista, but they were limited to only the right side of the screen. With Windows 7, you could drag and position them anywhere on the screen. I never knew anyone who used them but many people used the much more versatile Rainmeter.

There probably will be more changes coming and more old technologies fading into the sunset. Like I said, who will miss them?