Sleepless In The Start Menu

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we've got waima audio caps so the azroc tai chi the philosophy of infinite potential and on top of all that it's got a really excellent motherboard accessory bundle including a keycap and some other cool stuff you'll have to check out the full review thanks asrock on with their video so windows 11 yeah how is it how's it going windows 11 the start menu and those ads and you know the utility of the windows 11 start menu okay here's my take on it my opinion it's basically fraud yes the start menu perpetuates fraud let me explain we need to have a chat [Music] what are you even talking about the start menu perpetuates a fraud well i'm wendell this is level one and we have these kinds of discussions from time to time the start menu on windows 11 is so bad that it goes beyond poor decision making it actually has a lot of brilliant decision making in it if you are using the start menu as a prop to juice the value of what you're doing to shareholders maybe advertisers things like that let's take a closer look the start menu is meant to be a menu that you can use to find programs that are installed on your computer seems simple enough right i am forced to admit that the start menu on windows 11 is actually a little bit better than windows 10 but the aspects of windows 11 start menu that are janky are clearly the result of design by committee where nobody can just stand up and say hey i don't think this is a good idea we shouldn't do this because it doesn't serve the users of our operating systems the best that we can when i click on start i see a list of programs i've got programs at the top that are pinned that makes sense i'm going to type here to search where i can search for things well i've got a file on my desktop called big buck bunny movie that's from the blender foundation it's a demonstration of their 3d rendering program it's pretty cool i searched for big under the all tab i see big lots not big buck money movie is it because there's underscores in there is it because the windows search service on my computer is weirdly broken because of something that i've installed it does actually work sometimes if i fiddle with it sometimes the search will actually return the big buck bunny movie that's on my desktop but it doesn't always find everything you see the search that's there is very fast because it indexes or pre-indexes certain locations but if i put my files in a weird place or i have a network drive or some or have a usb stick or something like that it doesn't index those locations it won't find it but what it does find is stuff from the internet as a computer literate person i find that useless borderline offensive it actually keeps me awake at night because the only reason that that's still there is because it can be used as a prop for misleading people like i said let's maybe do this from another perspective grandma grandma's going to use the start menu she's going to look for cookie recipes she's got a usb stick that's got cookie recipes on it so i've typed in cookie recipes the start menu didn't find anything on the computer i know that because i'm a computer literate user and i can see in tiny print in the top right it says ads and i can see you know there's commission links here 12.99 i can i can buy a cookie recipe book for grandma i suppose or grandma can buy a cookie recipe book but i mean this is the internet recipes are just information surely we don't need to have grandma buy a recipe do we well if we scroll down just a little bit there are chocolate chip cookie recipes including this recipe from joy food sunshine it's the number two result in this list there's a button down here at the bottom that'll open the results in browser it's going to open those results in your default browser which is going to be edge on windows 11 unless you've gone through a lot of trouble to change it to something else instead of clicking open results in browser let's click that second chocolate chip cookie recipe sure enough it opens an edge it opens an edge just like i've done a web search for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever now when i maximize that window it shows me the number two result and it has a little check mark on it and i get this thing that opens at the side all right cool you know chocolate chip cookies this is almost not a completely broken user experience because if you scroll down eventually you get actual web results like you can see the web results and so i know because again computer user that these results at the top have been sort of quasi curated by microsoft and these results at the bottom are the actual internet search results the keyword search results now bear in mind from the start menu i clicked a specific recipe that i wanted to load and i did actually get that on the side but that was the second result so top cookie recipes once again but this time i'm going to click see more within the start menu now never mind the user experience design of this you know grandma's getting up there in years she's she probably needs cataract surgery and she can't see all that well and we're doing all of this browsing in a tiny little window inside the start menu and grandma's 43-inch lg cx oled tv so you're gonna have to click see more a few times and then oh yeah there's a keto recipe oh yeah let's check out the keto cookies so this time when it brings up the bing search results it's actually just the same cookie search like it copies the search into the title which sometimes works but sometimes doesn't so at the top it searched for keto ginger recipe but as you can see the results that's still a good old chocolate chip and you can scroll and you can find it eventually and sometimes it does actually pop up on the side but sometimes it doesn't and so this would be weird and confusing for grandma and also how do i get back here i've got all of these cookie results and i'm using ctrl f to search the page for keto there are no keto results you get the keto results when you scroll to the bottom and you get the actual web results but unless you get the pop-up on the sidebar it's just a sea of confusion and this is why the only reason it must exist is to juice some numbers in a spreadsheet so someone can say oh look people are using it can you turn off the web results from the start menu well let's take a look at that here's where the options should be it's under privacy and search settings there's three options you can enable searching for adult content so you can find porn right on your start menu or you can have safe search turned on which it is by default or you can have kind of a medium filter but you can't turn it off completely so this goes beyond just they've added ads to the start menu it's not a simple equation to just say oh it's advertising space they're selling as an advertising space and that's what's going on here the space the thing that's being sold is actually worthless it's a case of the emperor's new clothes and you know who has got the courage to stand up and point and say the emperor is actually completely naked the emperor doesn't have any clothes on it's kind of like that with the start menu in order for the start menu to improve we kind of need this emperor's new clothes situation where somebody stands up and says yeah now that we're thinking through it this is actually garbage and then maybe you can change things around because think about all the stuff that i just did i clicked on the cookies and we went through some stuff and the bing stats if you're just looking at some numbers in a spreadsheet and not this video openly mocking what i experienced then you're going to look at those numbers in that spreadsheet and say wow the start menu is doing really good we've got all these clicks we've got these extra bing searches we've got the synergy of the bing search and the start menu and it's driving everything together and everything just works and this is a brilliant business move and it's really great and the shareholders look at that and they say yeah our bing engagement is up we can compete with google it's good results and all this other kind of stuff but when you actually use it it's literally trash when we were searching for those cookies that were buried a couple of clicks on the start menu when you click that to open in browser it doesn't take you to that specific cookie i clicked on a very specific cookie and it took me to a generic bing search in no universe is that actually useful except for juicing your analytics numbers there's literally no other reason that it would function like that because it's not actually functional it's literally broken by design that's fraud and the sec or lawmakers should probably investigate that because it's literally fraud alright let's talk about the windows store the windows store is microsoft reimagining how you're going to get applications they've gone so far as to offer a version of windows 10 called windows 10 s which only allowed applications to be installed from the windows store it was universally very unpopular for reasons you might imagine but the windows store microsoft still continues to push it and they they want people to use it and it might be getting better every iteration but is it actually useful alright so i've searched for firefox firespace fox there are no results it doesn't always do that though sometimes i got firefox the movie now suppose i want to find gears of war which is a microsoft title well it's a microsoft xbox game thing which should show up gears of war no results for gears of war try again later what about far cry 6 oh that was going to be a little bit of a challenge you can't actually get that one from here but wait there's guides there's guides all over this i found guides for firefox so there's a bunch of companies that will set up these sort of scammy applications and if you look they've all got one star reviews what's happening is people buy this for three dollars or five dollars or whatever expecting it to be a game or expecting it to be an application or expecting it to be firefox but it's actually a scam and this is very similar to the type of corrosion that we see the sort of ethical corrosion that leads to the stuff that we see in the start menu you see corrosion has a way of spreading and if we allow the analytics numbers the misrepresentation of the analytics numbers from things like the start menu to infect the windows store then we can't police the windows store really super hard because then total number of new applications that are uploaded doesn't look as good and user engagement with applications doesn't look as good how many of us know someone that has spent you know several hours trying to find an application to solve a certain problem or trying to find a specific application that they had in the past they couldn't quite remember the name of it so they went a little crazy installing applications all of those clicks and installs and things like that went into somebody's dashboard and they were spun in a very positive way so if i stumble through here installing five or six different pdf applications actually looking for something from adobe somebody's spreadsheet somewhere is going to say oh our applications are doing really well our app installs are up on average when the reality is you've got some very frustrated users that are installing crap on their machines that really shouldn't be there as i've been working on this video the windows store experience has also been changing because when i would search for firefox without the space it would actually bring up the firefox guide first i don't know what kind of black hat seo was going on there but if you search for firefox without the space it does actually find firefox now so that's nice at least now this whole video i've been picking on microsoft but i want you to think about this corrosion and this dishonesty and this juice in the metrics game with literally everything the whole ad tech industry is built around these kinds of lies and they are lies and it is perpetuating a kind of fraud it even happens with physical products and physical goods look at amazon amazon's expanded their third party marketplace but every other week there's a story about knockoff goods or unsafe goods or goods that burn people's houses down and yeah amazon has started to try to lock down those kinds of things a little bit but the reality is that if they lock them down too much it's going to negatively impact their numbers and the shareholders are going to look at that they're going to say whoa there's way less revenue going through the third party marketplace now that means there's a limit on the expansion of amazon let's you know let's pull out of the stock let's sell let's do all this other stuff and everybody inside and outside the company that has any influence on this at all is sort of encouraged to let the fraud continue okay okay we you got us on the store and the start menu but that's just you know we can that's not anything fraudulent that's just uh we didn't think about the analytics all right what about this firefox was recently changed to use an undocumented function for changing your browser so windows 11 comes with edge the edge browser if you want to use firefox you can download firefox and you can use firefox but when you double click on a file like a web page file what does that open with does that open with edge or does that open with firefox if you want to change the program that that opens with there's an onerous set of steps where you have to change every single file extension but if you've changed something to firefox or chrome you can one click change it back to edge it's very easy to change it from literally anything else to edge but it's very hard to change it from edge to something else comparatively well firefox looked at how edge was doing it and firefox emulated what edge was doing so that it was also easy when you install firefox for firefox to function exactly the same way as edge does when it takes over your file preferences and it would ask you because it's a good steward of your permissions hey is it okay if i do this and if you said yes then it would take over and it would associate the extensions microsoft in a recent update closed that loophole it's undocumented and so of course edge is still easy to use but firefox isn't these things taken individually okay maybe but together they represent a kind of corrosion of honesty that exists add technology and advertising and deep analytics of people is not some magic silver bullet it is snake oil at best we are convincing people that have money and advertisers and other people like that that there is some technology magic with all of these numbers in a spreadsheet that somehow make these interactions valuable and if we make it hard for people to switch from edge then it will uh improve our numbers in edge and so that is a business outcome that microsoft as a corporation has decided that they want rather than to actually build the best operating system that they can and the business numbers sort of back that up and so we end up with this crazy tail wagging the dog situation until internet bozos point this out and it's not just oh haha they've added you know ads to the start menu like there's ads on billboards and there's ads on the side of buildings and there's ads on subways and there's ads on this side and the other it's far more insidious than that it's not as innocent as just ads on that ads on the start menu are not the problem it's that the ecosystem that led to ads on the start menu making the start menu actually less useful less utility making the computer less useful than it should be the computer could perform a search of the c drive the computer could perform a search of other things but instead it's doing these useless web searches trying to find nonsense juicing the bing analytics it's literally worthless and we as users should be aware of it but we should also resist it and reject it don't accept it so if you can come up with an explanation as to why this is again my opinion i think that the analytics numbers and the interactions and the accidental misclicks and all of that nonsense from the web search and the other you know sort of missed features in this operating system like the whole browser selector thing and search and some of the other stuff i think that exists to make numbers in a spreadsheet bigger numbers which can then be taken to shareholders and can be taken to advertisers and say no look we're developing a good product people want to use this product it's a good product because the numbers are going up and we should get more money because the numbers are going up if it's not being used to perpetuate that lie then explain it to me because i don't understand it doesn't make sense for the neophyte computer user it doesn't make sense for the experienced computer user and everybody that uses a computer can agree that this is a terrible terrible interface why is it like this why can't you turn it off and why do they make it so difficult it is unacceptable we should not accept it and we should not accept it and i don't believe that we have to and i'm going to keep making videos about that until something changes or until you switch to linux i'm building this level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music] we make too many compromises already too many retreats they invade our privacy and we fall back they assimilate entire operating systems windows subsystem for linux we fall back not again the line must be drawn here this far no farther

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 40,079

Keywords: start menu, level one techs

Id: cRwdoo9kNTw

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/KenAbdul]

Thansk for sharing. Just posted this before realizing it's already posted. Removed mine to avoid duplicates.

[u/LEXX911]

File Explorer search is also garbage. If you have a file named underscore 000cat_01 or with a dash 000cat-001(not 100% sure on this one since I'm not at my W11PC) and you type "cat" in the search it won't even show up.

[u/Lolpo555]

Bring the tiles back

[u/1stnoob]

I don't see any problem, it's exactly how insiders wanted :>

I still remember all those posts with praises for Trash News before it was pushed thru a cumulative update and everybody saw the real garbage fanboys insiders were to blind to spot :>