Why Metro design should make a grand return
Metro UI wasn’t just a design language. It was a declaration. It respected motion, space, clarity, and user autonomy. It gave us live tiles that pulsed with relevance, panoramic pivots that guided flow, semantic zoom that revealed structure, and full-screen hubs that anchored experience. It was unapologetically modern, minimal, and meaningful. Then came the drift. Fluent UI buried Metro under acrylic, chrome, and overlays. It softened the edges, blurred the motion, and diluted the clarity. What was once a bold interface became ornamental. Metro was never about decoration—it was about discipline. Im still using Metro UI in my projects, not because I need too, because i like how it looks, but you created fluent design, that ruined it all. Microsoft, you knew Metro was good. You launched it with pride. You made it the face of Windows Phone, Zune, Xbox, and Windows 8. You called it “authentically digital.” You were right. So stop burying it. Stop apologizing for it. Stop pretending Fluent is a replacement. It’s not. Bring back Metro UI: As a first-class design option With full support for live tiles, semantic zoom, and panoramic navigation Without overlays, blur, or ornamental drift Not as nostalgia. As correction. Metro was clarity. Metro was discipline. Metro was good. Let it speak again.
We've updated you to the latest build page design
Dear Edge guys, Here I want to share my idea, why users don't feel Edge is as their favorite one. I think Edge is too edgy. From design perspective the every part and content from Edge team seem not so fluent. For example, why you don't make the "We've updated you to the latest build page design" page like acrylic, rounded corner, transparent effect and so on? May be it is not so important for Edge development, but I think, every small part of your team work shows good design and give a feeling of a more modern browser, even the content about Edge development. I like you guys excel in web design. What do you think about this?
Use the acrylic menu to further adapt Fluent Design.
Use the acrylic menu to further adapt Fluent Design. I noticed that in Microsoft Edge, if you are in the Canary channel, by enabling the Windows 11 visual update logo, you will get a context menu of acrylic material. as the picture shows. Acrylic effects are now used for all temporary pop-up area backgrounds, such as context menus (the picture shows the desktop context menu); search results Start Menu Edge The new Teams is based on WebView2, and the right-click menu should be adapted to the acrylic effect, which is consistent with the visual update of Windows 11. Furthermore, if WinUI3 can be used to reconstruct Microsoft Teams, it will be more harmonious and consistent with other Windows software.
Using design frameworks for teams
Hi guys, We are building our web app and want to choose right design frameworks. Our plan is to build a stand alone web application and then to integrate it with Microsoft Teams. As I understand, web applications integrate with Teams using IFrame. In the documentation for Teams developers is written that if I want to develop my web app inside Teams (as Teams web app), it is recommended to use Fluent UI Northstar. But if I want to develop just a stand alone web application and then to integrate with Teams, could I use other frameworks like Bootstrap, React bootstrap or Syncfusion? Are there any constraints while integrating with Teams? Thanks in advance!I figured out why Edge still uses Material Design: it's a strategy, not laziness.
New Edge uses a blend of Google's Material Design and Microsoft's Fluent Design. (Clarification on where Material Design can still be seen is at the bottom of this post). But I now think this is a strategy, instead of laziness (as I initially thought). The more that Edge looks like Chrome, the more people think "it's just Chrome, but uses less RAM." As evidenced by https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/mdhtom/me_irl/ (and basically anywhere Edge is mentioned), that's what consumers think about Edge. So although I've seen plenty of people try to convince the Edge dev team to switch the browser to Fluent Design (and as much as I would like it), I don't think it's ever going to happen--not because they're lazy, but because it helps the reputation of the browser (even if it doesn't have any unique identity). Where Material Design can be seen: Menus (like right click menus and the "..." menu) fade into view instead of slide in. Tooltips don't have any animation (like they do in Fluent Design), so they still look like Chrome. Some of the loading wheels have been changed from Chromium (like in the tab when a page is loading), but others (like in the Update page of Settings, and even in Collections (which is weird since it's a feature that's unique to Edge)) retain the loading wheel found in all of Google's products. This means that all of these menus resemble Material design menus instead of Fluent design ones. The scrollbars look like Chrome's instead of any Fluent Design app. When hovering the mouse over items in the toolbar, there is a delay on the items being highlighted. This is from Chromium and doesn't match any other default Windows app, where they either have the "reveal" effect or they just are highlighted immediately. This delay also has the added detriment of making the browser feel a little more sluggish.Build a unified Windows UI experience
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/top-feedback-summary-for-january-12/m-p/2053932 As shown in the link, the introduction of transparency effects for Microsoft Edge dominates the rankings all the year round. Obviously, users are so looking forward to acrylic and fluent design! With the continuous development of FDS, the transparency effect is no longer the focus. We know that using Navigation in XAML will no longer enable the transparency effect of the underlying window by default, and the default transparency effect will remain in the window of this layer. The difference is shown in the figure In this picture, the window title bar and toolbar of "Screenshots and Sketches" are transparent to the desktop and windows below In this screenshot of the Microsoft Store, the elements at the bottom of the window are transparent At present, it seems that the design team intends to adopt "transparency to the elements in the window" as a trend, and will not develop more transparent title bars and side bars in the future. Therefore, the focus is not on transparency, but on other areas. Microsoft Edge now gives me the feeling, as if I changed the Chrome icon to Microsoft's, and then told me, look, this is Microsoft's browser. I think this is a huge irony and tragedy for the visual perception of the Microsoft brand, which means that users cannot really recognize the work that Microsoft is doing on this browser, and-let users understand that this is a different version of Chrome Browser. Microsoft must use practical actions to reshape Microsoft's brand image. I think the core action is to use native controls, or reshape the appearance of non-native controls that look like native controls. This includes the following: 1. Forward and back buttons, refresh buttons, address bar and toolbar 2. Context menu 3. Edge's special pages, such as settings, downloads, favorites, etc. For the address bar toolbar area, I think it’s not too difficult to build the appearance with XAML (or WinUI 3). If it is difficult, it is not too difficult to make these controls look like Windows. This area should look exactly like the old version of Edge. The context menu is a place where it is easy to achieve a smooth design. I think it is nothing more than adding a transparency, adding a matte, adding a noise, adjusting the kerning and line height, and finally adjusting the edge and projection. I don't think how difficult it is, is it really difficult? Or, will you consider WinUI 3 release? Or use XAML island, just like the old version of Edge? Is this really so difficult? I can't understand why I can't do it after a year. I think any user will notice the huge difference between the sidebar of the settings page and the sidebar of XAML Navigation in "Windows Settings". I don’t want to worry about whether the highlight bar is a rounded rectangle (capsule) or a right-angled rectangle-because Both are FDS, but there is no lighting effect (CompositionLight Class), completely different spacing, inexplicable margins, lack of transparency, all of which remind users that this is a web page, not a native one. UI-based application. It seems to have nothing to do with the Windows design language-although it seems that many applications have to do this, indeed, cross-platform, Web development also meets Microsoft's strategic goals, it is really difficult to resist the temptation. Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook to come,-and the latest file explorer used on Windows 10X, the design looks increasingly unrelated, each team has its own ideas, compare , The unification of macOS is simply outrageous! I implore the development team to read this article to help users build a harmonious and unified appearance, One Windows, One Microsoft https://medium.com/microsoft-design/fluent-makeover-photolab-a583d25f362bThe new icons in Canary make Edge's design feel even more disconnected from Windows.
https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/full-page-screen-capture-edge.jpg in Canary don't match those of the rest of the Windows operating system. In any Windows app, the settings icon has 8 spokes on the gear--you can see this in the Start menu and in the settings icon in apps like Microsoft News, Photos, and Camera. The normal Home icon can be seen in the Windows Settings app and in Backstage View in the Microsoft Office apps. The new Canary channel icons don't match those anymore. It makes Edge's design even more inconsistent with Windows's design than it already is. It's bad enough that Edge retains Material Design from Chromium, but it's worse that Edge is going to replace the only parts of the design that feel consistent with Windows. To my knowledge, Fluent design has separate mobile and desktop icons to feel natural on every device. Mobile icons should not be used on Windows. EDIT: looking more closely at their wording on the iconography and https://medium.com/microsoft-design/developing-an-open-source-icon-system-at-microsoft-b1796315df9f, it looks like the new icons are going to be the same across all of Microsoft.A list of design problems with Edge
Controls don't match equivalents of the modern parts of the Windows system and default apps Tooltips (no transparency or fade-in) Right-click/context menus (no transparency or animations) Dropdown menus (no transparency or animations) Hover effects (no reveal effects) And they're also delayed, which makes the browser feel more sluggish Loading wheels for HTML video and in the Updates section of Settings The new icons in Canary This puts mobile icons in a desktop space, which makes it feel inconsistent with desktop apps (this would be fine as long as the rest of Windows and Outlook on the Web are also getting icon refreshes to match mobile icons, but we haven't heard anything about this) Apart from the font and the current iconography, Edge keeps Material Design from Chromium. Anything I'm forgetting? EDIT: looking more closely at their wording on the iconography and https://medium.com/microsoft-design/developing-an-open-source-icon-system-at-microsoft-b1796315df9f, it looks like the new icons are going to be the same across all of Microsoft.New Windows dev channel update includes acrylic. Edge team is ridiculous for saying it's outdated.
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/09/02/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-20206/ made the emoji panel "more aligned with our Fluent Design principles, including a new acrylic background." But the Edge team wants to make barely any effort into changing the design of Chromium Edge from Material design and says that transparency no longer aligns with Fluent design. I don't think I'll ever fully understand the Edge team's thought process regarding anything.
