One hopes it never will, because everything post-Win32 seems to be much worse. UWP (what is used for the new Control Panel/"Settings") is particularly frustrating.
...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198
> ...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it
From what I understand, the thinking is something like:
- There currently aren't any great alternatives for an attractive, touch-friendly, modern-looking UI framework. UWP applications generally feel pretty good to use despite UWP's problems.
- MS already has to support UWP apps forever (once something ships with Windows it's immortal), so they might as well take advantage of that support guarantee.
The Windows team is currently investing heavily in Chromium/Edge/WebView2, but it's still fairly early days. I'd bet good money that within the next 5 years, web UI in some form will fully replace UWP for new first-party development.
The apps are slow. They are optimized for non-technical people using touch screens (though I haven’t tested that). And the rewrites suck because one needs to learn a new UI, and you would still need to find the old UI for a lot of purposes.
Should it be? I imagine the number of people who use Regedit is less than one per cent, and those people really don’t care what it looks like? (yes, RegEdit is a terrible UX but for me familiarity makes me less likely to make mistakes in a tool you really don’t want to make mistakes in!)
It's complicated, but the short answer is that the Windows team messed up and there isn't really a good new native UI framework to migrate Regedit to.
UWP was burdened with sandboxing+packaging requirements that made it very difficult to use, even for first-party software. They eventually figured that out and have made some attempts to lift UI stuff out of UWP (XAML Islands and WinUI 3), but they're both train wrecks (and not staffed with nearly enough people to put up a fight against Chromium).
Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.