Why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list?

oldnewthing

3 Sep 2003 12:37 PM

Comments 49

We learned our lesson the hard way.

In Windows 95, we gave programmatic access to the Start menu "Fast items" list - the items that appear at the top of the Start menu above the Programs list. This area was meant for the user to customize with their favorite links, but programs quickly saw the opportunity and spammed themselves into it every chance they got.

In IE, we gave programmatic access to the Favorites menu, and once again, programs spammed themselves into it.

In Windows XP we intentionally did not give programmatic access to the bold list of items at the top of the Start menu (the "pin list"). The pin list is for users to put their favorite icons. It is not the place for a program to decide unilaterally, "I am so cool. I am your favorite icon. I just know it. So I'll put myself there because, well, I'm so cool."

Because we knew that the moment we let people mess with the pin list, everybody would install themselves into it and it would become meaningless (and annoying).

What's particularly galling are the programs that, as part of their install, decide that they are so cool they want to be everywhere to make sure you don't miss out on the coolest most amazing program ever written in the history of mankind, so they go into the Start menu, into the Fast items, onto the desktop, into the Quick Launch, onto your Favorites, take over as your default autoplay handler, and even hang out as an icon next to the clock on the taskbar just in case you somehow missed all those other places - and each time you run them, they go and recreate those icons and settings in case you "accidentally lost them".

I hate those programs.

History

Comments

Kevin Dente

3 Sep 2003 1:21 PM

Amen, brother.
Anonymous

3 Sep 2003 1:26 PM

i wondeR who hE's tALking about?
Donald Kackman

3 Sep 2003 1:26 PM

RealPlayer is one of the owrst offenders in this regard. I won't install it anymore for this very reason.
saberworks

3 Sep 2003 1:33 PM

That sort of thing drives me nuts. The protection should be enabled on EVERYTHING. No program should be allowed to put itself anywhere OTHER than the start menu (and not in "startup" either) without my explicit permission. I don't want anything in my systray except volume control. I don't want anything on my desktop that I don't put there. I don't want anything in quicklaunch because *I* should be the one to decide which things I want to launch quickly. If the windows team saw all this abuse as far back as windows 95, why didn't they take a more serious action other than just preventing it from the start menu? Make that protection system wide!
Dominic Hopton

3 Sep 2003 2:21 PM

Because, by then, it had already happened. There was no oppertunity to remove that access without breaking setup programs. Also, vendors who already used this functionality would bitch and complain about it being removed. BTW Raymond, your not 100% accurate saying that there is no programatic access to the Pinned items - if you change the default Web Browser or Mail client the changes are relfected there. Also, therei s *some* sort of programatic access to the "most used items" because XP By default rams applications up there that take ages to fall down. Which is a wee bit naughty. I dont know if Real et al stuffs them in there since I refuse to use that evil software
GMan

3 Sep 2003 3:16 PM

Real can be bad but you CAN get it off all those places. I have it installed and it's only one place, in the start menu -> programs. There are options in the installer to not install it most of those other places and once installed there are options to get it off the taskbar AND out of quick launch. Now, what I really wish was that the Start Menu was indirected so that no matter where I moved a folder or icon in Programs, when I uninstalled the software it would know how to delete its crap. On top of that, when I re-installed or installed a new version it would know where I had moved its folder inside Start->Programs folder. My programs menu is TOO BIG so I need to sort things into sub folders like "crap". (stuff I will almost never manually pick) "development" more stuff I will almost never pick like SDK shortcuts, etc.
Ryan

3 Sep 2003 6:08 PM

Uh oh, Saberworks used the term 'systray'! Raymond, have you told everyone your story about systray yet?
Raymond Chen

3 Sep 2003 6:25 PM

To tell the story about "systray" properly I need to be able to upload a picture, but I'm not set up to do that, so it'll have to wait until I figure out how it's done.
runtime

3 Sep 2003 8:00 PM

please do! I am very curious to hear more about the dreaded systray. :-)
Zorba the Hutt

3 Sep 2003 8:31 PM

I remember a while back, on Win98, I used tweakUI to move the "startup" folder into c:\windows\startup so it wasn't cluttering my start menu anymore. It always amused me when a program created a "startup" directory in the start menu in the futile hope that their program would be run. Of course, some programs were smart enough to use the appropriate function to find out *where* the "startup" directory was - but a surprising number weren't.
Raj Chaudhuri

4 Sep 2003 12:08 AM

Zorba raises an interesting point here. Raymond, maybe you could do a post about the evolution of "special location APIs" (GetWindowsDirectory, GetSystemDirectory,SHGetFolderPath). Maybe include the NT Environment variables which provide some of this info, too.
Omar Shahine

4 Sep 2003 1:38 AM

Even worse are programs that draw their own menus, buttons etc. They decide that standard windows controls are not cool enough.
w.h.

4 Sep 2003 1:54 AM

Sometimes you have to make stuff owner-drawn. The customer wants it to look and act just like the latest Windows or Office version. There's no standard API to draw things that way, so you have to do some owner-drawing. The problem is that those self-important programmers ruin things for the rest of us. At some point, the folks on the windows team opted to prevent us garden-variety windows programmers from popping up windows unless it was in the same task. Which provoked some programming difficulty for the product I work on, where we want to send a message up to the server to pop up a window and have a window in a seperate executable be brought to the top. But all that happens is that the window we want is just flashing in the taskbar. It's the revenge factor. Anything will be used against us somehow. Every "rich" feature of email applications, save plain text, has been used to spam, invade our privacy, or be obnoxious in general.
About Real Player stuff

4 Sep 2003 3:27 AM

I caught it in the act while recording an installation with Wininstall LE: Real works ALL THE TIME, writing some stuff on "Application Data" folder even thought it was not started or listed on Task Manager. So I found an alternative, Media Player Classic. Just do a Google on "real player alternative" - I believe there is some kind of ilegallity here, because it uses most of the dll's from the real Real. Another place that fell in the hands of the barbarians is the "Tools" menu on IE and most uninstallers do not bother to clean it. ...And yet another barbarian that is setting a shortcut there is Yahoo IM.
Oleksiy Kolisnychenko

4 Sep 2003 4:14 AM

Raymond, can you tell us a story about why Office-style GUI is unavailable for the rest of developers? Moreover, I saw the screenshots of Longhorn, it uses really cool GUI. Will this GUI will also available for the rest of developers too?