Microsoft Is Finally Ditching Its Windows 95-Era Icons

Microsoft is now planning to refresh the Windows 95-era icons you still sometimes come across in Windows 10. The Verge reports:

Windows Latest has spotted new icons for the hibernation mode, networking, memory, floppy drives, and much more as part of the shell32.dll file in preview versions of Windows 10. This DLL is a key part of the Windows Shell, which surfaces icons in a variety of dialog boxes throughout the operating system. It’s also a big reason why Windows icons have been so inconsistent throughout the years. Microsoft has often modernized other parts of the OS only for an older app to throw you into a dialog box with Windows 95-era icons from shell32.dll. Hopefully this also means Windows will never ask you for a floppy disk drive when you dig into Device Manager to update a driver. That era of Windows, along with these old icons, has been well and truly over for more than a decade now.

These new changes are part of Microsoft’s design overhaul to Windows 10, codenamed Sun Valley. “We’re expecting to hear more about Sun Valley at Microsoft’s Build conference later this month, or as part of a dedicated Windows news event,” notes The Verge.

3 Likes