Ding dong the witch is dead. The wicked witch is dead!

Windows Aero’s Shake “feature” [1] has to be the single most annoying GUI behavior I’ve ever run across. In fact it took more than a year to figure out why, sometimes, my desktop would immediately minimize every window except for one. Eventually I got fed up enough to employ DuckDuckGo [2] to find an explanation.

Turns out my usage habits have run headlong into Microsoft’s everything is a mobile app strategy. While on a phone a shake might be a useful gesture, it sucks for people like my when ported to the desktop. I have a habit of grabbing the chrome of the window I’m actively reading from. I also like to highlight text as I read it. All of this distracted clicking and dragging behavior while intently reading something gets interpreted by Aero as a desire to minimize every other freaking window on my desktop.

And for someone who has a great many windows open and positionally sorted, this goes beyond a rude interruption.

So I spent a few minutes after that looking for a way to disable this behavior via personal settings or the control panel or any other number of ways in which Microsoft scatters configuration across the operating system. All to no avail.

Today I did a bit more DuckDuckGoing [3] and discovered a registry entry that stops this insanity [4]. On the one hand–hooray! On the other, why is it that difficult to turn off a terribly unwelcome and intrusive behavior?

So endeth today’s sermon as to why Microsoft sucketh…in my humble opinion.

For what it’s worth, Apple isn’t any great shakes in this arena either.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/shake
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+does+every+window+except+the+active+one+minimize
[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how%20to%20disable%20windows%20aero%20shake
[4] http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/disable-aero-shake-in-windows-7/