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They could call it "disable cookies and other persistent storage (more information)" with more information providing their reasoning why they are bundled in plain English. There is no reason the setting has to have a two word name with no description.


Just like Windows Control Panel has "Printers and Devices" - because I guess people don't think of printers as devices?


I guess that well behaved devices took offense of being put in the same category as printers. And I understand them.


Yeah if I was a device and someone called me a printer I tell you hwat!


From what I saw, that was indeed one of the more common complaints about Windows 8. Nobody could find printers and thought Windows 8 didn't support printers because Windows 8 merged everything to just "Devices" (and the short-lived Devices "charm" as an intended one-stop print shop/"universal Print button", RIP). It didn't help that Windows 8 tried to at the same time update the ancient Windows Printer driver model and remove some of the worst habits of Printer driver vendors (background apps that are always running, bespoke updaters, weird unregulated UI extensions to Win32 common dialogs via backdoor hacks, etc) so there was some Manufacturer-encouraged hysteria that Windows was moving too much cheese on Printers and coming to take people's beloved Printers away (which did result in Microsoft killing that nicer printer driver stack initiative of Windows 8 and its user-focused experience).


Why can Microsoft seemingly not commit and stand by decisions in the way Apple does?


Many of Microsoft's early successes seemed predicated on listening to user and developer feedback.

It is simple to believe that they've taken that as a strong core principle of the company. The over-reliance on deep telemetry metrics, for instance, seems kind of a natural evolution of a company that cherishes as much feedback as it can get.

It seems reasonable to think that the immensely negative feedback on Windows 8 or the sad market response to Windows Phone sparked so many shifts in priority precisely in the way that any heavily feedback-focused (even slightly neurodivergent) person might over-react to negative feedback and try to do everything "not that" to make up for it, even if those were good ideas and the negative feedback was more concerned about execution of them rather than the ideas themselves.

I've been accused of "fanboying" Microsoft at times because I like pointing out the good parts of ideas that Microsoft has had over the years (like how the Charms bar was a good idea poorly executed) not to blow smoke up Microsoft but to remind them, as a feedback oriented company, of ways they've over-reacted to negative feedback, to wonder where they would be if they didn't just kill such good ideas at the first sign of disinterest/complaint but instead gave them room to grow/evolve. Sometimes it sounds like they need a lot more positive feedback to be a better company because all they seem to hear is the hate of some of the noisier crowds.


> The over-reliance on deep telemetry metrics, for instance, seems kind of a natural evolution of a company that cherishes as much feedback as it can get.

Telemetry is almost the opposite of user feedback as it completely disregards the human element of the user. You may be able to tell what is used often, where users drop out but you don't know why and you don't know what is important to you users. So what telemetry ends being used for more often than not is to back up the developer's own preferences by seemingly backing them up with data without actually doing so.


Microsoft seems to have a crapload of competing teams with each fiefdom vying for attention and authority over decisions, whereas Apple, at least from an outsider perspective, more looks like an authoritarian, top-down corporate hellscape. Another very important distinction that explains this is that Apple doesn't give much about backwards compatibility, whereas it was a core part of Microsoft to keep backwards compatibility even at very high cost.

Both methods of corporate behavior have their advantages and disadvantages.


I'd guess it's more likely that there used to be a "Printers" control panel, when the main thing it controlled was the DB-25 parallel printer port on an ancient IBM-compatible PC, and later they added other devices to it. People accustomed to adjusting printer settings might scroll straight to "Printers" and be confused if it got renamed to "Devices." Even more nefariously, it's reasonable that there's some software out there that does a string comparison for "Printers" that ignores extra characters like " and Devices" which would be a reason not to rename it completely.

Similarly here, cookies have been around since Netscape in 1994. IndexedDB is as new as 2015, window.LocalStorage is from ~2010 IIRC. For backwards compatibility, it's totally reasonable to use "Cookies" or "Cookies and local storage", and expect that to extend to any new developments.


Dumbing down user interfaces has always been the trend on the internet.




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