Rudy Huyn joins my crusade against the Windows 10 Volume Pop-up

Regular readers will know I am not a fan of the Windows 10 Volume pop-up (aka Media Overlay), as I feel it is too big, it’s in an obtrusive position, cannot be repositioned, it takes too long to disappear and there is no option to disable it.

I have not received much support in our comment section, so I am delighted to see high profile Windows developer Rudy Huyn shares my opinion.

I love #Windows10, but there is 1 thing I hate: the media control toast.

It's way too large, it stays on display for too long, it's not Fluent, it cancels the fade out animation if you move your mouse over and the worst: you can't dismiss it! ? Please fix it! pic.twitter.com/VPpkBrPSdq

— Rudy Huyn (@RudyHuyn) July 13, 2019

His tweet in facts echos my opinion, and adds two salient observations – the pop-up does not use fluent design (since it is a leftover from Windows 8) and can not be dismissed.

It is important to note that if Microsoft addressed only a few of those issues the problem would go away – make it smaller and I would care a lot less, make it repositionable and I could put it out of the way, add an X button and I would get rid of it without waiting for what feels like 10 seconds.

(As an aside, here is how to disable to volume popup for music and video playing in Chrome, and here is an app which aims to hide it in general for Windows 10, with variable success)

Since I am complaining about Windows 10 usability issues, I would like to add the Windows 10 toast notification to the list.  It shares much of the same issues, being much too large and staying much too long, meaning, for example, I can’t press the send button in Slack because the pop-up has taken focus and is covering the button.

Microsoft claims to be in a listening mode – let us hope a prominent voice such as Rudy’s will finally get their developers to act.