{"id":112373,"date":"2026-06-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=112373"},"modified":"2026-06-01T17:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T00:34:14","slug":"20260601-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20260601-00\/?p=112373","title":{"rendered":"The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was &#8220;modern&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>During the development of Windows\u00a08, we needed a name for &#8220;that thing we&#8217;re creating.&#8221; Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it &#8220;the modern experience,&#8221; to distinguish it from what we had in Windows\u00a07, which was called &#8220;the classic experience.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.<\/p>\n<p>The new shell was called the &#8220;modern shell&#8221; or &#8220;MoSh&#8221; for short. By comparison, the old shell was called the &#8220;classic shell&#8221;, which some people started calling &#8220;ClaSh&#8221; for short. (<a href=\"https:\/\/meangirls.fandom.com\/wiki\/Fetch\">That name didn&#8217;t stick<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>When we couldn&#8217;t come up with a name for a component of the modern experience, a common fallback was to stick the prefix &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mo_Money_Mo_Problems\">Mo<\/a>&#8221; in front.<\/p>\n<p>The new Start menu derived from some earlier explorations known as the &#8220;Go page&#8221; (since it&#8217;s the place you go when you want to do something). Its new code name was therefore &#8220;MoGo.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The portion of the screen for snapped applications was called the &#8220;MoBar&#8221;, and the portion of the screen used for filled applications was called the &#8220;MoBody.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The settings control panel? &#8220;MoSet.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The ListView control? It started out with the more tedious name &#8220;modern collection control&#8221;, which got shortened to &#8220;MoCo.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Even the new applications got the Mo-treatment. The new Web browser initially called itself &#8220;MoB&#8221;, but then decided that an even hipper name would be &#8220;MoBro.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And the new photo manager? The people who worked on that didn&#8217;t want to get left out of the &#8220;Mo&#8221;-party, so they called themselves (wait for it) &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110713093239\/https:\/\/ew.com\/ew\/article\/0,,1219727,00.html\">MoPho<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I hope somebody put their foot down out of frustration. &#8220;Enough already. This Mo thing is completely out of control.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Windows 8 was announced fifteen years ago today, on June 1, 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modern this and that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-112373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Modern this and that.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112374,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112373\/revisions\/112374"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}