How settings menus changed, from icon grids to searchable sidebars

Settings used to be a grid of icons you could learn by muscle memory. Two decades of new features, per-app permissions and touchscreens turned that grid into a searchable sidebar that changes names with almost every release.

The grid era

For twenty years, configuring a computer meant a grid of icons. Mac OS X shipped System Preferences in 2001 as rows of labelled squares, and Windows offered Control Panel, which by the Windows XP and Windows 7 era had grown a category view layered over an alphabetical list of applets.

The grid worked because there were only a few dozen things to configure. You learned where an icon sat and reached for it without reading. The Mac OS X hub and the Windows 7 hub preserve both layouts, and revisiting them shows how much smaller the configuration surface used to be.

Two settings apps at once

Touchscreens broke the grid. Windows 8 introduced a separate PC settings app for the new interface while leaving Control Panel in place for everything the new app could not do yet, and Windows 10 continued the split with a Settings app that absorbed applets release by release.

That transition took roughly a decade, and it is not finished. Windows 11 still ships Control Panel, and certain dialogs around printers and regional formats hand you back to the older interface. Apple made a cleaner break: System Preferences kept its grid until macOS Ventura replaced it with System Settings and a scrolling sidebar modelled on the iPhone.

Sidebars, search and longer labels

Today the pattern is nearly universal: a sidebar of sections on the left, a search field at the top and a detail pane on the right. Windows 11, macOS, ChromeOS and recent GNOME releases all use it, and iOS runs the phone-sized version of the same idea.

Search is what makes the pattern survivable. iOS added a search field to Settings in iOS 9, and every desktop system now indexes setting names, so typing bluetooth or caption skips the hierarchy entirely. It also quietly compensates for the fact that almost nobody remembers where things live any more.

The trade-off is that search only finds what you can name. If a feature was renamed in the version you are running, the old term returns nothing and the setting looks as though it was removed, which is the single most common cause of a support call about a missing option.

Why sections keep splitting and getting renamed

Sections split for three reasons. Features multiply, so one wireless entry becomes a network group with sub-pages. Permissions become per-app, so a single privacy switch becomes a list of dozens of apps. And new disclosure screens need somewhere to sit.

Renaming usually follows a change of scope. Apple widened Privacy to Privacy and Security in iOS 16, Windows 11 replaced Ease of Access with Accessibility to match industry wording, and GNOME retired Universal Access for the same reason. Android's Oreo restructure folded many top-level entries into a shorter grouped list, and manufacturer skins then reorganise them again.

Tracking the changes version by version

None of that helps when a support article describes one path and the screen shows another. The practical fix is to compare versions directly instead of trusting memory. The version change log records what moved between releases, and the settings finder resolves a feature name to its path on a specific version.

To see the two desktop lineages next to each other, macOS compared with Windows covers the current layouts. The osimulator settings browser opens 87 version combinations, old grids included, in a browser tab with nothing to install.