"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away...."
-Antoine de St. Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939
-Antoine de St. Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939
For example, Chrome doesn't have a nice and simple Bookmarks menu like FF (or Favorites in IE). You have to waste an entire chunk of vertical space on a "Bookmarks Toolbar" before you can access the button which is actually a menu, under which the bookmarks are hiding. One of several reasons I don't use Chrome.
There are lots more examples in Windows Vista and Win7. Take wmplayer: how do you open up a URL for streaming? It's hard to find that kind of functionality in the visible UI, because it seems not to be present. Instead, you have to use the context (!) menu on some of the window chrome (!!), and you can see that they've squished what used to be the main menu bar into the context menu. The UI actually ends up being more complex (it's harder to get at the features), the only "benefit" being that the application, on the surface, appears to do less.
Not to mention the now-fashionable ribbon toolbars, used in Wordpad and MSPaint - they've changed what used to be a modeless UI paradigm, i.e. menus, into a mode-based one with switching tabs. In many ways it feels like a step back into the 80s for me.
Completely agree. These overly minimal interfaces are great if you only use the most basic functions (open file, pause, play, stop) or already know what you are doing. However, if you need to figure something out its pretty horrible.