Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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> Don't know what the f is going on with "Modern" UIs.

I see this as a confluence of a few different things:

1. Monitors are getting higher and higher resolutions; a 4K display that's less than 27" is going to feel awfully tiny unless you start scaling things up.

2. Things have gotten more complicated over time, and the more complicated they get the more chances that something will mess up. At some point my gaming PC decided that it was going to take 30-90 seconds for the right-click context menu in Explorer to come up, and while it was waiting it would lock up Explorer. Simplification can be a good thing.

3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

Probably some other stuff.

>Monitors are getting higher and higher resolutions; a 4K display that's less than 27" is going to feel awfully tiny unless you start scaling things up.

Does this mean people who _don't_ buy 4K displays at those resolutions are going to be disadvantaged with strangely-huge UIs? (Side note: every OS I use already has display options to scale up UI 100-200+%, but not scale down less than a "normal" 100%.)

It reminds me a little bit of when Apple's retina displays first came out and nobody knew how to handle widely-different resolutions, which resulted in huge UI/icons on normal-resolution monitors and fuzzy UI/icons on high-resolution ones, for the longest time.

It's getting bad again on MacOS. Big Sur made window title bars vastly bigger. Using my new mini on a 1080P monitor is pain. I really hate that no one implements a 75% scaling option for MacOS or Windows.

Saddest part is I have a replacement 1440P monitor showing up later in the week since I had to drag mine to work and it doesn't even help all that much. Macs in stores all have 2-5K resolution screens now ruining things for budget monitor folks with cheap Mac Minis.

New mini? I had a mini and two Mac Pros in a job four years ago and when ARD launched in 1080p the screen was unmanagably cramped and everything was huge.

As someone who used 768p 15" laptop until late 2019, yes, everyone else has to deal with bs huge menus. Oh the number of webpages that would have you scroll horizontally, often with white bar on both sides... The day I upgraded to 1080p I could feel a sense of joy in being able to see the web as it was designed. And now every web developer is beginning to develop on 27" (or less) 4K displays and the target is shifting for less fortunate yet again.

If you account for the screen size only, even now we have more resolution the scale of elements on screen is bigger than what screen size allows for comfortable reading.

To me these UIs improvements look like "dumbing down" of UI instead. Everything UX now suggests you the action it thinks you want to perform and hide all other options. Take context menu, start menu or taskbar in Windows 11 or in Android see the drop down from top bar which use to have more options visible at the same time in previous versions.

This will surely work for anyone who is using these systems at very basic level (new users, people with accessibility needs?). For everyone else who spend their lives in these for work or hobby this dumbing is frustrating.

> Does this mean people who _don't_ buy 4K displays at those resolutions are going to be disadvantaged with strangely-huge UIs?

My experience so far is that if your monitor is "too small" for a given app the UI will be gigantic, sometimes to the point of being unusable.

If your monitor is "too big" for a given app, the UI will be tiny, sometimes to the point of being unusable.

Because of (I guess?) the way that Windows (so far?) has handled things, I keep ending up with apps which are too large on my laptop's 1080p screen running alongside apps which are too small on my laptop's external 1440p screen.

> It reminds me a little bit of when Apple's retina displays first came out and nobody knew how to handle widely-different resolutions, which resulted in huge UI/icons on normal-resolution monitors and fuzzy UI/icons on high-resolution ones, for the longest time.

This is a great comparison; I think the difference with MacOS is that if you're doing everything "natively" on MacOS, everything "just kinda worked" a lot of the time, but if your app does any custom drawing (e.g. for toolbar buttons) everything went to hell. In contrast, there are a lot of apps on Windows which use native controls and menus and so on which do not handle scaling well at all. Possibly they're using some API that wasn't properly updated, like Win32 or GDI or who knows what else.

I even have one app, which my company makes :/, which has an odd behaviour: if you launch it when you have a 1080p primary display, and then switch to having a 1440p primary display (by plugging into a dock or monitor or whatever) the right-click menu for the system tray icon shows up at the appropriate location for a 1080p monitor - the correct distance from the top and left of the screen - which, on a 1440p display, is near the middle of the screen.

Which reminds me, I need to report that bug.

> 3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

"Modern" UIs most often are anything but clear and less noisy. Part of what made the Windows 95 design so strong was that UI elements were separated by visible lines, you exactly knew what the touchbox of any element was, the behavior and look of UI elements, menus and icons were generally consistent across applications...

I think that's the worst part of the new Firefox UI. Firefox got rid of the defined, rectangular tabs using a colored background with lines between them. Now it's white rounded rectangles floating in a light-gray background with no other visible distinction. Even with perfect eyes, it was hard to tell what was going on without taking a moment to really focus on it.

It clashes heavily with the container tabs add on as well. The new UI adds a coloured bar on top of a container tab, which I always mistake as an open tab since it's far more visible than the actual open tab indicator

Desktop? Miss me with that shit, I still stubbornly click "not now" whenever I unlock my laptop :D

There are some tweaks out there which patch the CSS to bring stuff slightly closer to the original style.

Oh, I've managed to get it looking basically exactly like Firefox 90 again for me, but it's still a hassle to have to inject custom CSS on every machine to get an easily-usable interface. And I feel bad for people like my elderly dad who don't have that know-how and will have to just live with Mozilla's indifference to accessibility.

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