Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without losing your place in the file system. And on top of that, everything is grindingly slow.

A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad.

View on HN

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two decades if not three.

Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.

I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].

I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37774322

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar

The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option.

The rare times I have to use windows, I use edge and I quite like the vertical tabs. This allows for a usable title bar, too.

You can't actually use reason to understand modern UX/UI designers choices. I've just got Windows 11 at work. They've increased the blank space between all the items in the file exporer quite significantly. They clearly don't care about vertical space because I know have to scroll first in places I could click first before.

Just so you know, you can disable that spacing in the file explorer: in the explorer -> View -> Show -> Compact view

I feel like I periodically have to do that

Usually the smallest "skinny" 16:9 screens you see nowadays on desktops are 24".

Windows was perfectly usable on 15" 4:3 screens. The first iMacs were 15" 4:3.

So that as such probably wasn't the issue.

http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

What might be an issue though is the use of laptops.

Yeah, I was mostly thinking of laptops.

Ok I can see the point there, especially with the non-movable taskbar (and hideously large ribbon bars in Office etc.)

http://www.displaywars.com/15,4-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

> The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens

Only to waste it on the ridiculously big search ribbon. See the current Thunderbird.

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.

There is: more space for content, e.g. websites while not removing directly accessible functionaly

If the content would make better use of screen estate, that probably would not be necessary.

If things are so tight in the layout that taking the title bar away is actually necessary, then the layout is already fundamentally bad.

It's not necessary, still helps

Oh come on. Why even have a title bar at that point. Why not just stick a little tab on the side and get rid of the title bar entirely.

Is "Yes, good idea." the response you're expecting? Because that's my response.

But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

> But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

What does that even mean? That's the whole point of the discussion - standard UI elements have been bastardized so much, might as well just keep the trend going.

Bastardized yes, but you can't truly get rid of it in all circumstances.

If there is a clean way to get rid of it, then sure that's a good option for some programs. (But there are a couple bits that you need to keep.)

But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

> But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

No, it is a question about design. Window environments like Windows 11, macOS, Gnome or lots of other Linux window managers are designed for desktop PCs, not tablets. I would include Laptops under desktop PCs for this discussion, since most people -- that are working the whole day on their laptop -- add one or more screens to it. And on those large modern displays, it is more effective than ever to use overlapping non-fullscreened windows. Then it is absolutely necessary to have good standardized UI components to manage those windows. But those customized title bars break that standardization and customization. On modern Gnome I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar. Today, there is slight difference in gray shading. That is ridiculous. And half of modern programs redefine the colors of their title bars, so you have to know for earch application which shade of gray stands for focus and which stands for not in focus. This is fucking stupid.

> I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar.

First and worst offender against this basic Windows guideline: Microsoft Office.

That's actually a case against modern overfilled title bars.

"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).

"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.

> But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

They're mandatory because they're the way to move the window with your mouse. So fucking them up with a bunch of stuff that hinders that is just as bad as not having them in the first place.

Congratulations, you've circumvented the mandatory requirement!

Which is just as bad as disregarding it in the first place.

Do you need the entire title bar for movement? I sure don't.

https://imgur.com/a/dGwiRP5

That's a screenshot across the entire width (of the top) of my monitor, as you can see from NP++ being maximised behind MS Word. Pretty darn busy, isn't it?

Sure, I can clean it up quite a bit, I can find out how to customise that. But naive users? They'll probably freak out. (And, TBF, I just noticed you can grab on to at least some of those busy-looking fields and drag it. But I only noticed that just now, while futzing around to screenshot it. And again, would my Mom? Or yours?) No, on the whole: What large software providers do to the Windows ittle bar nowadays is shit. The larger, the shittier. So of course Microsoft itself is worst of them all.

FWIW, and I know it's not as good as patching the root cause, on Windows environment I have found relief in using AltDrag (and/or its fork AltSnap [1]). You can grab and move a window by pressing Alt and then clicking wherever you want on the window. There are also a few other tricks regarding window maximizing/resizing etc. [1] https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap

Alt-Space, 'M' is your friendly keyboard method to move a window around. After pressing those three keys, use the cursor keys to move the window around as you desire, and press the Enter key when you're happy with the window's new location or press the Esc key to cancel the move op.

Works really well when the window's title bar has been moved offscreen for some reason.

IBM's CUA for the win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Once you've moved the window with the arrow keys you can also use the mouse to move the window. The problem with this is that it's _slow_, and it doesn't actually work on some software. Some non-native window frameworks like to disable (or don't implement) all hotkeys by default, including f10, Alt+space and sometimes even the tab key. IMO the only reason for a program to disable the standard windowing mechanics is because it's intended to be used as an overlay (programs like launchy or slickrun).

You wanna freak out anyone under the age of about 45-50, use the [Ctrl]-[Ins] / [Shift]-[Ins] / [Shift]-[Del] shortcuts while they're watching your keyboard. Everyone nowadays only knows those Apple-copied [Ctrl]-[C]/[V]/[X] ones, and thinks they're the God-given Standard.

Ironic, to some degree. I agree with the overall sentiment,but:

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.

But also: > Chesterton's Fence >>The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

There are always pros and cons to every design decision. As technology develops, we create new tools to interact with an ever-expanding content base. By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.

There are other design paradigms that can be used for this, but it's a fairly simple (and naive) implementation / solution to this problem to move some of the stuff to the title bar which (visually) appears to be wasted space. But visual space != interactive space, so

> By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.

But the loss of the title bar causes actual pain and interferes with practical use. It's hard to imagine any tools/content that would be worth that loss.

The only programs I have that are putting things in the titlebar are putting tabs there, and those programs do not cause me notable problems. For me the positives are much stronger than the negatives.

Well, MS Excel , Word etc. put a search widget and a user widget in the.title bar which occupy the whole thing. Moving Office windows is a pain.

Some occupied parts of the titlebar accept mouse-down-drag to move the window in MS Office apps, including:

document-name-dropdown, search-box, username, user-icon.

Elements that do not allow dragging the window, because they react to mouse-down, include:

application-icon, quick-access-toolbar, notifications-bell-icon, and the standard titlebar icons.

This requires experimentation, memory, and conscious thought moving a window did not require previously.

Visual Studio actually puts the menubar in the titlebar; I never have any place to click left unless the window is maximized (or, at least, full width).

Oh yeah, that's a little bit annoying. It looks like I can drag on the second toolbar on the very left but it would be much better to force some dragging space both left and right on the title bar. Otherwise I think menus there is okay, I don't need the entire title bar as a dragging area.

I'm ok with adding more functions to the titlebar, it's something I experimented with myself for a desktop app some 15 years ago. I found there was a heck of a lot of special behaviours tied to the titlebar and that overriding them meant a lot of work to fix edge cases like - being able to move windows. So I never followed through with it.

Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?

That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.

If you need to use the move button, the move button needs to stay on screen. I may be the only one, but I regularly position windows partially off screen when I only need one side of the window and I don't have enough desktop space for the whole thing.

Browser tabs I actually find OK, I didn't even really consider them as "using" title bar space, since each tab is a title bar and contains no "active" areas that prevent the simple 'click and drag' action.

This does become more problematic when there are so many tabs they become tiny and the whole title bar of the browser is taken up by tabs so that there's no dead-space to drag the entire browser window to another screen. I try to keep minimal contexts (due to personal brain capacity issues), so I don't run up against this very often - I manage links that I want to keep and go back to using other means, or if I forget them then they weren't very important in the first place.

Just use a tiling window manager. In mine you move windows around by holding middle mouse button anywhere on the window, or left button with some key combo.

https://github.com/StackWM

Oh wow I thought the New Teams menu was an internal dog food thing for Microsoft employees. I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely maddening. Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either, and many hours a week are wasted complaining about it.

I used to use Teams, and it had this feature where if you clicked on the app icon (macOs) enough times a debug menu appeared. It was clearly aimed for internal testing. But there was no timer attached to it, so if, over the course of your day, you clicked on it in the dock, eventually the menu appeared. It seemed pretty half baked to have a debug menu available to your users in the wild.

> Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either

Then why can't they make Teams not terrible?

I don’t know man. It’s a big company and far removed from my team. If I had to guess, probably because of too many Chefs in the kitchen

Don't worry, they are rewriting it in React. That is guaranteed to fix all the problems.

So what do employees say about it? How could it be fixed? And since you're not in that dept I'll ask something else too, why are Microsoft employees not using MS made tech? Like it seems almost nobody is using WinUI3, or MAUI internally but it's all React and Electron?

> A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad

That's the thing, I don't think they feel bad at all. Their UX departments exist solely to justify their own existence and are increasingly distant from the opinions and issues facing actual users using their products. They're still well paid, so they have no reason to feel bad.

I agree. The distro I am using lets me move windows by holding down Meta/Super key and left mouse button - anywhere in the window. Firefox is an example of how terrible it can get, see this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zs2wekv.png. To move this window I can either click to the left of the Firefox icon (to the left in image) or between the arrow down and minimize to the right.

This is a X11 feature AFAIK. Meta+Right-click resizes the window by the way.

> This is a X11 feature AFAIK

Good to know!

> Meta+Right-click resizes the window by the way.

Yep, I use it all the time, killer feature!

I mean, what’s the alternative? Go back to Internet Explorer style windows, with 3 toolbars?

Yes? We managed on 1024x768 screens and all that “wasted” real estate. Meanwhile I have two 2880x2560 monitors hanging off my dock and UX designers are tripping over themselves to hide more shit in the overflow menu to save me 5 pixels of vertical space.

And one of those monitors is pivoted vertical...

Yes, in Internet Explorer you could show and hide all those toolbars as you liked. So, you could adapt the application to your needs.

If my former self, that was forced to use Internet Explorer, would defend its UI in the future, it would rotate in the grave.

Making things look pretty is very good for your portfolio and career. But making things usable usually means ugly.

Thin scrollbars and window borders are pretty. Mobile buttons with only icons but no text are pretty. Hiding functionality is pretty.

> Hiding functionality is pretty

Going back a long way, this is what always bothered me about UI efforts in the Linux world like the Enlightenment window manager. It seemed like the very definition of “nice house, nobody home.”

The problem boils down to allowing aesthetics to dominate over functionality - form supersedes function. There are plenty of people happy to inflict that on others. I sometimes wonder what they use themselves.

> I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button.

I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.

It is a must have to know because there is inevitably moments where you have a window showing at the wrong place. I remember back in the days I was using windows sometimes when switching from multiple screens to single screen a window would start/appear out of the frame so you'd have to move it using one of those shortcuts.

I would be surprised Microsoft and Apple have removed these. Someone to confirm?

> I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.

Except this is an X11 feature, and they're all frantically switching to Wayland... Which probably doesn't have that feature, right?

It has nothing to do with X11, and everything to do with your window manager. Many wayland dms allow it, such as sway which is a clone of i3.

> “Morons” is the right word

never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice

if they don't break things how can they fix them next year and add it as "new look UI"

>Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams

Are you sure you’re not accidentally opening the old Teams application? When you update to new Teams it leaves the old version in place so you have both, and if you open Teams with the new shortcut/application you won’t get prompted to switch back.

that's probably just MSFT's lackluster design of a chat application, though.

I think this was a bug that lasted a couple weeks or so because I had the same exact issue: Open New Teams, get prompted to switch back each time, including the first run (!?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com