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> Every application had application menus that worked the same way, in the same font, and they all responded to the same keyboard shortcuts.

My experience had been that most (almost all) of them _only_ worked with a single font in a single font size and a specific window size. If you did change any of these, it got unusable.

About consistency: except for those that didn't, not even MS themselves were consistent. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html

The 90s had been also the time of programs like Kai's Power Tools https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ and Winamp.

I'm sorry, but "interface consistency" is not something that comes to my mind when I think of 90s and early 2000s Windows programs (neither was Linux). Irix with 4DWM had been quite consistent at that time.

I used Windows 98SE for eight years. I never saw any issue changing window sizes.

I can't speak to font sizes since IIRC that was an option but I left it default.

For all my apps that had controls pinned to a specific coordinate, I made sure to make the windows fixed-size.

I taught courses on VB from versions 3 to 6 and this was always something we went over.

In the "hall of shame" you linked, they list applications which misuse radio buttons. Uh oh, call the police. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies. But honestly, up until the ribbon in Office, it was incredibly homogeneous compared to today.

In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners.

They aren't even pretending any more.

This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows.

Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today.

Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.

You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.

They're pretty fast to create, relatively consistent, simple and fast/easy to create.

That's not what people want, they want all the flexibility and features of say Gmail or maps. B along with some communication and flexibility. Not to mention running on every OS under the sun, and being able to use accessibility and screen reader tools on all those platforms.

> You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.

Uh, no you can't. Web forms aren't rich enough to build most desktop applications. You can't make vscode, gmail, slack or spotify using web forms. They're just a bad set of primitives for applications. (In the web's defense, it was never designed as an application platform).

Yet - we had some version of all of those applications in the 90s, on every OS at the time. And (mostly) using the platform's built in UI libraries so the look and feel was consistent and delightful.

Web forms are absolutely enough to roughly match the typical VB6 application. Especially the "easy" path mentioned. Not every app, but definitely most.

Interfaces were WAY more consistent than they are nowadays even when taking into account some applications slightly altering their themes. One application using a listbox instead of a tree (like one of the Microsoft examples in the site you linked) does not make a UI inconsistent (even as the wrong control, the listbox still looks and works exactly like the other listboxes in the system), it only makes it an odd/bad choice. And from a quick browse, most of the issues mentioned there are things like that (including, amusingly, a ribbon-like interface in Windows 3.1 in the tabs section[0] :-P).

IMO the fact that someone cared enough to make a site about what is largely nitpicks like this shows exactly how these stood out in the otherwise consistent landscape of UIs in the 90s.

Nowadays such a site would have 99% of every application released. It could even be automated, just somehow track all new .exe files in GitHub, MajorGeeks, Softpedia, etc and add them automatically to a hall of shame list, chances are even without human supervision the overwhelming majority will be correct :-P.

[0] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/tabs.html

I think you're forgetting how much more dense and complex even a basic web ui is in controls. Every HN comment in the default story view has something like up to 10 clickable controls - a pair of vote buttons, username, timestamp, a bunch of nav links, a hide control, a reply button. HN, the famously minimalist, oldskool website. The web made new ui and even the back-in-the-day version of that ui is way more complicated than the back-in-the-day desktop app UI you're thinking of.

Hm. I don't think it would be that hard it would be to remake HN's UI using an old school UI component library. The up/down arrows could use the up/down buttons on this screenshot from macos's old color picker:

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colo...

... But limited to only allow you up/downvote between -1 and 1.

Everything else could be done with buttons and a TextField / Label for comments and replying.

The web is a bit weird in that it taught us to build every UI as a giant scrolling document. And HN is no different. A more "classic" UI approach would be something like Thunderbird mail - with 2 panes: a "comments" tree on top and a "message body" down the bottom. That would be harder to read (since you'd need to click on the next message to jump to it). But it might encourage longer, more thoughtful replies.

Thunderbird: https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/

Or you could reimplement HN with classic controls and something like TB 114's UI:

https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_ma...

Probably still worse that what HN is now though.

A "traditional" UI for HN would surely look a lot like Usenet newsgroup readers. I think Thunderbird might even still support NNTP.

Usenet had a much better model for discussion groups/forums like HN in my view, though crucially for the modern world it is missing some kind of "comment voting"/user-driven moderation. I wonder if there's an HN<->NNTP gateway around somewhere?

Voting could be handled with comments with specific content - wouldn’t even need to have a body, as everything could be in the headers. Totals could be computed at the server, unless we wanted real NNTP-style distributed discussions.

You'd probably just need create your own X-header extension

> I think you're forgetting how much more dense and complex even a basic web ui is in controls.

It really isn't. Web is anemic in controls and layouts compared to what's actually possible with proper controls and control over those controls.

Yeah; especially given the number of pixels we have at our disposal. Old UI screenshots look simple but they had to work at tiny resolutions compared to modern user interfaces. I remember when 800x600 was considered luxurious.

Web apps also can't use a lot of native shortcut keys to build keyboard-friendly UIs. Its rude to override the browser's right click menu. Alt-anything might bring up browser native controls. Ctrl/Cmd+S is owned by the browser. And so on. Some of this stuff you can override, but even if you do, users never experiment because those shortcut keys basically never do what you expect.

I don't see anything special in having tens actions on a UI item. Toggles, action links and vanilla buttons would take care of it.

Dense?! I've never seen a web UI remotely close to what I'd call dense.

The HN UI would be very easy to recreate in something like Delphi, I'd call it trivial.

We use Delphi at work. Our main application is a regular Windows desktop application. I recently had to add a new module to our application at work, it required three new input windows/screens, each with 100-150 input fields, few dozen buttons, and several grids.

I made the UI parts in a day. A few more hours the day after and all the UI logic and database loading/saving was done, and I had a functional UI for all three windows/screens.

Many of our customers have HTML-based ERP or CRM systems that we integrate with. I've never seen any of them that are close to dense UIs, and most of the time I see the user having to click through multiple sub-screens just to do a relatively simple task like looking up a couple of values. With a denser UI that could all have been on a single screen and saved the user a ton of time.

But I'd love to be proven wrong. Any examples out there of actually dense, in the good sense, web UIs?

> I think you're forgetting how much more dense and complex even a basic web ui is in controls.

I realised I should've added: Have you actually seen a proper dense UI? Look at any professional software. You will die of old age before you can implement just the layout for it using web technologies.

Here's Cubase with TAL-U-No-LX synth emulator in front of it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8M6-QOWEAQMgGl?format=jpg&name=...

Can MIXXX be considered professional software?

The skins are made using XML and QSS (Qt CSS).

It's not web per se, but it is not too far from it either. I would say it's a combination of both, Web and Desktop technologies, into one.

https://i0.wp.com/djtechtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07...

It's not web technology by any stretch of imagination

What about a dense ui is intrinsically more difficult to implement on the web? Doesn't dense just mean lots of buttons/fields and small margins between them? Your example looks very challenging indeed, but it was probably not trivial to implement either way.

> What about a dense ui is intrinsically more difficult to implement on the web?

You have no control over layout or control over rendering. In native apps (especially desktop apps) you can always go down or up any level you want. In the browser you're always fighting the quite rigid and high-level layout and rendering engine.

It's somewhat better now with grid and felxbox, but the browser will always have its own ideas on how the children can be laid out, and there are no good ways for children to depend on the parent, or for the parent to depend on the children etc.

There are very, very few dense layouts on the web. And while late-90s/early-2000s sofware was often ridiculed, you could create dense control-rich interfaces in minutes. Because they are usually not ad-hoc hacks added to the platfrom as an afterthought, like everything on the web.

> Windows has several competing "official" UI libraries. Every library has a different look and feel, and all are in various stages of decomposition

I can’t fathom why they made the decision to push every style to a different rendering engine. Working on Windows gets you to see every look and feel and the deeper you go, the closer you get to Windows 2000.

They dropped the ball because no major part of their current business model involves creating a better operating system for the sake of attracting new users

They seem to aim at minimising users leaving and maximising the extraction of data obtained per user

Hasn't there been a set of web components that tries to reproduce this?

I think about this every time I'm asked to build a custom dropdown menu. Can we just use a <select>? No- it must be 'branded'!

If you’re in a rare team doing agile halfway right, see if you can start providing separate level-of-effort for a feature with good UI that’s also quick, and the worse-for-the-user “on-brand” one.

Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible. If you can get it through stakeholders’ heads that they’re cutting the feature development rate in half (and making UX worse, and paying in maintenance time and a higher defect rate, but those are harder to make them understand) with their twee UI, some can be steered away from it, or at least convinced to tone down the most-harmful parts.

> Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible.

A billion times this. And this is when the next version of the design system isn’t incompatible with the previous one.