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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen.

Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious.

It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.

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One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.

It's really gone backward.

We lost any concept of shading and borders, which has made modern day user interfaces absolute hell to navigate because everything melts together and looks the same.

Windows 9x/NT4.0 Explorer was the pinnacle of graphical user interfaces.

One regression that really annoys me: in recent KDE themes, the default "active window" and "background window" titlebar colors are indistinguishable. So you have no clue where all your input events are going to go.

And if you actually set them to reasonable colors, certain applications do weird epileptic things (looking at you, Firefox!)

I'll probably catch heat for this, but I think Windows 95 was the pinnacle of UI/UX design, and much of what we've done since have been regressions.

I agree. You knew visually what everything did. A button was a button and was noticeably off or on and things like that. I would put classic on for my XP UI I love it so much.

It was a very explicit interface. It was not as sexy as a 3D composited one, but it did not play peek-a-boo. Scrolling through a list, like downloads on a web page, you would see 20 or 30 line items, not two or three. It also worked on a slow CPU without a GPU. We have lost something since those highly-optimized 2D interfaces, from the same era as Super Nintendo Mode 7 affine transform and After Dark/Xscreensaver 2.5D graphics.

I can’t stand things that are hidden until I mouse over or click on them. Just draw everything and let me scroll

I disagree, but only slightly, Windows 2000 was my personal favorite, especially for its version of Windows Explorer.

The one area where I think 98 and 2000 regress from 95 is that they introduce "web content" in applications that are not web browsers - specifically, random objects respond to single-clicks instead of double-clicks, and blue underlined (and sometimes not even underlined) hyperlinks start to appear.

There was no reason to do that.

Active X desktop crap could be disabled with some Registry tweaks.

It wasn't just on the desktop, though. It was in the Explorer, in Office apps, and various other places.

Enable "high contrast mode" in macOS.. buttons look like buttons and some more things.. The normal mode is way too flat / low contrast.

Sometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice.

Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?

Last Christmas, one of the most popular toys we sold was Pop-Its, which is nothing more that a plastic sheet of buttons.

I am not worried that the kids will grow up not understanding the concept of a button.

https://www.target.com/s/pop+it+fidget+toy

TV remotes do still have buttons.

Also, there are still on/off buttons and volume buttons on phones. Video game controllers still use buttons. Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.

> Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.

Depends on the car's year, make, and model. It could be touchscreen only.

That's fair. I haven't yet seen a car with only a touchscreen and nothing else, but I wouldn't be surprised by the existence of such a car. I don't actively keep up with new cars.

Tesla doesn’t have buttons for the aforementioned functions

I hate Tesla as much as the next guy, but all Teslas have buttons for temperature and audio controls - they're on the steering wheel.

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