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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

I think parents reaction might be due the amount of shit software with pretty UIs. In the last 10 years it really feels like software has leaned towards form over function. I personally miss, simple, snappy Windows NT type UIs that were a megabyte and didn't contain a gig of custom icons or hit the GPU to like fade a window or something.

I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute.

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Microsoft teams doesn't load slowly because of the animations, you can turn all of them off if you mess around with the settings and your windows registry enough. It loads slowly because MS have a huge incentive to keep adding features and almost no incentive to optimise it because the software is almost always purchased by large institutions, half of whom have vendor lock in already, and imposed on the people who actually use it day to day, who have no power to change it.

> It loads slowly because MS have a huge incentive to keep adding telemetry and ads and almost no incentive to optimise it

Fixed that for you.

>I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute.

It's a paradox. If you don't make it look fancy, smooth, and appealing, you lose out to those that do. Even if you have a better product, that doesn't mean you can sell it on merits of being more technically efficient. Especially to more casual consumer or to business heads to make the purchases.

besides, the minute loading times aren't because it's caching all those animations and assets. That's a different division with different problems. Probably a mix of security checks, inefficient networking, and _maybe_ some choice in framework like Electron as a distant 3-5th (not that Teams uses Election).

We don't use Teams because it is fancy, or smooth or appealing.

We use Teams because the company that pays our salary tells us to use Teams. End of story.

And I would definitely trade opacity and fancy buttons for a client that loads and runs fast.

Unfortunately, you can't, because it isn't the opacity and fancy buttons making it slow in the first place. It's still a false dichotomy.

>Especially to more casual consumer or to business heads to make the purchases.

I covered that yes. Your company isn't made of people who will objectively measure the best product for the employees.

That's a fictitious trade, though. Opacity and fancy buttons are computationally very cheap, and they aren't the reason for Teams's poor performance.

If Microsoft Teams were made in Windows Forms, it would not have the fancy look it has now, and it would be a lot faster. "The reason" is complicated.

I still love a nicely designed Winforms UI in 2024.

No weird colours or anything. Just mostly standard controls, unless it's necessary to create a custom one.

Most developers look at old interfaces through rose colored glasses. If you separate nostalgia from what most people find usable, they just don't hold up.

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