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Comment by poetincode | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing! Can you please put some products in contrast to help me visualize the trend in point... I mean, maybe two products doing similar things but where you feel that the whole product or a part of it from the older design offered superior ergonomics

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I'd say find some screenshot of Windows 95 with multiple applications running and marvel at it. Google Workspace administration console is good example of UI in many ways less capable and useful then what I used twenty years ago. To name just a few:

- listviews are limited to 50 items. MSDOS apps running on 640kB memory could do better back in eighties.

- Adding a new item does not refresh listview. I had wits to do that when I was 13yo toying with qbasic.

- UI "windows" are just floating <div>s that can't be moved, with controls wherever UX monkey happened to have dropped them. Heck, even the (fake) close button can't have consistent left or right position. Compared to that mess, Windows 3 apps look like work of art.

- Many actions take long clock-to-display time. How come that rendering a few lines of text and some buttons is slower on gigahertz class multicore machine then pitiful 200Mhz celeron?

- Even the early, amateurish web apps from nineties, pushed through pathetic dialup internet had the common sense to check session timeout BEFORE displaying a form for user to fill in. Google today? Not so much.

I could continue, but this makes me sad.

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