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Comment by pbz | Hacker News Reader

They're forcing touch paradigms, like seeking screen edges with the mouse since you can't swipe, essential a workaround, onto desktop environments. With previous mobile versions they were forcing the mouse paradigm where touch would've worked better. If you as a tech person find it odd and need time to adjust then you have to multiply that many times for the average user, and all this without any benefit to a desktop user.

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Is using the edges and corners of the screen not a mouse paradigm? Isn't the Fitts's Law value of the edges and corners one of the classic tricks of mouse UI design?

Having to take the mouse to an area of the screen that doesn't have any UI clues that something may happen is not a mouse paradigm. If I show you a window that doesn't have the red X in the top right corner, would you still take the mouse there and click anyway or would you not even bother?

It's not particularly a touch paradigm either. It's simply a "new" convention introduced by Windows 8. FWIW, moving to the mouse to the corners or edges to trigger "invisible" actions isn't unprecedented, for example that's how you show an auto-hidden taskbar (ok, so there's like a 1-pixel edge visible) or show tabs in a fullscreen IE in Windows, and Mac OS X has a "hot corner" feature that has you set actions for the corners.

Fitts's Law says that elements along the edges are easier to hit with a mouse, and elements in the corners are easiest to hit with a mouse.

There's nothing in Fitts's law that says that invisible UI elements are preferable to visible ones.

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