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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

The hamburger menu would be fine, even great, if it was a standard menu that every mobile app had in the same place with the same look [0]. But its purpose, positioning, and look is different in every app, so it’s just one more thing to click on to see what it does. It also doesn’t make sense as soon as you have more than one menu [1], or on the desktop — mostly because a single menu rarely makes sense on the desktop, and because an icon tends to be a much smaller pointer target compared to a regular labeled menu, for such a main entry point.

[0] like in Windows 1.0, I guess: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4e/Windows1.0.pn...

[1] unless it’s a secondary but universal menu like the Windows system menu in [0]

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On that matter, I don't get Android's design trajectory: They used to have exactly that: A standard button in the OS for the app context menu, on some devices even a physical button. For some reason, they got rid of it in newer versions, so every interested app has to implement it itself, which of course causes to UI to become wildly inconsistent between apps. I don't understand why.

They had enough fun getting app developers to support the back button properly, let alone the context menu!

In truth Android has suffered from the fact everyone starts on iOS first and then ports to Android, screen by screen in many cases, meaning accommodation of Android specific UI flows simply doesn't happen.

The removal of physical buttons was largely motivated by OEMs wanting to eliminate moving parts which make things far more expensive to build/test than simply one slightly bigger capacitive touchscreen.

I'm pretty sure on most phones those buttons were just an extension of the digitizer / touchscreen backlight.

physical buttons are also a pain for waterproofing

That was 15 years ago.

The problem with the old Android menu button was that you never knew whether or not there was a menu, and what would be in the menu. Some apps had navigation, some had actions. Some apps had different things on different screens.

The usual pattern on Android nowadays is that hamburgers go on the left, actions go on the right. And an on-screen button is much more obvious than a hardware key, or something on the never changing bottom bar.

I recently had to resume using Windows extensively after a long hiatus, and the regressions I had already noticed in occasional use remain an infuriating PITA every damned day. It's not a matter of adjustment to something different. It's a matter of incompetent UI.

The elimination of the standard menu bar in one application after another is a huge one. Look at Edge: I wanted to save a PDF I was viewing. Fat chance.

There's no menu. In the toolbar past the URL box there's a jagged Pac-Man that I guess is supposed to be yet another "gear" icon. Then there's a star with lines in it for "favorites" and then your own avatar and then three dots with a tiny upward pink arrow overlapping part of one of them.

In the upper-left corner of the window there are more boxy icons... let's see what those are... "Workspaces" and "Tab actions menu."

So is "save file" under Gear-Man, the three dots, or somewhere else?

And BTW, WHAT APPLICATION IS THIS? You have no idea which window belongs to which one, because the title bars are missing.

What a truly incredible, pathetic mess. The Mac's single menu bar is a UI blunder, but NO menu bar is monumentally stupid.

I’m also astounded at the loss of density.

Open Word/WordPerfect in Win95. Toolbar filled with lots of unique tiny icons that do useful things. Doesn’t take up much space.

Now we have an enormous ribbon with a few gigantic icons, with most of the functionality buried in tiny submenus triggered only by clicking an tiny arrow in a corner that seem to have been inspired from The Net.

Call me crazy - I didn’t dream of high resolution monitors so I can have a toolbar that occupies a bigger percentage of the screen NOW than it did in the days of 640x480 computing. I’d much rather see my document instead.

I hate UI trends for the past 20 years.

I know the this isn't the thrust, but the "jagged pac-man" is actually supposed to be a puzzle piece, and symbolizes plugins.

The three dots at the right, for some reason, is the menu. It's labelled "Settings and more", and contains the gear icon you were thinking of, but also all of the normal menu items like new window and print. It also contains "Save page", but befuddlingly that one is hidden under another flyout menu called "More tools".

When opening a PDF file in Edge, it loads up some kind of Acrobat embedding for me, and that one has its very own "save file" button, though with identical iconography to Edge's. Thankfully, the button is visible without any further menu diving, but is also placed at the top right, with an extremely faint border delineating it from the Edge chrome.

Mmmm, thanks. I don't remember finding plug-in-related stuff under there. But I'll take a look tomorrow.

If that's supposed to be a puzzle piece, it's a disgrace. Just another symbol of Microsoft's abject design bankruptcy. They had far better icons than that at 16 x 16 pixels 30 years ago.

Sure enough, this entire button is devoted to plug-ins... which the vast majority of users are likely to have none of.

Another fine UI choice by today's Microsoft.

Thank you for putting in words what has been subconsciously annoying me about modernized windows applications. It seems like they are consistently worse with no recognizable improvements.

Who is to blame? Is it the UI people wanting a "clean" look or is it misguided UX people?

I think it's people who lack

1. Experience

2. Aptitude

3. Supervision

And then there are the apologists who attack anyone who calls for better, and almost the entire rest of the population... who

1. Don't take time to convey feedback

2. Can't find a way to convey feedback

3. Can't distill exactly why the product sucks and formulate feedback.

I just wasted a good portion of my afternoon trying to activate change-tracking in Word. The Word UI is an even bigger POS than the rest of Windows. I mean... it's a wonderland of baffling rabbit-holes, to the point where I'm laughing while typing this out because it seems like a prank. MS even eschewed their own File dialog in this thing, to replace it with a page that looks like hand-coded HTML without a stylesheet. Truly incredible.

So I took screen shots. I wrote up a detailed explanation as to why this is defective. And then I used MS's "Feedback Hub" (which vanishingly few people are going to find or bother with) to try to file a report. After typing it all out and attaching files...

"Something went wrong. Please try again later."

And of course it deleted all my work. And it has happened on four attempts throughout the day.

So when companies claim, gee, no one has complained before... it's just another mockery of the recipient.

It's cultural. The way things look are more important than they way they work. In fact its way way more important. People will almost always choose pretty and useless over not-as-pretty and functional.

But those are not exclusive. Look at the File "dialog" in Word now. Seriously, take a look at this mess and then see if that is "prettier" than a proper File dialog on ANY platform.

I can't figure out if you're talking about Chrome or Edge but both browsers have made so many bad UI decisions

"Look at Edge: I wanted to save a PDF I was viewing. Fat chance."

Relevant: I had to quit using Firefox though, because of the brain-dead bookmarks being buried several levels deep in menus, and worse in the mobile version.

Enable the menu bar in Firefox - given this thread, that'll probably be a great joy for you. I love the menu bar, it's so convenient.

Thanks. I particularly hated the burying of bookmarks on mobile, so is there a way to address that?

You mean how it defaults to a different folder? Yeah, no idea on that one. Mozilla needs to give bookmarks some love imo, but I think far fewer people use them than one might expect.

Somewhere along the way I have lost title bars to know the title of each tab in my browser, whether firefox or brave. I don't know if I need to set it in the browser, or kde, or kwin, i also tried microsoft windows and the same behavior.

In Firefox if you right-click the title bar and "Customize Toolbar..." you can check Title Bar.

I've seen apps with a hambuger, gear, and ellipsis button all on the front page. Why? For what possible reason?

I truly don't understand why we do this to ourselves.

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