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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable. There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss.

That is more what I am advocating for, subtle background UX improvements based on an LLMs ability to interpret a users intent. We had limited abilities to look at an applications state and try to determine a users intent, but it is easier to do that with an LLM. Yeah like you point out some users don't want you to try and predict their intent, but if you can do it accurately a high percentage of the time it is "magic".

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> subtle UX behaviors

I'd wager it's more likely to be the opposite.

Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first. I've seen this talked about on HN a fair bit lately.

Using an old-fashioned interface, with 3D buttons to make interactive elements clear, and with instant feedback, can be a nicer experience than having to work with the lack of clarity, and relative laggyness, of some of today's interfaces.

> Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first.

Yes. For example, Chrome literally just broke middle-click paste in this box when I was responding. It sets the primary selection to copy, but fails to use it when pasting.

Middle click to open in new tab is also reliably flaky.

I really miss the UI consistency of the 90s and early 2000s.

Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss?

Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.

The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is grouped icons.

And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state.

So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own separate windows.

But even that is something that still feels janky in most apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even VS code took a long time to make it feel okay ), and I wouldn't really miss it that much if there were no tabs at all and every tab was forced into a separate window at all times with it's own task bar entry.

It's not like grouped icons wasn't technically infeasible on win95. And honestly, whatever they are more useful is quite debatable. And personally, I don't even have a task panel anymore.

The real stuff not on Win95 that everyone would miss is scalable interfaces/high DPI (not necessary as in HiDPI, just above 640x480). And this one does require A LOT of resources and is still wobbly.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Technically feasible", but it wasn't supported by explorer.

You could have multiple windows, and you could have MDI windows, but you couldn't have shared task bar icons that expand on hover to let you choose which one to go to.

If you mean that someone could write a replacement shell that did that, then maybe, but at that point it's no longer really windows 95.

I miss my search bar actually being a dumb grep of my indexed files. It's still frustrating typing 3 characters, seeing the result pop up in the 2nd key stroke, but having it transform into something else by the time I process the result.

Inevitably windows search fails to highlight what I’m looking for almost all of the time, and often doesn’t even find it at all. If I have an application installed, it picks the installer in the downloads folder. If I don’t have an app installed, it searches Bing for it. Sometimes it even searches when I do have the application installed!

Microsoft seems not to believe that users want to use search primarily as an application launcher, which is strange because Mac, Linux, and mobile have all converged on it.

I remember seeing one of those "kids use old technology" videos, where kids are confused by rotary phones and the like.

One of the episodes had them using Windows 98. As I recall, the reaction was more or less "this is pretty ok, actually". A few WTFs about dialup modems and such, but I don't recall complaints about the UI.

> But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable.

And nobody relied on them when they were distracting and unpredictable. People only rely on them now because they are not.

LLMs won't ever be predictable. They are designed not to be. A predictable AI is something different from a LLM.

> There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss.

Like what? All those popups screaming that my PC is unprotected because I turned off windows firewall?

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