Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed
Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
how it makes ortholinear keyboards better?
Whether it does slow people down, as a side effect, is not as well established since, as another person pointed out, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for most people. Learning the layout and figuring out what to write is. On top of that, most of the claims for faster layouts come from marketing materials. It doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a vested interest.
If there was a demonstrably much faster input method for most users, I suspect it would have been adopted long ago.
Is my digital life at a natural end now?
"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.
It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.
Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?
Not sure if that's a great example
Sometimes good enough is just good enough
You might, but you'll never really know.
I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want.
Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..."
The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise.
However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting.
The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.
Back when that started W3C was still strongly embedded in the XML hellhole.
99.5 % agree, because I would love to try SAAB:s drive-by-wire concept from 1992: https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/
From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech.
I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.
You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts.
We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else? Even lane assist still sucks on traditionally designed cars. Is having to fight a motorized wheel to override steering really all that safe?
Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well-established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.
The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups.
There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere.
Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.
In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
the web is a document structure, but browsing it doesnt need to be linear.
We had that ability in Chrome, through Chrome Apps. You could make a browser app, load pages in webviews, with the whole browser frame customizable. Then it was removed.
We had an ability to make a new innovative browser, until Google infested all the standartization committees, and increased complexity of standards on a daily basis for well over a decade. Now they monetize their effort on making Chrome by removing adblockers and enforcing their own ads, knowing full well that even keeping a fork that supports manifest v2 is infeasible for a free open-source project.
There is no way forward with the web we have right now. No innovation will happen anymore.
There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:
In writing, show, don't tell.
In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.
Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
The UX is also awful.
But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?
And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.
And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.