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shiandow

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages.

Things like:

- If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can

- Menus should be tree structures

- Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable

As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may well have several different styles all imitated from office, but at least I knew what everything did and when it was slow at least it did what I expected.

This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen. Nowadays that has no chance of working because even to log in I need to press enter or click some button (which one depends on how I logged in previously, maybe) before I can even start typing and doing so eats a random amount of keystrokes while the damn log in screen loads to do its one damn job.

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It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not.

We've lost design idioms, which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

Over the past year I've started thinking a lot more about design and UI work, and I think it's basically impossible to design things, or create design systems, that appeal broadly to different types of users in a cross-platform way.

I personally love dense UIs and have no expectation of doing certain kinds of work on a phone or low-powered device like a chromebook, phone, or bottom-barrel laptop. But if you're a company trying to sell products to a broad user base, you want to try to design in a way that works for those kinds of users because they still might be end-users of your product. And there's a good chance that those platforms may be where someone first evaluates your product (eg from a link shared and accessed on a mobile device) even for the users who do plan on using more powerful desktop devices to do their work.

So instead we get these information poor, incoherent (because it turns out proper cross-platform, cross-user design is much more difficult than just getting something that works cross-platform for all users on its surface) interfaces. I guess I'm writing this just to add, web/mobile have complicated things partially because more than just requiring their own distinct patterns, they each represent a distinct medium that products try to target with the same kind of design. But because they're different mediums, it's like trying to square a circle.

It is absurd that there is no standardized UI toolkit, or rather that the web browser _is_ the standard with is characteristic _lack_ of user interaction idioms.

The fact that there are multiple platforms for UIs* is a huge failure of the industry as a whole. Apple, Microsoft and Google could have had a sit down together at any point in the last 20+ years to push some kind of standard, but they decided not to in order to protect their gardens.

*: a standardized UI platform doesn't necessarily mean a standardized platform. Just standardization of UI-related APIs and drawing.

My guess 10 or so years ago was that Google would be the first to bake Material UI into browser with web components, and then any browser would essentially reuse that to extend out whatever style they wanted. It really seemed like the way the web (and Google was heading). Instead we got bad Material UI knock-offs in about 45 different UI frameworks.

I'm not convinced that it's possible to create a UI toolkit that works on both desktop and mobile without one compromising the other. It's a bit like trying to design a vehicle that can serve both as a 2-ton pickup truck and as a golf cart; the needs of the two are just too different.

The rules didn't have to be reinvented - web/mobile devs chose to ignore them.

Another reason is that in 2000 if you wanted pointless UI wank you had to implement it yourself from scratch. Today with bloated frameworks where the developers ran out of ideas 15-20 years ago and have filled the intervening time adding wank that no-one asked for and no-one needs, everything you build with it gets to include every brain fart someone had at 4am back in 2017 that they thought looked cool at the time.

WinForms - It just works.

Any system that needs a straightforward UI for kicking things off, stopping them, logging them, and dragging data files into them..... WinForms.

Bugfree, hardened by the test of time, works on Windows X, Y and Z.

Everything else is just consumer silver sprinkles, and involves faffing around with multiple config files and obscure layout issues.

Isn't that windows only?

> basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: [...]

I am going to add my favorite here, just to rant into the void. A dialog box's options must never be Ok/Cancel. These are not the same sorts of things. "Cancel" is a verb, "Ok" is a noun (in this context). Even if "Ok" is taken to mean the verb "acknowledge", it is still not an alternative to cancelling.

99% of these dialogs should be "[Verb]/Cancel": Change "Ok" to a verb or short phrase indicating the action that will be taken if you press it. Don't do the action if the user hits "cancel". The verb should be something specific like "Delete file" or "Terminate process" and not something useless like "proceed".

IMO the ubiquitous Yes/No/Cancel is even worse. No and Cancel are too conceptually close. Doesn't help that these usually show up when you're about to lose all your unsaved changes.

We've got big screens now! use more words! Save changes/Discard changes/Don't quit.

"cancel" means cancel the last operation (e.g. "quit the program", "yes/no" is an action taken on the prompt.

I understand those prompts perfectly fine, but they are panic inducing for e.g. my mom who has about a 50% chance of clicking the wrong button and losing work.

- clicking a checkbox's label should select/deselect the checkbox

This is one that I hold my devs accountable for. No, I shouldn't have "put it in the spec", because it is the fucking spec.

Some Microsoft managers started suppressing people who reported internal defects, instead of leveling their teams up

That sounds like Goodhart's Law in action.

Bad metrics. That's why Microsoft cleaned house of midlevel managers a couple years ago. But the culture remained in places.

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.

I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day.

Yet we risk desktop experiences becoming less useful due to the UI becoming "dumber" as we keep shoehorning websites onto the desktop. Website UI is dumb. It's mouse driven, keyboard is an afterthought. There's no consistency, and you have to re-invent the wheel every time to get the details right (almost never happens).

This is why, for me, year of the Linux desktop was 2008. It's been atrocious since then.

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_

Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well.

Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.

Try installing Sidebery or a good adblocker on Chrome.

I use AdBlock on Chrome. It is excellent. Do you not like it?

Go to an adblock test page in Chrome and compare it to Firefox with uBlock Origin. Chrome can't block some ads, and some of the ads it can block leaves behind empty containers.

>Firefox has nothing

Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it.

God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.

> It's tragic how mismanaged it is.

Is it mismanaged? Sure, they spend a fair amount on administration. Sure, they spend about 10% on Mozilla Foundation stuff. But they still spend ~2/3 of revenue on software development.

And they're somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If they try to evolve their current platform, power users bitch. If they don't evolve their current platform, they lose casual users to ad-promoted alternatives (Chrome and Edge).

And they don't really have the money to do a parallel ground-up rewrite.

The most interesting thing I could see on the horizon is building a user-owned browsing agent (in the AI sense), but then they'd get tarred and feathered for chasing AI.

Part of Mozilla's problem is that the browser is already pretty figured out. After tabs and speed and ad blocking, there weren't any killer features.

To a first degree, nearly everyone who installed Chrome did so because of Google putting "Runs best in Chrome" on every page they own and including it with every single possible download, including things like Java updates!

Almost nobody chose Chrome. Microsoft had to change how defaults were managed because Chrome kept stealing defaults without even a prompt.

People use "the internet", they don't give a fuck about browsers. Firefox only got as high a usage as it did because of an entire decade of no competition, as Internet Explorer 6 sat still and degraded.

Chrome was installed as malware for tens of millions of people. It used identical processes as similar malware. It's insane to me how far out of their way lots of "Tech" people go to rewrite that actual history. I guess it shouldn't be surprising since about a thousand people here probably helped make those installer bundling deals and wrote the default browser hijacking code.

It should be a crime what Google did with Chrome. They dropped Chrome onto unsuspecting users who never even noticed when malware did the exact same thing with a skinned Chromium a couple days later. Microsoft was taken to court for far less.

How was Mozilla supposed to compete with millions of free advertising Google gave itself and literal default hijacking?

Container tabs, independent proxy config (chrome only respects system-wide proxy), vertical tabs, and functional adblockers are the four big features for me.

Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the novice users who, over time, become power users through repetitive usage. If there are no user efficiency gains to be had through experience in a UI, then it just prevents the emergence of power users. Users just have to wait until a product manager or designer somewhere notices their pain and create a new feature through 10x the effort it would have taken to simply maintain the lower level shortcuts (e.g. keyboard accelerators, simple step automations).

Personally, its not so much about customisation as it is consistency, quality, and attention to detail.

Being able to keyboard through menus as standard. Focus being deeply considered and always working as expected.

Compact UI elements -- in the 90s/00s we decided buttons should be about 22px tall. Then suddenly they doubled in size.

>their telemetry showed that few users used them

I wonder if they ever stopped to think that power users are the ones that disable telemetry immediately upon install.

That's not remotely universal, but they did consider that. It's immaterial.

It's really not immaterial. Power users are also the ones that get anyone to install Firefox in the first place.

Considering Firefox market share trends all decisions at Mozilla should be by default considered textbook material for what not to do.

The power users I know do that immediately and then it becomes uncertain. Also, most of these metrics suck. We didn't always collect such metrics and I wouldn't say it did improve software in general. On the contrary, it probably brought in far more dark patterns than better UI.

To hell with it and then some. Also to ignore uncertainty means you will be wrong. There is no "perhaps" or "likely" here.

>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.

I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers.

The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen.

For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser and all its responsibilities - but rather cross-platform, reliable, predictable on all platforms - i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.

This is attainable and there are many great examples of apps which are in fact, old wheels not re-invented, which still work for their particular user market.

I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.

The cognitive load of doing a web app that can do all the things a native app can do, is equivalent to the load required to build a cross-platform app using native frameworks, so ..

> I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.

No. I want things like keyboard shortcuts to reflect the platform norms of where the app is running (macOS in my case). A shared core is fine, but the UI framework must be native to be acceptable. Ghostty is a "gold standard" there.

This is why most web apps are lowest-common-denominator annoyances that I will not use.

Indeed, if the framework is sensible, keyboard shortcuts reflecting platform norms is entirely attainable in a manner that developers don't have to bother with it, much, if they don't want to.

There are plenty of examples of cross-platform UI's surviving the hotkey dance and attaining user satisfaction. There are of course poor examples too, but that's a reflection of care, not effort.

>i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.

Based on my experience, I would be quite reluctant to rely on any non-native cross-platform desktop UI framework that is not web-based. These tend to be either less performant, look outdated or are bug-ridden.

What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks.

It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

In my experience:

- Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

- QML looks stylish and is a very nice language, but had a lot of weird bugs.

Neither of these are issues I'd run with if I were to make a web app.

Widgets looks like whatever you want them to look like, if the feel like they're from the 2010s its because the implementer made that choice, not because of a limitation in qtwidgets.

Could be, but I am mostly speaking about the fact that making a web app looks stylish feels infinitely easier to me.

Qt uses css. Its no different than what you’re describing.

As I understand the philosophy of Qt, it does not (for the most part) use native widgets. They seek to draw widgets that match native widgets on a pixel-by-pixel basis. You can also change the look-and-feel (similar to Java Swing widgets) by using what Qt calls "styles". Ref: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/style-reference.html

> - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

That's too bad, because I prefer software which looks like it was made in 1999.

Ah, the magic times when screen resolutions were large enough to display lots of information, in proper 4:3 aspect ratio, just before they got flattened and the industry started treating them as short view distance TVs.

Qt apps don't feel great on macOS, though it's by far the best for mac-ish UI. Dropbox was Qt for a long time and I'd argue it worked well for them. Its easy to fall into "uncanny valley".

On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west.

I think Qt also suffers from not really being anyone's favourite.

On the one hand, you have web developers who tend to not really appreciate the nuance of the desktop as a platform. They're not going to advocate for Qt, it's not CSS/HTML/JS.

On the other hand, you have native Mac developers who love Apple's toolkits (AppKit, maybe SwiftUI). They're not going to advocate for Qt either.

Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

> On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west.

It's much better than how GTK apps feel under Qt-based DEs - at least Qt tries to adapt to the DE style.

    > Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

Bollocks.

DotNet WinForms has been rock solid for 15 years. And there are so many good 3rd party widgets if you need them.

If you prefer C++, then Windows Template Library (WTL) is also rock solid and released more than 20 years ago.

I think Qt is only missing well-written, feature-complete bindings for a major JS runtime, including support for hot reload.

Developing UIs without hot reloading is too painful.

I think what you're asking for has existed for a long, long time. QML.

QML doesn't have a way to define interfaces with JSX and doesn't integrate with the wider JS tooling. From my very limited experience, it still feels too close to the C++ world.

This isn't true, but I understand why you feel that way.

Qt had bindings to many languages, C++ is a choice, not a demand, if you'd like to use Qt.

> This isn't true, but I understand why you feel that way.

By all means, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Last effort I saw on this direction was node-gui + React. I believe that project isn't being maintained. Being able to use something like Vite to build desktop programs would be a blessing.

QML is an entirely separate widget toolkit that really isn't a great fit for desktop programs - it's not much different from using a web-based toolkit.

That's your prerogative, but web-based UI's have their hard limits, and native cross-platform desktop UI's are no more/less problematic than the browser.

It seems you fumbled your starmenue click, the start menue will be right back, right after these messages.

> Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.

The web is not consistent itself. Lots of sites, and most web apps, invent their own UI.

If you become a power user you realize that nothing matches the power of the command line. And at that point you also realize that are better OSes that allow you to fully explode the true computing power that is terribly limited and constrained by a GUI.

Nonsense. Do you read and write your email using the command line? I use Mutt and Vim for that, and that’s not the command line. GUI with power-user support is just as efficient as Mutt and Vim. Did you use curl to read this thread and submit your comment? I use Firefox with Vimium C, which allows most web pages to be navigated and operated efficiently by keyboard.

Wait, mail clients other than mutt exist?

>And at that point you also realize that are better OSes

Nothing beats Windows 11+WSL2; literally the best of both worlds.

I'm planning on writing a desktop (I've wrote about some of my goals here before) precisely for this reason

In the future it will all be done by AI, no need for GUI. Just write or say what you want to do

Hopefully /s

I know this isn't really your main point but I don't think they've been trying to reduce complexity but rather increasing ease-of-use for the end-user*. Those things are often completely at odds with each other in software as I'm sure you know.

*well, that seems to have been their goal in the past; nowadays it just seems like they've been trying to funnel windows users to their other products and forcing copilot into everything.

The issue is that everyone wants a full-featured remote with only "on, volume, and channel changing" buttons.

> We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.

Power users are less susceptible to suggestion and therefore less profitable. They have largely moved to OSes that do not interfere with their wishes, allowing them to make their own choices about what they can or can't do/run (Eg. Linux).

> We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.

I think the world changed. "Power users" in the traditional sense use Linux and BSD now. Microsoft and Apple dropped them when they realized how lucrative it would be to dumb things down and make computers more like cable TV.

Well, Alt+Tab in Windows is supposed to switch windows. That's unless you're in Microsoft Edge where obviously, it switches tabs. Inconsistent and annoying.

Browser tabs are the fault here and browsers are trying to be OS environment, so Alt+Tab is useful for major task switching. I agree it's inconsistent and annoying, but I like Alt+Tab as a way to try to find the window I'm writing that email to someone.

I hate this too. You can turn it off. In Settings, go to System->Multitasking and change "Show tabs from apps when snapping or pressing Alt+Tab" to "Don't show tabs."

Or better yet, Settings > Apps > Default apps > select a different browser

Android and Chrome worked like this for a hot minute too. I assumed the idea was to promote webapps to look like they're first-class citizens, but in practice it's just bizarre and confusing UX.

Because everything got made for smartphones and touchscreens while desktop users are left to suffer in the mediocrity.

> This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen.

I mean... well... responsiveness matters to me too, and I am impressed by such inspired productivity, but... I'm also confused. Why not turn on the screen - the monitor, right?

Now thinking about how gui lag might impact the sight-impaired, tangential as that is...

It was meant as an example, not a productivity tip ;-)

Anyway the real point is that it's just easier to use something if you don't need constant visual feedback. Being able to use something blind is more than just an accessibility issue it is just better in general.

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