90% of the time, even in Android that was pre-Honeycomb, the menu ended up just showing what would have been in the overflow anyways.
Android really did end up doing a lot better on the UX side that iOS with the contextual action bar and long-press to select. The idea of selection mode on iOS is still a weird process, and it's been mostly worked around since with higher PPI screens and touch sensors, instead doing a small area to "select" items on iOS
Still the best navigable phone I had when coupled with the Nova Launcher gestures.
This precisely coincides with the web developers being allowed to wrap stuff into "apps" in Electron and the like.
Something fundamentally switched around 1998-2002 in how interface design was viewed and approached. I started my career in software as a design summer intern at a company that made a Windows “groupware” application in 1997. They took pride in following the platform’s guidelines and actually testing their designs with real users being videotaped trying to use it. The company’s UI design department was tiny, but employed both an industrial designer and a cognitive scientist.
Five years later, everybody I met in UI design was a graphic designer who was drawing glossy website mockups in Photoshop. The elder lore of science-based UI design was completely lost when Web 2.0 happened and app designs became vibes-based. Even Apple couldn’t resist the tide. (Indeed Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997 was a major contributor because he had developed a taste for user-hostile skeuomorphism like the brushed metal QuickTime Player.)
I was at Microsoft when they user-tested Windows 7 to death. Including installing eye tracking software during sessions so you could monitor where the user was looking at on the screen.
That data was in part used to justify the changes made in 8: "Users only click on the start menu 0.1% of the time and when they do they focus on a narrow portion of the screen."
Def the sort of stories you hear at at a bar after work.
I think a fair take is that going full skeuomorphic may take some options off the table for you because they would conflict too much with the metaphor you’re leaning hard into.
I’m still 100% Team Forstall though, considering the massive violence that ios7 and its copycats have wrought on usability.
The poster boy for that is the old QuickTime Player, which had a volume wheel and a drawer for shortcuts. https://www.johnforde.com/teaching/shame/qtime.htm
Apple meanwhile has made some notable mistakes, but when they do, it's usually a thorough bad bet that's just missed the mark, but if they do, it's all throughout their OS in every corner. Even with their recent Liquid glass blunder, they're not really putting a veneer that looks like wood over a rotting corpse of a house, they're just picking bad materials to update an otherwise decent layout. Microsoft's whole track consumer UI/product record imo is trying and failing to bet small but intrusively on ideas that don't work, aren't cool, and have no longevity. You see it as soon as you open the control panel that still looks like the 90s; it's this uncomfortable amalgam of failed tepid temporary marketing pitches by some department that make no sense
It's a tragedy decades of UI research/design can't get any of the fundamental design elements right
We could even have unified desktop.mobile codebases, with different GUI layouts. 280 North's objective-J/Cappuccino proved this.
IDK what we're even doing anymore.
I would say people are just disagreeing with you that the situation is actually so black and white.
Win10 LTSC with the right options and limiting search to local only is pretty good also though. Insanely snappy on even crap systems (with really any SSD)
Of course people who got used to traversing 3-level menus got annoyed but they still have all the same keyboard shortcuts. However, spending enough time, you also get used to Ribbon and it usually requires fewer clicks not more.
I still find a tastefully done Ribbon is better than a menu and a toolbar combination. The problem is, not everybody has put the same effort that Microsoft did which created monstrosities like Solidworks Ribbon.
UX being copied by OSes from each other is a good thing.
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/Themes/Mi...
https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_optimized,f_auto/p/5c889a...
What does this mean? I use lots of apps that still have a menu bar.
Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.
I don't think this is true. If anything, we see more oversized buttons and empty space nowadays. It's as if developers forgot that PC users have keyboards and mice. Remember, display resolutions and monitors were a lot smaller back then, and making space count was arguably more important 20 years ago than it is today.
The space also really has nothing to do with “mobile first”. It’s for touch screens (and also modern aesthetic that avoids crowded controls).
To be clear, I am not saying that all apps are optimizing for saving screen space. I was specifically talking about browsers, which are broadly optimized to give as much area as possible to the content.
It was a mildly useful point of view when they were designing things meant to be the first computer program someone might ever use. Like Microsoft Bob or Apple “At Ease.” But it’s idiotic to have things following that dogma as the only interface to tools that people need to use daily and will become expert users of.
To think some of us nerds complained about the Luna theme of XP as too “Fisher Price.” Fisher Price products look like industrial control panels compared to today’s contemporary operating systems and apps.
If that was the case they wouldn't put giant margins around every UI element and dead space everywhere.
The Wells Fargo website screams this for me - it used to be dense and packed with info, now it's got large elements and wasted space.
Ironic to say on hackernews which shows massive whitespace in the margins-- and if I try to widen my tab sidebar it actually indents the margin rather than eating into it.
One can look across the computing space as a whole and see that, it is surely not the case that we're "maximizing screen space".
The key element missing from this thread is that the Internet going from a text based to a multi-media (and increasingly video-centric) experience.
A lot of Internet users, at this point, do as much reading on their phone or laptop as I do reading on my TV (almost none).
Oh really? I, sadly, use nearly none. Open on my desktop right now: Slack, Outlook, Zoom, Windows Terminal, Edge, Claude, Obsidian, whatever the Windows image viewer is called, Cursor, and VS Code.
Only the last 2 have menu bars. And I can’t be certain that I didn’t dig through the preferences of one or both of them when I first installed them to tell them to knock off the bullshit and give me back the menus. Once in a while, there is an option buried somewhere like that.
I see some have gone the “browser” direction with tabs folded into the title bar and the menu bar dropped. Windows Terminal, File Explorer, and Notepad are all that style now.
Edit: Actually Notepad has the tabs in the titlebar thing but retained the menu bar and folded it into the command bar.
The Windows SDK samples like Hilo make use of C++ with COM.
Ribbon is absolutely an improvement for users but is more work for the XML layout and learning how to organize it.
I'm rather convinced that Ribbon is still the best way to organize quick actions, show their shortcuts (Alt to see keyboard shortcuts), and also have enough text to describe all the buttons. But it'd be nice if it were easier to make good Ribbons.
Menu was braindead easy, albeit through ancient process of .rc files and whatnot
Old Photoshop, any CAD software, Excel. Smaller buttons and more of them is a steeper learning curve but results in far superior day-to-day usability. You can still hold down [Alt] and see hotkeys, that wasn't unique to the Ribbon UI.
it's all very much an example of the "Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" meme.
It's well acknowledged that modern designers and users benefit from large vs small, and other varying styles of organization.
Menus only had top menus vs submenu vs sub-sub-menu (and so forth). Yes a good menu is useful but...
A ribbon offers many more tradeoffs. It's harder to design a good ribbon, but the best ribbons are always better than even the best menu. The important features will be physically larger with more text and space. The less important or niche features might just be an icon with tooltip, possibly hidden behind a subcategory of the ribbon.
In theory, you can use the modern Ribbon to make old school menus. But why bother? If you made the switch to that XML design language, you might as well take all the benefits of the Ribbon
Or hell, if you like old school menus, you can still make them today. Those .RC editors still work in modern Windows 11. But give it a shot and you'll see how restrictive and bulky old school menus are in practice.
There’s no need to be hyperbolic or blinded by nostalgia. Yes, user interfaces have suffered several setbacks in the years since, but even if we concede every change was for the worse (they weren’t) it was by no means “perfected” and there was still plenty of area for improvement.
If you see this UI transition through the same lense as CLI-GUI one, a lot of things become more clear, in my opinion.
I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.
Insanely great performance.
Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.
In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".
I still run Windows Classic GUI here, because its fast and confortable to use. Can you do better? Hmm, maybe. But im not conviced :)
What a terrible attitude to have as a comment reply. I've been using Windows since Windows 95, meaning I have plenty of experience and some emotional attachment to it and I'm as millenial with knee pain as they get, so not Gen-Z, and I can't imagine going back to using W95 today productively in a non-ironic way.
Windows 95 was perfect ... for what people did on computers back in 1995, not for what I do now in 2026 on the HW of today. May W95 rest in peace, but I'll take my modern OS for my moderns entertainment and productivity tasks on modern HW. There's no way in hell I'd want to go back to W95 even if that's what popped my cherry. People calming otherwise have rose tinted glasses and only remember the good parts of that era without the downsides.
In modern WIndows, from 7 onward, I can hit the meta key and type the first letters of the app I want to open, hit enter and boom, it's opened. I can mouse snap the two app windows side by side on my large monitor. I have 125% scaling so things don't look tiny on my 4k monitor.
Win 95 had none of that, the only way to launch an app was via shortcuts on the desktop or navigating a long and tedious star menu tree, which was perfectly fine for 1995 since you had ~10 app on your PC and you used it sparingly, but is really shit UX if your PC has 50+ apps like in 2026 and you use it for half a day. "Classic windows" only makes sense if you also use your PC in a classic way like it's the 90's, with like 1-2 concurrent apps opened at once, instead of 10+ leaving them on for days/weeks.
>Good that there is Cygwin, so I could move most stuff there.
Cygwin is CLI, not UI, which is what we were talking about. Are your complaints about the Windows CLI or about UI, because those are different topics you seem to mix up?
>Classic Windows just works, and if you care, you can even customize it.
I can also customize modern Windows, at least in the ways I need it to be productive. Sure, you can't customize it anymore in the W95 way, such as having a Matrix screensaver or Rollercoaster Tycoon theme on it, but I don't need that anymore since I'm old now and don't have time for that anymore. If I want a short hit of nostalgia I boot up my vintage Windows XP machine, but that's not my daily driver.
>Im really curious, because I was using corporate Win10 and hell, it was really driving me crazy.
If Win10 was driving you crazy, then "classic windows" would also drive you crazy even harder because it doesn't have any QoL over Win10. Please explain yourself here what you mean since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Or are you only talking about your limited corporate windows experience and and not what you can do as an admin on "home" windows?
How are you running the classic GUI?