Isn't that the same as a win95-style menu? Whenever you want to do an action you have to look for it in the top menu and try right-clicking related objects on-screen.

> Long-press and the ••• menu in the overflow is a far superior UI paradigm than having a purpose built menu button.

I disagree - long-press isn't intuitive or discoverable, and it's slow. You could make a case that they're a good fit for mobile, but they're truly horrible on desktop.

For me, long-press is one of the most infuriating UX features of mobile. Probably the top on the offenders list for me is the copy-paste with the handles (which of course relies on long-press to trigger).

Hard buttons beat soft buttons for UX any time. You can use them with a glove, you can feel where the are located and you don't accidentally click because your finger was close enough for the capacitive touch sensor to trigger.

I find that HP/Palm Pre with WebOS was best even if we ignore the physical keyboard (sliding left/right on the touch area below the screen or on the screen with a button pressed really made it easy to select text easily and precisely). Nokia N9 with Maemo/Meego was second best but it excelled in the cards interface for multi-tasking.

Some of those were taken into other OSes but nowhere were they implemented so smoothly.

Those were the standard android buttons.

> Borland buttons

Wow, you unlocked a memory. In case somebody doesn't remember, or doesn't know, the style of Borland buttons, here's a screenshot: https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BW...

Some more screenshots on this page: https://www.drbob42.com/delphi/findmapc.htm

(Look at all those misaligned icons/labels in the Tool Options screenshot!)

They had a different look, but usage and UI conventions including keyboard navigation worked basically the same. Since the mixing of mobile and desktop with web technology, it’s the Wild West.

But they were not too far removed from how the standard Windows buttons looked. Office had its own look in a lot of ways back then, e.g. with the extra handles on the toolbars.

Now, if I take a couple of current applications, the differences are much bigger: from the top of my head, Explorer, Settings, Edge, Office, Steam, Spotify all have much more unique UIs.

There was a short period of time around Windows 95-XP where application developers really wanted to try to use the "latest and greatest" because if they didn't they really stood out as being "last year's tech".

Then XP kind of broke that as so many started not bothering and then it all went sideways.

A couple of the UX people who worked on Win8 told me that some of the UX study results were faked to give the desired results that justified the new Win8 design changes.

Def the sort of stories you hear at at a bar after work.

how do you go from

> the users don't focus on this menu much

to

> therefore we need to make this menu as large as possible

shouldn't the conclusion have been "the start menu is so great the user doesn't even need to focus on using it". it feels like desperately trying to make the data fit the predefined conclusion, despite the data screaming and kicking.

Windows 7, that other, great OS that represents a bit of a shining pinnacle of what MS has managed to accomplish, along with 95. Hm.

You’re not wrong that they aren’t directly correlated. I can see the argument though that making Notes look exactly like a yellow legal pad was not an automatic gain for usability compared to say, wordpad.exe with its super simple toolbar that showed you every option.

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.

Skeumorphism where "things look like real things" can be fine. Complete skeumorphism where "things act like real things" is user hostile.

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

Some skeuomorphism is user-friendly, like buttons that animate like they're clicked when pressed down. Other skeuomorphism was user-hostile, like the various mouse-only interfaces where everything had to be dragged around to work.

Extremes are usually wrong. Skeumorphism and flat design are both user hostile; Windows 95 is a very good compromise between the two.

Scroll bars have always been both control (press here to move around) and indicator (how much of this document is there, and how far through it am I?).

Always-on-screen scrollbars are only useless if you think that indication is useless. Many people find it quite valuable.

I think elements like scrollbars remaining visible serve a useful purpose of their own. I don't just mean scrollbars in this case depicting the location in the scroll, either, but instead offering a fully predictable interface that looks the same and doesn't depend on state. Elements like scrollbars only appearing when needed- expanding when you hover near them, for example, removes some of the predictability of the interface. If you have elements all over a UI that only appear "when needed" it starts to become a bit of a circus show, IMO; ribbons or toolbars or menus that only appear when you press alt or hover near the top of a window; scrollbars that only appear when you either scroll or move the mouse near the scroll elevator area, etc. It's some of the same push that has removed titlebars from desktop UI. Programs like Chrome spearheaded effectively taking over that area, because it's a "waste of screen space", But it's not, that screen space was used for a predictable, known UI element that used to be fully expected on all desktop UI Window elements. It's sort of like how we have with writing a predictable convention of words on a page to have margins on the left and right. If that followed the way UX has gone we'd have dismissed page margins as "wasted space" and all text would have 0" margins and run all the way to the edges of the page and we'd pat ourselves on the back for "using page real estate" more effectively.

No they don't, they appear every time you scroll even if you never use the bar. And flashing of ui elements is in many cases worse than wasting that space permanently.

It's a tragedy decades of UI research/design can't get any of the fundamental design elements right

I restored them and made them fat again in FireFox. It was getting too thin and hard to find

I hate when magically appearing scrollbars cause the screen to redraw - I especially hate it when the content needs a scrollbar if NOT present, so it appears, which makes the content reflow so it doesn't need it, and it keeps swapping back and forth.

Good times.

They are handy on a tablet. At the same time they are not since dynamic content might be loaded so the true size of the page is not shown to me by the scroll bar.

And fuck anyone that likes fullscreen programs and uses multiple monitors.

In both Windows 7 and Vista you could change the theme engine to Windows Classic, which gave you the Windows 9x/2000 look AND the start menu search bar.

I found the transparency of windows in Vista and 7 to be a useless distraction. Found Windows 8.1 to be refreshing in that respect, although the menuless apps were poor.

I actually like Ribbon and I disagree. It made functions easier to find, for people who didn't have a muscle memory of those functions. It actually taught them how to use the program and exposed conditional menus like picture options better than the toolbars that appear and disappear.

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.

When Office 2007 was released, they made a lot of noise about how the ribbon was easy to use. One of the key functionality was Preview - that when the mouse cursor moves inside a button, the change is immediately applied to the content and when the cursor moves outside a button, the change was undone.

They never bothered to implement this Preview functionality on the Web version of office, and I bet only a few ever noticed this inconsistency.

The zune theme is great, now on my XP machines i use a mod of the MCE theme called Royale Noir which is my absolute favorite.

https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_optimized,f_auto/p/5c889a...

Oh you mean "ripping off compiz"?

Two things can both be true. An app can create more space around controls and get rid of the menu bar to save space.

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.

Smaller screen also means your menu bar has to be larger relative to the total screen size to be readable though. Assuming something like the standard going from 15" or 17" CRT to 24" LCD

My browser doesn’t have a bunch of dead space. No footer. One line for controls. Tabs have been collapsed into the title bar.

It should have said maximizing screen height, not space (on desktop not mobile), in these modern days of widescreen monitors. If we have title bars, menu bars, toolbars etc, while using the full screen width, we're peering through a letterbox. (Fixed headers on websites contribute too.) Line length needs to be kept shorter for readability, leading to wasted space at the sides.

Perhaps, if you're not using a sidebar for bookmarks or vertical tabs or whatever, it suggests something ought to have changed in UI design back when widescreen monitors became the norm?

You think Hacker News’ design is new? It’s looked exactly the same since I started using it over a decade ago.

Totally agree. But this does not take away from his point that maximizing screen space is the motivation in Firefox. In fact, all you have done is demonstrate why they are driven to do so.

In fairness I did not do a full inventory of all the apps I use. I see Word and VS Code. It may be less than I thought if I inventoried every app I regularly use.

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.

This is one thing I love about macOS: always a menu bar, always just one, in a consistent predictable place where Fitt's law makes it easy to access.

> even implementing dark mode is a pain in the rear

You don't need to implement dark mode when all the controls already follow the users system color scheme. Dark mode is a signficiant regression compared to user-adjustable color schemes and another example of designers wanting to enforce their vision over the desires of the user.

Using a library that wraps the native system is also good - eg. wxWidgets. I find it very nice to work with compared to attempting to learn any of the myriad UI attempts Microsoft introduced later.

And make it actually work well. I'll take the old 9x era control panel over the new text-only, harder-to-navigate settings app.

Menubars/toolbars were not n00b-friendly but great for anyone that used a computer for technical reasons.

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.

Menus from Win95 are uniform. All buttons took up one row and a full width of the submenu. (Even if you don't have a shortcut key assigned, the space is taken up and wasted)

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.