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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Oh you mean "ripping off compiz"?

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

>Are you nuts? Or wait.. you must be Gen Z then, never really used Win95.. If so, you cant make any statements in the subject.

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.

I think they were referring to the latter part (downhill ever since) and not the former (win 95 is the best).

How are you running the classic GUI?

Typical insulting boomer reply. Personal attacks, against the rules, and nothing useful added to the discussion. And the guy you insulted isn't even Gen Z...