Definitely rose-tinted glasses when people look back at Windows XP and earlier in particular. So many HN posts waxing poetic about how great the UIs were then. No! They were ugly, unreliable, inconsistent, and slow. It was a bad OS. Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.

> Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.

If you read through old HIGs, they generally have actual concrete reasoning behind the choices they made. They're pretty interesting to read because back then they did scientific user studies to try to make computers more usable.

For example, Microsoft didn't make the UI gray because of some aesthetic preference. They chose gray because black-on-gray text is easy to read, and because it makes it immediately obvious what's UI vs. what's content (vs. if they made the background white or something). They made all the buttons three-dimensional because it makes it immediately obvious that something is clickable. Getting rid of stuff like this makes the UI prettier, but it gets rid of hints for how to use the software.

Inconsistent? I feel the opposite. Right now, every app seems to have its own UI design. Back then, most apps were native Win32: maybe ugly, maybe too serious, somewhat limiting, but mostly consistent. And relatively fast, despite running out of a spinning HDD and a single-core CPU.

I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).

Being “gray” is an aesthetic preference.

It’s hard to determine what was aesthetically good from a different time because tastes change.

But there’s nothing wrong with small buttons when your only input tool is a pixel accurate mouse. Arguably what’s worse is too large a button.

But what’s inarguably worse are things like window corners where the click zone extends far beyond the actual window, and parts of the window are not click zones.

One thing that old UIs had were visible and usable scrollbars, while for some reason on that website you need a magnifying glass to see it on Firefox Android