1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.
I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.
Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."
If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.
> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.
I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.
Not to mention that the statement is wrong. Windows applications do NOT look the same, and that's bad.
Oh... except for their lack of a title bar, which prevents you from telling which application you're looking at. Is this PDF open in Edge, or Acrobat? Who knows. The windows look the same.
Beyond that... it's a disgraceful mess. You have applications now with no menu bar, but instead a bunch of hamburger buttons and "gear" buttons scattered all over the place. And common, standard functions like "save file" are further hidden behind "more" labels even in THOSE menus.
Another example of Windows's galling regression: the abolition of the File dialog in many apps, which have replaced it with a giant page of crudely-drawn, unlabeled, super-wide text boxes and a bunch of plain text. There's no file structure shown, so you have no idea where you are about to save a file... It's truly a clinic on dogshit UI. Pathetic.
Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window.
All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals.
The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality.
Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts.
The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.
> The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what.
I strongly disagree - do you often find it hard to figure out where the light switch is when you enter a room? Terrible applications are terrible regardless of whether they are modern or old, whether skeuomorphic or purely functional. But well written applications tend to have more affordance when skeuomorphic because people already know a lot about real world controls and their function.
I agree with your sentiments, but not your timeline. The mid-'90s was the high point for GUIs, with Windows 95 nailing it pretty much across the board.
And as you note, "flat" design is NO design. It's total dereliction of the design task. Fortunately we're seeing some steps back toward legitimate GUI, where controls are occasionally demarcated as controls.
A great example of Windows's pathetic regression is "dark mode." Since the early '90s (and I mean '91 or '92), you could set up a system-wide color scheme. Inverse color schemes were an unfortunate vestige of the late '80s, early '90s... the advent of the Mac, "desktop publishing," and the effort to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That analogy fails.
The result was millions of people reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, every day. The first thing I did was set up a charcoal theme in Windows, pretty much exactly what all the "dark" schemes are today. And all properly written applications inherited it and all was good.
So... just in time for people to realize that this was the way, Microsoft REMOVED the color-scheme editor from windows. Only to have to hastily slap a hard-coded "dark mode" back onto the OS. So damned stupid.
Meanwhile, I wish BMD would take a step back and do the housecleaning that Resolve so desperately needs. They threw a bunch of purchased products together on different pages and called it "integrated," when in fact the integration is buggy and janky.
The #1 thing they need to do is integrate all the nodeviews. A single nodeview for all processing would make Resolve a truly groundbreaking product, and undoubtedly eliminate a lot of bugs.
Amigo! If you're not a professional video editor but you have to, occasionally, make long videos shorter or just remove awkward silences, etc., the cut page is a godsend. You grab the knife tool, bim, bam, boom, you're done.
To be fair (and I hate Microsoft, so it's painful), Microsoft is not alone here. Google and Apple perpetrate similar BS, with Google Drive being a major offender.
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