A related peeve of mine is stateless URLs. When backend engineers built UIs they were terrible in a lot of ways but the URL would often reflect the state of the UI so you could refresh and get back to the same view. I think web frameworks and people specialising as frontend engineers helped kill this being something that was added as you developed

I am 100% with you on both of those!

One that gets me is the number of menus below infinite scrolls. I think this is a reflection on people doing responsive design for variable screen sizes but only as a checkbox / meeting some UX redlines / implementing once without basic testing. An example of this is Google Flights for some screen sizes where the currency selection is below the infinite scroll on some screen sizes (but its not an ideal example because on other screen sizes the currency select just disappears or at least it used to)

I just stopped using Libre Writer and switched to OnlyOffice because it was impossible to get a normal goddamn scroll bar in an application literally designed around scrolling text. Holding the scroll Arrow button to scan for something is impossible because there are no scroll Arrow buttons.

But OnlyOffice has a Header navigation tool, too, so fuck Libre Writer right in the face.

Auto hide bullshit scroll bars should be illegal on desktop. Who the fuck needs that 7 extra pixels on desktop?

I now have very strong opinions about scroll bars.

I JUST updated Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is a huge step back… and it has the TINIEST scroll bars that don’t even exist until you try to mouse over everything! I hate it so much.

I like when they have both, like the roller thing you can click to input a number, best of both worlds.

Samaung at least in their apps I canbtap on the number to type it instead of scrolling.

On the same vein, date pickers. Just let me type the damn date instead of having to choose on your virtual calendar.

I hate it when the numbers affect each other too, so if you roll back on the minutes, the hour changes too. It's awful.

As an old guy with a Birthday in Late December, fuck scrolling for dates.

Even if iPhone did everything else better than android, you could still never convince me to switch over to their hell of every date and time being entered via scroll.

Give me the little clock or a numpad.

Bro why is it any other way, ever.

I despise setting alarms. Why do I have to scroll? Fucking let me type in the time on a numpad.

I have like 50 alarms that are 15 minutes apart and I toggle them on and off as needed.

It's a fucking mess, bro. Fuck.

I take a moment to mildly rant about this, sometimes out loud, every time I have to set a timer on my phone.

I didn't know that was a standard until I started working in UIs. It's great when you know, but it's a clear sign that the standard isn't clear enough when everyday users don't realize.

Even worse are the scrollbars that are hidden until your mouse is over to of it.

That's something I appreciate about the WordPress "block editor"; it tells you when you've changed colors in a way that is hard to read for some people. I wish more design software did that automatically.

Quick question and I'm very happy with a RTFM type response: Any chance you're red-green colour blind and can share some with what that's like because the good-bad representation seems pretty pervasive in society?

Here I was going to join this thread to share the controversial opinion of "The hamburger menu is fine," because I thought the general trend was shifting away from using them.

Admittedly the hamburger menu is often misused. It's like the junk drawer for developers who don't know how to logically streamline the navigation modes within their app, so they just throw everything in there. But when it's used well, to me at least, it's a better option than some of the alternatives. I prefer to have views that I almost never use just kept out of the way in a menu I can manifest at will instead of occupying permanent space on a navigation bar.

Unfun fact: I taught computer literacy for about a year. The students struggled to see or find the hamburger menu on many pages. Understandably so, because it literally does not look like anything.

Ah yeah, don't you love f-droid's impossible to read 5-line toasts that randomly appear when something in the background fails?

Internal to Google what you're calling toasts were made to need user input to dismiss as part of accessibility pushes to win government contracts. That really just highlighted their issues for me though, most of them should be behind a small element I think, like the notification bell. And I think a bunch should be more localised to the action / app

Respectfully I'm on the other side of that, but I see what you're saying. I hate skeumorphism and (IMO) flat is a much more professional looking design motif. BUT...that flat has to come with just enough drop-shadow to be able to delineate the layers, otherwise yes, its too flat and indistinguishable.

GIVE ME HIGH CONTRAST COLOURED BORDERS

Back when I was a kid on MSN Messenger, a bunch of my friends had names like this:

☆꧁✬◦°˚°◦. ǟɮɮɨɛ .◦°˚°◦✬꧂☆

I disliked it even then, because it's not really about personal expression or style, it's more about wanting to stand out in other people's contact lists and look the most special and get the most attention.

It's an arms race that leads to a user list that's impossible to find anyone in, and when everyone is special then nobody is.

Stop removing the underline styling for links. It's not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about sites that keep a colored underline on links, but have the text color be the same as the body text?

I do wonder whether the text next to the toggles changes depending on the state of the toggle. It seems to be arbitrary whether they do or not, leaving me unsure as to what the toggle actually does.

Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They're one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you'd check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?

Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.

I also thought toggles were unnecessary, but then I read something that changed my mind.

Toggles have an immediate effect, whereas checkboxes don't.

For example, a light/dark mode setting. You could use a checkbox, but users have become used to the above behaviour, and so a toggle may be more appropriate.

Checkboxes, therefore, are more of a form element.

Personally, I'd still be fine with just checkboxes, but that design intention is something I hadn't known but makes sense after I heard it

I develop JS for a living, but for my personal site I faced the burden of PHP to load it directly, and kept minimal JS. I’ve had people note to me how quickly it loads.

While I do want the logs accessible, I don't know if I want it all on display.

Ever like, dig through Windows or Proton logs? Plain text files measurable in megabytes within seconds.

Yeah, try telling that to my boss. Or any dev boss for that matter.

This used to be so common with installers in the past. Sometimes you had to click a button to show it. But I don't really see it anymore

Running a program in terminal on Linux gives you a detailed output log that you can pipe into a txt file.

The right answer would be to mandate an architecture for cookies to properly label their purpose and origin. This would allow you to set policy on the browser level and never have to think of it again.

Instead they just prop 65'd the whole Internet.

My partner and I watch a fellow (Brutalmoose) play retro/vintage games. Mostly Windows 98/XP/DOS/older consoles. When he busted out his Windows 98 machine built by LGR on YouTube, I was astounded at how simple and professional 98 looks. Windows XP looks like a toy compared to 98.

I will never get over Windows 7 Start Menu/Explorer, though. I loved it. I use OpenShell to make all of my Windows 10 machines have Windows 7 start menus, with their good indexed search (no internet results) and excellent Explorer UI I’ve been used to forever.

I got a Windows 11 machine at work and I fucking hate everything about it. They won’t let me install OpenShell because they “don’t allow open-source software” (insane)

Always makes me laugh what people prioritize. Perfectly blended shadows underneath my windows that takes noticeable resources to render

I see you are a fan of FVWM style of UI design.

I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…

real

• Rounded corners are ugly and a bit wasteful and it not being square sounds annoying for devs.
• Transparency is ugly and less performant.
• Shadows are sometimes nice (movable floating windows/popups, large boxes of any sort, and text on images) but otherwise not.
• Animations are really annoying. The recent Firefox mobile UI update features even slower and more annoying animations. WHEN I OPEN A MENU IT SHOULD BE FULLY OPEN NEXT FRAME.
• I don't really care about modern icons, but they should be coloured. Also old firefox logo better.

...win95 had the same minimize, maximize/restore and close buttons that modern ones do. _ □ x in the left upper corner...

Samsung does this in the phone settings because they have way too many features and half of them are Feature™ that you can't even search for because it doesn't describe the function at all.

I miss the consistency you had in old GUIs. A window is a window, and it has a border, a title and some buttons to control it.

I despise client side decorations, like Gnome has. It makes all windows a special snowflake. Window decorations are the window manager's responsibility.

As someone who dœs shit with CSS userstyles quite often , disheartening how rare prefers-color-scheme is