12 ms·

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information

• flyinghamster 7y ago
  Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar. My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!
  • magashna 7y ago
    I rarely use the menu bar so I just hit alt when I need it. I'd bet lots of users don't even know it exists though. Especially with Chrome hiding so many of their options
  • sp332 7y ago
    I can see why they did it. Now that screens are ~universally 16:9, vertical space is at a premium. It would be nice if the hamburger menu actually replicated the same functionality though.
    • alxlaz 7y ago
      I think that if vertical space were indeed the reason, then we wouldn't have huge, touch-sized widgets everywhere and 32-pixel titlebars. There are applications where simply reducing the padding on most widgets to sane values wins you 3-4 menubars' worth of space. I'm sure vertical space is the most often-repeated argument, but I'm skeptical that it's indeed the reason behind this trend.
      • nine_k 7y ago
        Firefox in particular is themable; mine is pretty compact.
    • lottin 7y ago
      16:9 is a ratio whereas the amount of vertical space is an absolute amount. I don't think the two are related, unless screens got wider at the expense of height, which surely is not the case.
      • kps 7y ago
        They did lose height; 1600×1200 → 1920×1080. For a while you could find 1920×1200 if you looked hard and spent more, but at the next increment everything is 16:9.
        • silon42 7y ago
          I have 2 1920x1200 and there is no reasonable upgrade except maybe something like 40" 4K (and not in retina/high dpi mode). 2560x1600 would be ok, but it's too expensive.
          • com2kid 7y ago
            3440x1440. Less pixels overall than your current setup, but incredibly nice to use. Also affordable, you can get them for under $400 during sales / end of year clearance.
          • zrobotics 7y ago
            Seriously, for coding I absolutely love a 1920x1080 screen rotated 90°. Still wide enough to see an entire (sane) line, but more vertical space is just wonderful. Can't watch video, obviously, but for a work computer the vertical space is the absolute best. Improves web browsing as well for most sites. I tried a 36", I can't stand it as a display. Fine for a TV, but it's a little much for a monitor. Although I can't stand more than 2 displays, so YMMV.
          • account42 7y ago
            I went to 3840x1600 - as wide as two Full HD screens but with a bit more vertical space and no bevel in the middle.
      • sp332 7y ago
  • jaredwiener 7y ago
    Agree! "Mobile First" design thinking should not mean "Mobile Only." What was supposed to be a call to consider all of the devices your users may be utilizing, it just transferred the preference from one type of device to another. Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      > Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support? Indeed. There seems to be a weird idea that it's possible to make a UI that works well on all form factors. I don't see how that's possible, and I've never seen it happen in practice. What actually happens is that you have a UI that works well on one form factor and badly on the others, or you have a UI that works poorly on them all.
      • jaredwiener 7y ago
        I think NYTimes.com is a good example. Theres a hamburger menu that expands to the whole screen when on mobile or tablet; its a sidebar on desktop. The whole arrangement of articles becomes linear on mobile; it isnt on desktop. It looks like someone figured out how it should look at every state, and then developed a way to gracefully switch between them -- not that it was a mobile UI that someone decided to enlarge on desktop. This is why we have media queries in CSS!
  • eropple 7y ago
    It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.
    • RaiseProfits 7y ago
      This must be a Linux/windows paradigm? I am lost looking at Firefox on my Mac. Edit: apparently on PCs the per-window menu is activated with Alt, TIL
      • catalogia 7y ago
        On Macs the menu bar is intact, same place it ever was, detached from the firefox window at the top of the screen. The hamburger menu on macos is basically redundant.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      I always turn on the menu bar on the desktop. Screen real estate is valuable, but using some on a menu bar is a very worthwhile expenditure, in my opinion. I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.
      • eropple 7y ago
        I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).
        • airstrike 7y ago
          go-to-URL-bar is also Ctrl+L which I tend to favor, for some reason Also I miss typing ".." in the URL bar to go to my home page (I'll admit this was an iexplore quirk, albeit a really convenient one...)
        • 7y ago
  • RaiseProfits 7y ago
    Not only that but a big pitch of the tablet itself is to get the desktop web browsing experience.
  • heymijo 7y ago
    Good god, and I'm over here living like a plebe thinking I had to just deal with the hamburger. Thank you to the poster below for the "alt" shortcut and for reminding me I can change the settings! I don't have a problem with the concept of the hamburger except what they put in it is less useful than the menu bar.
  • denton-scratch 7y ago
    There is a style of roundabout called a hamburger roundabout. It's controlled by lights, and has a two-way lane running straight through the middle. I don't drive much, these days; but even as a passenger, they do my head in. No More Hamburgers! Boo!
  • coribuci 7y ago
    > My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one! Game over. Do you want to play another game? (...you know - material ui is the new shit. I wonder what are they smoking, i would _love_ to try it too)
  • redwall_hp 7y ago
    This is one of my favorite parts of OS X, and it's sad that there aren't many Linux DEs doing it: the persistent menu bar. It's always expected that it be right at the top of the screen, and utilized. Firefox and Chrome, by default, have survived hamburgerization...because it can't be hidden. Sure, an application that doesn't use it at all (yuck) can just not implement anything beyond the application name menu, but something like a browser has no choice but for the bar to be visible.
    • masswerk 7y ago
      I guess, we may be confident to see the menu bar dissappear in a not so distant future iteration of OS X. With a bit of bad luck and some rather cynical retroverse distortion, it may be replaced by a Hamburger (as in the Xerox Star Interface, which introduced it to indicate the anchor for the single menu in the entire system.) Placing the cursor in text by imitating the new cursor catch and place game of iOS will be also fun. Probably so much fun that quite a number of people will stay longer in the office to play with it. That said, the menu bar has already taken serious damage by the introduction of OS X, when the first menu item became the variable width application name. Before this, the File and Edit menus and their essential menu items were exactly on the same place in every application, rendering the most essential commands a matter of muscle memory, quite like a guesture.
• thrower123 7y ago
  Desktop software has never recovered from Office adopting the terrible Ribbon element instead of proper menus and toolbars.
  • mark-r 7y ago
    Have you run into lots of desktop apps using a Ribbon style interface, other than Office? Microsoft didn't do themselves any favors by trying to patent the design and keep an iron fist on it.
    • thrower123 7y ago
      I do see a lot of Windows software and utilities that have tried to copy it; there's a set of Telerik controls implementing most of the pattern. It's just unfortunate, because it started the trend of reducing and hiding functionality. With less examples of what high density software looked and worked like, people don't even know what they are missing. Then they briefly tried to push the one interface for every device holy grail with Windows 8 and UWP. Thankfully that was abortove, but it's still poisoned things more and hurt information density in its fallout.
      • sjy 7y ago
        How does the ribbon hide functionality compared to menus? I’m a big fan of it because it exposed functionality like styles, using large buttons that intuitively show how the function works, to people who were never going to independently discover them and customise their menu for easier access.
        • coribuci 7y ago
          > How does the ribbon hide functionality compared to menus? Did you tried to use it ? For every god damn thing i try to find in the ribbon i lose 5 minutes. That's what i call "hiding functionality" .
          • 7y ago
• Random_Person 7y ago
  I spend a huge amount of time making sure that my users get to experience fully-functioning UI on desktop, while not being overly limited on mobile. It's a HUGE part of my workflow, but honestly it's the only way. I can't stand visiting an 'app' website on my desktop only to find that it's 600px wide because it IS the app.
• city41 7y ago
  I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.
  • rightbyte 7y ago
    How is that not pancakes? But ye, it's way to big. If they have to do it fullscreen, atleast put the menu options in the centre of the screen not downwards ...
  • Zelphyr 7y ago
    I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"
    • rhizome 7y ago
      I've had to conclude that they think (or hope) that everybody not using a phone is using a tablet.
      • cally 7y ago
        Yeah, but surely the vast vast majority of dropbox's business has to come from PCs. Given how hard (and wrongly) they are pushing to be a collaborative space for work documents, I think I must be correct about this. I know it's cool and all to imagine everyone working on their phones, I just can't see that as a viable work process atm.
        • genericone 7y ago
          Their loudest majority is probably mobile then.
          • nine_k 7y ago
            Not necessarily a majority.
• rb808 7y ago
  But our A/B testing shows a 5% increase in engagement by making it crappy.
  • arkitaip 7y ago
    But then we actually had a 13% decrease because our test was fundamentally flawed. Also, we don't really understand the statistics behind a/b testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • buboard 7y ago
    Oh yeah, i was pressing all your buttons randomly because none of them were obvious what they do. I was surely engaging with your app very much, while swearing.
    • rhizome 7y ago
      Voice recognition is still a few revisions off, thank you for your patience.
  • catalogia 7y ago
    Meanwhile it seems like very few people in the industry actually understand statistics well enough to not shoot themselves in the foot. The number of times I've seen accidental p-hacking is absurd. Having to explain to people why they can't stop running a trial as soon as the numbers look good is like pulling teeth. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3204791 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3204791
• cortesoft 7y ago
  Yeah, I always use desktop old reddit on my phone... I like small text I zoom in on. What I hate even worse though is endless scroll... give me damn pagination with buttons! So I can reload the page and not worry about losing my spot, or accidentally scrolling away... let me use the back button on my browser!
  • buboard 7y ago
    oh yeah. i get that with twitter. view a video, close it and you ve lost your page . i dont know why this even happens but it s more annoying than i could ever imagine. My solution is to switch to chronological-view-only, so at least i can tell whether i ve seen my whole feed
  • andrepd 7y ago
    i.reddit.com
• Romanulus 7y ago
  This is fallout with the idea of "mobile-first" development... while I get that it caters to a larger demographic, it is blinded by its own crapulence in regards to _functional_ UI/UX.
• microcolonel 7y ago
  > I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. I think a lot of mobile designs underestimate the natural information density of phones too.
• aczerepinski 7y ago
  I think the biggest culprit is "tap targets", meaning that everything has to be bigger than your fingertip so that it's easy to select on a phone. It leads to crazy amounts of white space around everything. This ruined the presentation of tabular data on the internet, like stock financials or nba.com box scores. They're waaaaaaay harder to read than they were 10 years ago.
  • Jaruzel 7y ago
    Google is to blame for this. If you run your site through their usability wizard, it will warn you when links or buttons are too close together, along with insinuating that you won't rank highly for mobile devices if you don't fix it.
• novok 7y ago
  The vast majority of the world use mobile devices as their only computing device, and the office workers and power users such as us are minority users and thus get minority attention. I think something like iPad OS getting laptop features and everyone targeting one or two mobile OS targets will be the future in 10 years. It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • coribuci 7y ago
    > The vast majority of the world use mobile devices as their only computing device, and the office workers and power users such as us are minority users and thus get minority attention. I think something like iPad OS getting laptop features and everyone targeting one or two mobile OS targets will be the future in 10 years. If you consider that a tablet is a "computing device" then my washing machine is also one. > It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better. They get "better and better" because they are crap. As U2 said: even better than the real thing.
• pcwalton 7y ago
  I really dislike menu bars. Seas of text with tiny hit targets strike me as not usable at all, and studies have shown this.
• Legogris 7y ago
  This! Somehow I feel that the desktop UX model of 90s were actually conceptually much better than what most modern apps are doing and it's a shame that instead of doing incremental improvements on that (sure, it's far from perfect) we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater.