5 ms·

I use it regularly for compatibility testing. Here are a few things I find myself missing in relatively modern computing, off the top of my head: Accessibility

I use it regularly for compatibility testing. Here are a few things I find myself missing in relatively modern computing, off the top of my head: Accessibility. Everything, every single little nook and cranny is keyboard-accessible. And I mean accessible not in the sense that I can keep pressing the Tab key, and eventually the barely-visible focus rectangle may arrive at the control I want to use. I mean, everything has a visile keyboard shortcut, and the Tab key also works, and the focus rectangle is visible, and it works every time, not just when the application feels like it. Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the application is thinking. Fast as heck startup time. Fast menus. Fast application startup. Fast, fast, fast. My current daily driver is a 10-year-old laptop with a spinny drive, and Windows 95 is running inside a VM, which is competing for resources with my entire dev environment, so it's not like the hardware is not comparable to what it was designed for. Consistency in look and operation. Everything has the same widgets and dialogs, and they all work about the same way, at least between Microsoft apps. Netscape and other browsers are a different story. Flat, dull, boring interface. Everything is a flat gray, nothing is shiny, nothing is animated. Everything is a frame around the work that I'm doing, and feels like it wants to just help me, assist me with what I'm doing, and then get out of the way. Oh yeah, and I the Save and Open File dialogs are fully-featured file managers with sorting, multi-select, copy, paste, rename, the works. And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like createElement() getElementById(). IE3 has the most beautiful toolbar of any browser I've seen to date, and also has focus rectangles and basic CSS support. I can still use it to post to my blog.

agumonkey 6y ago
yes, yes, and yes. mostly yes. another factor is that computers were limited in presentation and computation, they'd present to you abstracted, dull tables and operations on data. But it did serious jobs. Now we have extremely (extremely, as a CGI fan, I cannot deny that) fancy presentation systems, but the actual data displayed is linear list of paragraphs, a few pictures and data points. Well computer is hypermainstream so obviously it talks to the average user.. but it says something about what computing was and is now.
- bombcar 6y ago
  It's amazingly frightening to me that companies were willing to pay MILLIONS for a Cray 2 supercomputer and I carry a phone MORE POWERFUL than that and I basically use it to browse the internet - and I don't know anything to do on it that would be worth millions to do.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Yes, I've been reading about this for a few years, you can find some people on slashdot or similar discussing peak power comparison between CRAYs and core i5 and they were already ~comparable (CRAY still won for sustain workloads). Recent machines are even more powerful but yeah the utilitarian aspect is different to say the least. Got me thinking about why computers in the first place.. in the 90s a computer was mostly sold as an office like tool for the home. "Get access to big corp tools !" marketing feeling. You get to write document, print them, organize your stuff (some people had movie tape databases), finance etc. But in retrospect we didn't use much of that (it was more a gaming machine for me, and later CGI tool) and with the web.. printing went away.. local db went away. People probably still do financing. But now electronics have become a social gateway .. see news, pics, chat. A billion dollar device production requires either a nation, a big company or 7 billion customers :) Do you ever try to imagine the face of a 50-80s scientist if you came back in time to show him an iphone ? he'd faint of laughter I guess.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Or he'd figure out a way to use each of the 2 million pixels to display useful information! One thing about old "business" UIs designed for terminals or small screens - they certainly didn't waste space.
      - agumonkey 6y ago
        I believe things wave, advanced business maximize efficiency as much as possible, the mainstream variant following relaxes that constraint that's why we have better tools but underutilized.
userbinator 6y ago
And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like createElement() getElementById(). It also has a proper (native!) settings dialog with tons of configurability and security zoning. While modern browser's rendering engines and JS have gotten more featureful, I think the UI has gotten much worse in contrast, with everything going in the same direction of dumbed-down-Chrome-clones. My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  >My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers. If you don't mind a learning curve and primarily keyboard driven, e.g. if you already love Vim, consider giving qutebrowser a try. You can even run it straight from the source tree, since it uses Python for its wrapper. It uses QtWebEngine and Chromium, which does mean some issues and drawbacks, but the frame around it is nearly perfect. It's an amazing piece of software, and truly next generation browsing for nerds, IMO. It's a bit like Vimium, but the keyboard bindings are native and always work, as opposed to being at the mercy of JS injection into the page. All of the settings are accessible via :command mode, and permissions are as granular as you can imagine. There's no graphical settings, but other than that I think it matches your description.
cout 6y ago
> Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the application is thinking. This annoys me to no end. Some applications (Firefox) even reorder keystrokes! I'm beginning to think we've been using the wrong programming paradigm for user interfaces for the last 20 years. I never had these sorts of complaints about DOS programs, or even Windows up to version 2000. Then something changed. Computers have been feeling slower and slower ever since.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  It,s almost like they,ve gotten smart enough to play dumb ;)

agumonkey 6y ago

yes, yes, and yes. mostly yes. another factor is that computers were limited in presentation and computation, they'd present to you abstracted, dull tables and operations on data. But it did serious jobs. Now we have extremely (extremely, as a CGI fan, I cannot deny that) fancy presentation systems, but the actual data displayed is linear list of paragraphs, a few pictures and data points. Well computer is hypermainstream so obviously it talks to the average user.. but it says something about what computing was and is now.

bombcar 6y ago
It's amazingly frightening to me that companies were willing to pay MILLIONS for a Cray 2 supercomputer and I carry a phone MORE POWERFUL than that and I basically use it to browse the internet - and I don't know anything to do on it that would be worth millions to do.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Yes, I've been reading about this for a few years, you can find some people on slashdot or similar discussing peak power comparison between CRAYs and core i5 and they were already ~comparable (CRAY still won for sustain workloads). Recent machines are even more powerful but yeah the utilitarian aspect is different to say the least. Got me thinking about why computers in the first place.. in the 90s a computer was mostly sold as an office like tool for the home. "Get access to big corp tools !" marketing feeling. You get to write document, print them, organize your stuff (some people had movie tape databases), finance etc. But in retrospect we didn't use much of that (it was more a gaming machine for me, and later CGI tool) and with the web.. printing went away.. local db went away. People probably still do financing. But now electronics have become a social gateway .. see news, pics, chat. A billion dollar device production requires either a nation, a big company or 7 billion customers :) Do you ever try to imagine the face of a 50-80s scientist if you came back in time to show him an iphone ? he'd faint of laughter I guess.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Or he'd figure out a way to use each of the 2 million pixels to display useful information! One thing about old "business" UIs designed for terminals or small screens - they certainly didn't waste space.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      I believe things wave, advanced business maximize efficiency as much as possible, the mainstream variant following relaxes that constraint that's why we have better tools but underutilized.

userbinator 6y ago

And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like createElement() getElementById(). It also has a proper (native!) settings dialog with tons of configurability and security zoning. While modern browser's rendering engines and JS have gotten more featureful, I think the UI has gotten much worse in contrast, with everything going in the same direction of dumbed-down-Chrome-clones. My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
>My ideal browser would have the configurability and UI of early IE/Firefox, with the JS and rendering engines of current browsers. If you don't mind a learning curve and primarily keyboard driven, e.g. if you already love Vim, consider giving qutebrowser a try. You can even run it straight from the source tree, since it uses Python for its wrapper. It uses QtWebEngine and Chromium, which does mean some issues and drawbacks, but the frame around it is nearly perfect. It's an amazing piece of software, and truly next generation browsing for nerds, IMO. It's a bit like Vimium, but the keyboard bindings are native and always work, as opposed to being at the mercy of JS injection into the page. All of the settings are accessible via :command mode, and permissions are as granular as you can imagine. There's no graphical settings, but other than that I think it matches your description.

cout 6y ago

> Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the application is thinking. This annoys me to no end. Some applications (Firefox) even reorder keystrokes! I'm beginning to think we've been using the wrong programming paradigm for user interfaces for the last 20 years. I never had these sorts of complaints about DOS programs, or even Windows up to version 2000. Then something changed. Computers have been feeling slower and slower ever since.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
It,s almost like they,ve gotten smart enough to play dumb ;)