23 ms·

Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy

338 points by gslin 3y ago

FreshStart 3y ago
Knights helmet Mode. Slams down, the horse starts galloping, you are in mortal danger a little seasick, but hoping that the battle may soon be over.
- henriquez 3y ago
  That’s exactly what I thought too. 800x600 isn’t a fair comparison because a lot of other tech has changed.
warning26 3y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that older devices (ie CRT monitors) usually had lower PPI than modern ones, so you could get away with smaller font sizes and it still looked readable.
- ChrisClark 3y ago
  True, and newer programs aren't designed for 800x600 in the first place. At higher resolutions, I actually prefer the larger clearer layouts because there is room to fit them.
metalliqaz 3y ago
We have been going downhill ever since we left the terminal. Back in the Windows 9x days it was still pretty good, but once we entered the web app era, people lost their minds. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the sheer amount of wasted space in modern apps, as well as the constant user-hostile design choices and an apparent allergy to putting text content on a page. Thankfully HN has not succumbed.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The 90’s were weird because people still had hope, I think, that UI could be advanced in a direction that helped get actual work done. So they kept trying to make professional-appropriate, high-information-density UIs. Now we’re bifurcated into toy UI for people who don’t have any idea what they are doing, and terminal interfaces. This is probably the only way to do things. But it does seem like a bit of a retreat.
PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
I'm not sure this is a fair or ones better than the other comparison. Resolutions and density have increased, applications have taken advantage of that, in the case of TextMaker to show much more functionality to the user in a way that's easy to interpret. You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  That's really it. There is basically no need to support a 800x600 monitor these days.
- Arrath 3y ago
  > You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either. But there are times when I do! Like having two windows side by side so I can transpose text from one into the word processor.
- dogleash 3y ago
  > You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either. Why not? My 2nd monitor is portrait. The window manager tiles are ~1080x630. I have Word open in one right now. Right above the tile with the browser I'm typing this comment into. But, I know, I said something about a tiling window manager so my options are icky. And I probably have a technical job, double ick. No parallels could be drawn from my experience to what normal people with desk jobs would do or want.
londons_explore 3y ago
Spacing in the GUI seems to be a power user vs beginner tradeoff. Beginners like big UI's with a few large buttons with nice big icons clearly illustrating what they do. Experts like to fit as much functionality in as possible, so want keyboard shortcuts and millions of buttons. The logical thing seems to be some slider to adjust 'UI density' that defaults to beginner mode, but can be slid on a per-app basis. How hard can it be?
- js8 3y ago
  GNOME 2 used to have a choice for toolbars: icons, icons & text, text.
  - anthk 3y ago
    XFCE still has it. And any GTK2/3 config tool such as lxappearance.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    As did every Cocoa app on macOS.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      Some still do, even if it's fallen out of fashion.
- bandrami 3y ago
  Huh. In my experience experts fill their screen with one application at a time and turn off its menus and toolbars.
  - bityard 3y ago
    I don't run applications fullscreen and have no desire to turn off menus and toolbars either. I guess I'll never be an expert.
- MR4D 3y ago
llm_nerd 3y ago
Seems trite. No one is running their display at 800x600 so apps aren't building for it. And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Yeah, and more recently 1080p-ish has become the fixed standard thanks to hi-dpi.
- zamalek 3y ago
  The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th... That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.
  - dingaling 3y ago
    I can't see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can't see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!
    - kiawe_fire 3y ago
      One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want. Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
      - jwells89 3y ago
        I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.
notatoad 3y ago
and here's a different modern word replacement at 800x600. it's spacious, comfy, and super usable. https://ibb.co/LdTtyBd https://ibb.co/LdTtyBd this seems like a problem with "textmaker from softmaker", not something that needs to be generalized out to the whole modern world
bandrami 3y ago
I still remember the excitement at being able to select "millions of colors"
can16358p 3y ago
Those programs were designed to be used at 800x600, and it was fine. Current apps are designed to be run at much higher resolutions, and are also fine at utilizing the available space. If we try to put current apps into small resolutions there will be very small usable space as they aren't meant to be there. If we try to put old programs to current huge areas there will be too much working space, looking very disproportional and potentially distracting focus. Both are fine for the environments that they are targeting.
irusensei 3y ago
It’s funny because Microsoft loves to overuse your horizontal space. Actually one of the reasons I can’t stand vscode deliberately opening lateral menus on both sides and creaming the actual content in the middle. No, do not lose your time trying to tell me how to avoid that - my relationship with that program is already sour. Also Azure Portal. God damn try to open a Log Analytics query window.
- wruza 3y ago
  Interesting, because I can’t stand horizontal full width. My editor opens at (60,0)-(100,100) in % of screen coords, the rest is console and browser. Anything more to the left feels like off-center and too wide. So I don’t like vscode too, but for the opposite reason. They pack too few in the sidebar and eat precious v-space instead. Do you have two-display setup btw?
- tredre3 3y ago
  > No, do not lose your time trying to tell me how to avoid that - my relationship with that program is already sour. That's fair, but VS Code (out of the box) only puts stuff on one side of the content. If you see stuff on both sides, it's because you did that.
breadwinner 3y ago
If you're comparing old vs. new consider this: In early 90s SunOS ran comfortably in 16 MB RAM. It was a powerful BSD-Unix system, with strong network functionality including Network File System, powerful PostScript-based 2D graphics [1], and SunView windowing system that arguably works better than today's UIs [2]. Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Some jpegs take up more memory than that! Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_screen_snapshot.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Tool...
- solardev 3y ago
  Pfft. But did it have a transparent taskbar and four different screens for the same settings? Ads in its search functionality? New Solitaire modes? That's what I call progress, baby.
  - ugjka 3y ago
    Or running a separate chrome browser for each "app"
    - Aachen 3y ago
      Which is essentially an OS with its own application sandbox and task manager
  - amluto 3y ago
    My theory is that old systems were too limited for modern BS like this. BIOS had to fit in a couple hundred kB. There was no room for nonsense like UEFI has. Other than POST, it booted pretty quickly because even a slow CPU can do anything that credibly fits in 200kB pretty quickly. (O(n^2) algorithms were pretty unlikely at boot time.) Having three or four different control panels each controlling part of, say, the network configuration takes developer time, compile time, and distribution space. When everything needs to fit on one CD or, better yet, a few floppies and the companies were new and very small and scrappy by modern standards, this would be utterly impractical. There was one control panel because it was cheaper and less code! Want one developer and zero professional designers to make a dialog box? You use one well-designed widget set (from the OS vendor!) and you just do it. Everything is easy to use because the resources needed to make pretty-but-undiscoverable UIs weren’t available. (We see this today writ small in the embedded space. For example, Secure Boot is an abomination that, as implemented in essentially all cases, requires truly bizarre CPU resources and complexity. So embedded systems use vastly simpler chain-of-trust systems.)
mysterydip 3y ago
I know some people are saying "no one uses 800x600 now" so it's not a fair comparison, but I have several lower end laptops at 720p, and vertical space can definitely be cramped in some applications.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Even some HiDPI displays are 1440x900 logical pixels at the default scaling. The areal coverage of a button of such a display is the same as a low DPI display that only has 1440x900 pixels.
- Arrath 3y ago
  And god help you if you try to run some things in anything but full screen. E: Or, a window smaller than 1920x1080, I guess. Even 1366x768 as so many laptops were stuck on for so long was pushing it.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  So bizarre how web browsers and Windows itself refuses to stop eating vertical space when widescreen monitors have been the standard for probably 15 years now. Windows 11 went so far as to remove the ability to relocate the task bar to the left side!
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    Yeah that. I'm not going to 11 until they fix that.
nuancebydefault 3y ago
I still remember the the time upping my res from standard vga to 800x600 when i got my big 17 inch crt that would have a bearable (read: no headaches) refresh rate at that resolution. Suddenly Word did not have icons up until further than the top half of the screen and became usable for writing letters. After that, things _only_ _improved_. When reading posts like this, it reminds me of the times when I re-used an older-than win95 machine and was cursing about the clumsiness of the UI. People seem to recollect past times very differently.
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  I remember I could up my CRT to 1152xsomething resolution for years (or was it 1600x1200 on the 17"? And 1152 on 15"?) until I moved to a samsung 24 1920x1200 back in 2004?
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I mostly used 1152x864 on the 17" CRT and 1600x1200 was only usable on the 21" CRT.
  - nuancebydefault 3y ago
    Apologies, it could have been the upgrade from 14 to 15 inch, a really long time ago.
- petercooper 3y ago
  People seem to recollect past times very differently. I'm mostly struck by the folks who seem to recall GUIs working "instantly" in the 90s. I remember them being incredibly slow and laggy, not to mention how sluggish disk access was. There's much to celebrate about older software and I'm a huge fan of retro computing, but there seem to be a lot of "good old days" glasses being handed out by someone out there.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Disk I/O was slow. But GUI's reacted on miliseconds.
chasing 3y ago
Well, yes. You see, no one uses 800x600 monitors anymore so we don't really optimize desktop app experiences for that.
armchairhacker 3y ago
Remember this image? https://static.wiliam.com.au/2014/07/EA/ms-word.jpg https://static.wiliam.com.au/2014/07/EA/ms-word.jpg The author definitely customized the toolbar. This is what it looks like on my Word, granted it's not 800x600, but there's a lot less items and it doesn't look so cluttered: https://imgur.com/a/oZp45vz https://imgur.com/a/oZp45vz
- humanistbot 3y ago
  Yeah, this is 100% disingenuous and exaggerated for effect. Why not enable the margins and page format for both or neither?
seydor 3y ago
If you make it cool, the Google will send you emails complaining that text is too small for touch devices. I can't get over how cool windows 95-7 looks today, so ergonomic and obvious to use. And it's so simple because it so optimized to use psychophysics in the most computationally efficient way. Pretty much anything today makes me puke. Turning off the animations in any smartphone instantly makes it 2x faster. I wish i could turn off all the flat CSS of the world
mavu 3y ago
first time (that i notice) that a link to such a conversation does not lead to twitter but to some other microbloging/social media site.
cfcfcf 3y ago
A fairer comparison would show Word 9x on a 4K, high-DPI monitor, which would be very difficult to read.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some people don't like the idea of adding more buttons to the UI because it can make it look cluttered and confusing, but rather than just adding padding around everything, why not make the icons higher resolution and maybe slightly bigger to take up the increased available screen real estate? I'm sick of people associating "modern" with "good" and "dated" with "bad". Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. And IMO, they're just plain ugly, but that's a matter of personal opinion. Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.
- ChrisLTD 3y ago
  The only app that I use on a daily basis that doesn't cram in tons of white space is Safari on MacOS. IntelliJ used to be good about this, until they rolled out their new theme.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    I’ve found I really like the new UI, but I may have also turned on some kind of compact mode.
    - ChrisLTD 3y ago
      Yes, the compact mode definitely helps, but it's a bit of a wonder that it's even necessary.
- anthk 3y ago
  I find Zukitre fine on modern unix/bsd's, it's the only flatish time (among the Tango icon theme) which looks fine to use daily without playing Whack-A-Mole.
- spiffytech 3y ago
  I discussed the whitespace issue with a Google engineer some years back, when Material UI was the hot new thing and lowering UI density became trendy. He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
wruza 3y ago
Imagine FL studio or Blender designed by modern ui principles. You can select reverb, pitch, wireframe and shading mode on a big spacy sidebar. Everything else is in a scrollable menu that pops up on hover and glitches if you move your cursor too fast. Also 95% of settings don’t exist because it might confuse a user.
- viraptor 3y ago
  That's a weird take on "modern UI principles". Blender definitely does use modern UI, but also knows its users so the interface is designed accordingly. FL? Go ahead, compare it to what we could even theoretically achieve a few decades ago. These are also completely at odds with the text processor goals. In music/3d you've got multiple modes (recording/effects/midi-patterns/mastering/playback/... and modelling/texturing/post/...) while in text editing you've got text. Maybe an outline on the side. One favours multiple layouts and modes, the other favours simplicity and presentation.
- mauvia 3y ago
  I find that comparison hilarious because my first experience with blender I bounced off it entirely because of it not using UI standard behavior like right clicking, etc, that I was used to because of an old trial copy of 3DS Max I had. I still haven't tried it properly since then, because I'm not a 3D artist.
DeathArrow 3y ago
To quote Bill G: : "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- srgpqt 3y ago
  Bill G has said that this quote was misattributed to him.
graypegg 3y ago
Honestly, I think this is a contrived example. Picking another company’s app is a weird cherry-picked choice. Here’s (MacOS) Microsoft word, which is as close to apples-to-apples comparison as I can do. https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png That looks perfectly usable to me. Not exactly 800x600 but it’s scaled close enough.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >That looks perfectly usable to me. It really isn't, though. Word 97 has a single row for each toolbar. It is very easy hand-eye coordination (anyone remember that term?) because the toolbars are very orderly and organized. It just takes practice, which most of us did. Word 365 and its Ribbon bar has 1 row splitting to 3 rows combining to 2 rows splitting again to 3 rows and then combining back again to 1 row. And some icons have text, most don't. Also, the menu bar doesn't fit and runs off the window/screen despite having less than Word 97's menu bar. WHY?! That is utterly hellish disorder and requires the eyes to scramble all over instead of moving along one straight line.
  - jug 3y ago
    The WHY is because behind these tiny cute menu bar options lies kilometer long Microsoft Word 9x menus and submenus that became increasingly tough to navigate. It was clearly a UI element that was being pushed beyond its limits. This is why ribbons were innovated, combining the menubars and toolbars into one element -- a categorized toolbar with the flexibility of allowing common options to be larger than less common options, helping the eye in finding the most likely tools. As for ribbons, you said it yourself "It just takes practice, which most of us did."
aidenn0 3y ago
Completely OT, but did HN increase the minimum width recently? My phone is only 480px wide and HN doesn't wrap at that width anymore. Probably a good thing for me to make HN worse on my phone, but just curious.
helf 3y ago
Everyone going on about "no one runs at that resolution! Stupid comparison!" Are missing the point. The point is that a properly designed UI will adjust to the resolution in use. And this doesnt just mean monitor resolution when running full screen. This also pertains to /floating windows/. Which often are the equivalent of 800x600 resolution. A lot of modern UIs are full of bullshit white space that takes up tremendous amount of screen estate for no damn reason. You can have a high DPI screen and a UX/UI that comfortably scales information density and widget sizes. That one commenter mentioned running the old word on a modern 4K monitor and of course that wont be great for a lot of people /if it's not scaling at all/ (i try to run everything native but my vision is great). Tl,dr: white space is abused and wasting screen space in modern UIs. High density is wasted on extreme scaling. Modern UIs and UXs are "optimized" for fat fingered geriatrics with tremors (touch) or blind geriatrics (desktop) at the expense of information density. Also, apparently users are too dumb to understand denser UX according to some engineers.
dragontamer 3y ago
You know you can... click the ribbon to hide it right? The idea of the Ribbon is to use more space/text to tell the user what the icons mean. In practice, users don't actually know what those buttons mean on the Word 9x example. While the Ribbon-interface at least has "Paragraph" or "Styles" to describe what their icons are.
- Arrath 3y ago
  Wasn't this a solved problem long, long ago? Mouse over the icon and get a popup tooltip that explains more. No wasted screen space on a label that's always there and extraneous after you use the program for more than a week.
  - jug 3y ago
    But that toolbar consumes more space than a hidden ribbon that only shows on hover. A ribbon has tooltips too. But they aren't there to solve the space problem but the information problem.
- ipcress_file 3y ago
  I came here looking for this comment. You can also create a toolbar in the titlebar. So if you minimize the ribbon by default and add the old style icons to the titlebar, you end up with a really nice setup.
milesward 3y ago
Yah that is stark. Folks wonder why I push workspace. Woof.
chowells 3y ago
I definitely do not remember 800x600 as spacious and comfy. The best I could call it is "slightly better than 640x480". I had to get to 1024x768 before I actually felt like the screen was no longer cramped. And I had to get to 2560x1440 before I felt like I really had enough room for more than one window at a usable size and placement at the same time. (Not really surprising, as it's finally big enough to put 1280x720 windows next to each other.)
- strken 3y ago
  This is a comparison of two generations of UI running at 800x600. The claim seems to be about the relative spaciousness and comfiness of the old UI at low resolutions, not the resolution itself.
- skissane 3y ago
  > I definitely do not remember 800x600 as spacious and comfy. It is all relative. Someone who grew up in a tiny apartment may consider an average-sized house spacious, someone who grew up in a mansion may consider it cramped. When all I had was 640x480, it didn't feel cramped, because it was all I knew. And then 800x600 came along, and "wow this is huge". And now I start Windows 3.1 in a VM, and "I don't remember it being this small?" When I was a little kid, I thought our house and backyard were enormous. Then my parents sold that house and we moved to another city, and I haven't been inside it for over 30 years now. I bet if I went back tomorrow, it would look a lot smaller than I remember it being
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    We have to remember we were also using CRT monitors, which don't have "pixels" per se like the LCD monitors of today do. 800x600 on a CRT back then really did feel as big as 1920x1080 today.
    - danparsonson 3y ago
      > We have to remember we were also using CRT monitors, which don't have "pixels" per se like the LCD monitors of today do. How so? CRT pixels aren't active, is that what you mean? They are still distinct picture elements ("pix-els").
Dwedit 3y ago
Word 97 has the most important feature, a certain helpful paper clip.
aninteger 3y ago
You can get this today again using the FOX toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ http://www.fox-toolkit.org/). This is probably my favorite lightweight toolkit. Patches gladly welcomed for a11y and Wayland.
vkou 3y ago
Good thing we don't use Modern Word in 800x600 resolution. Why not do an apples to apples comparison, and show it in something like 1920x1200? You'll have more page space than you'll know what to do with.
cycomanic 3y ago
What is it with so many recent "software" posts sounding like those grumpy old man (who can be traced back to the ancient Greeks) saying "back when I was a lad, everything was so much better, and we had it real hard..." The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, and if the developers would take away tools from the toolbar they would be the first to complain that they have to access them through a menu (or that the fonts look pixelated). Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. Ironically someone pointed out that you can take away most of the toolbars in textmaker to make it look very much like the old software (except for smoother). So really what are you complaining about?!
- kypro 3y ago
  > Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. I do agree there, but it's less that more functionality is being pack into menus today, and more that software is confused whether it should be trying to optimise for mouse and keyboard or a clumsy touch screen. As a result context menus get replaced with tabs and icons get replaced with large clickable tiles. Another issue with modern UX is that it assumes far more of the user for the sake of minimalism. If you look at software from around the Windows 98 era the UX was designed to be as functional and clear as possible. The obvious examples of this might be how browsers back then had a button that actually said "Back" and Windows had a button that said "Start". Contrast that with today – my browser has a rotated triangle for a back button and Windows has button with four squares which you need to know is what we used to call "start". These two trends combined imo are what causes most of the problems – the UX itself is often clumsy because it's poorly optimise for your device, and it's confusing because often UI elements aren't clearly labeled (or they're simply removed in a push for minimalism). Windows is uniquely bad for both of these trends. Functionality which would have previously been easy to find with a textual context menu is now often on some randomly ordered tab panel behind a vague icon.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    There are more clickable elements in that ribbon than there are in the classic menubars. They're also way more discoverable in that a lot of them are even named. There's more functionality in the ribbon here than the menubar.
deleted 3y ago
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ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Word is such a shitshow now. Not only is the giant "ribbon" a pile of childish, garish trash... but Microsoft has even ruined their once-excellent style management. Now MS forces a giant list of idiotic hard-coded styles on you (many of which appear to consist of different-colored underlines), which you have to wade through to find your own. I've switched to LibreOffice, which suffers from some style-management issues and of course bugs... but is still better than Word and doesn't badger me for a goddamned "Microsoft account."
sharts 3y ago
The bourgeois design and build software for the bourgeois. What kind of empathy can be expected of those that shoot in RAW and sip lattes everyday?
snvzz 3y ago
Hold my beer. Here[0]'s prowrite at 640x256. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBGoQX6H3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBGoQX6H3c
distantsounds 3y ago
The example is mimicking the Office Ribbon toolbar which is obviously taking up a lot of space. It's almost as if those little triangles in the corner of the toolbars allows you to change the size. Who would have thought! This is a horrible, cherry picked example that can be fixed with less than a minute of customization.
kgbcia 3y ago
They computer monitors for watching cinematic movies instead of apps.
tombert 3y ago
When I was a teenager, I was sort of obsessed with learning all the keystrokes in Microsoft Office (and later OpenOffice). I got to a point where I rarely ever touched the mouse. Once I got to that point, I started getting increasingly annoyed that so much space was taken by UI elements that I never used. It has eventually culminated with a rejection of GUIs entirely now; everything I do lives almost entirely in the command line with tmux and Neovim. I am reasonably happy with pandoc markdown for about ~85% of document tasks, XeLaTeX for the remainder. I use LSP for something approximating an IDE. It’s not for everyone, but I really like how little superfluous crap is in my window now.
- genmud 3y ago
  You sir, are a legend. This has strong stallman [1] vibes, and I say that not in a bad way, but as a norm-busting, trailblazing way. [1] - https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
  - tombert 3y ago
    Honestly it’s gotten a lot easier; modern terminal applications have decent mouse support, including NeoVim and tmux. I feel like software engineers are more or less used to leaving the WYSIWYG world; virtually all of use have dealt with HTML+CSS via the use of plain text editors. Once you’re used to that paradigm, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to just a command to compile to PDF. Just to be a little clear, I run all this inside vanilla macOS. I live in the terminal 90+% of the time but I am not a complete Luddite!
kwijibob 3y ago
The left one is better - reminds me why I prefer Google Docs.
kelnos 3y ago
Without weighing in on the quality of the specific UI in question, this just seems like a big "so what?". Modern versions of apps are designed with much higher screen resolutions in mind than apps designed ~30 years ago, because higher screen resolutions are now the norm. That's... fine? I'd much rather talk about how, in the name of "rapid development", we write using languages and frameworks that bloat memory usage and CPU needs.
111111IIIIIII 3y ago
hide the ruler and you're halfway there.
shanghaikid 3y ago
In old days, most CRT monitors are 4:3, now most monitors are 16:9, watching movie or playing game are more important than improving productivity?
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  I'm told that in (parts of?) Europe, turning those widescreen monitors into portrait mode and having three of them is pretty common.
emodendroket 3y ago
Rather than just carping about the new thing being bad it’d probably be more interesting to engage with the reasoning and talk about other possible solutions. My understanding is the ribbon was introduced because Microsoft got to the point where most feature requests in Word were for features that already existed. The discoverability with the old UI was poor. The ribbon helped. Also, aesthetics are subjective but I think it looks nice and, more importantly, less dexterity is required to click the intended icon.
nicetryguy 3y ago
Peak Office was 2003. Get off my lawn!
AequitasOmnibus 3y ago
I spend a large amount of time in my profession writing and editing[1]. The industry standard is Word, with some scant holdouts on WordPerfect. Word is a behemoth. The UI objectively makes reading and writing text difficult. Recently, I've switched to using VSCode for my first draft (written in markdown), and then converted via pandoc to .docx. From there, I can reformat to the industry standards. Why the extra step? Because when you're fighting with the UI for your attention, the ability to focus on the written word takes a backseat. I'll often end up tripping over some auto-correct feature (the autocorrects for copyright and euro are two of my greatest foes) or cryptic formatting issue, and end up getting farther and farther away from my original focus. Word processing is broken. VSCode in markdown with a few extra plugins for QOL (e.g. spell check) is a nice balance between something raw and plaintext like VIM and an unbearably clunky MS Word. I can't wait for Microsoft to add Clippy 2.0 powered by ChatGPT into Word so that it can finally complete the slow erosion the author in favor of pure computer-generated text. [1]: Just because I spend most of my time writing and editing for a living doesn't mean I'm great at it. I explicitly disclaim any typos in this comment!
janandonly 3y ago
It is an unfair comparison. The “comfy” window on the left shows Word in "reader-mode" or whatever it was called back then. The “cramped” window on the right shows a word processor on "Print-view", meaning it shows the A4/Letter including lots of white space around all corners... Apples and Pears...
- jug 3y ago
  Exactly, and the cramped version also includes the title bar of the operating system host.
mo_42 3y ago
I don't have any opinion on for either side as I didn't use any such UIs much. Is it possible that this is just nostalgia? Both screenshots look fairly similar to me. Also, I don't understand why UI developers don't try to replace all those buttons and the menubar with an omni search bar. Something where I can lookup functions that I can perform but also documentation. Still, we should be able to call function also by shortcuts and maybe we also want to show some important ones below so that people could also click them. I think people are very much used to typing into search bars (browser, Google, ...) so this might be a valid approach in general.
- hkon 3y ago
  How would you know what to search for?
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Perhaps in an accompanying piece of literature. You could call it a manual perhaps.
    - hkon 3y ago
      Manuals are really boring, give me a button I can click.
      - globular-toast 3y ago
        It's a shame that you've never read a good manual. I recommend The TeXbook by Donald Knuth. Being trained in certain things brings so much joy to my life. I would hate it if my life was just a caveman who can only press buttons and see what happens.
        hkon 3y ago
        Perhaps, but I think both are nice to have. Being trained in certain things?
      - 3y ago
Joeri 3y ago
Everyone here seems to be missing an important detail and that is ppi. That 800x600 screen was probably running on a 14 inch monitor at an effective ppi of 70, with much larger text and clearly visible pixels. Take a 14 inch laptop and maximize the word processor and you’ll get a like for like comparison.
- brenns10 3y ago
  Yes exactly. I definitely sympathize with the other complaints: the newer Word UI is pretty garbage (I truly do hate the ribbon bar). There is a bit extra padding in the newer UI. But really, it all comes down to the PPI which seems obvious. What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    Word 97 could display the page in WYSIWYG style just as the newer version can. In fact, as I recall, that was its default setting. For some reason this person chose to take the comparison screenshot in the non-WYSIWYG mode.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      It's not even non-WYSIWYG mode, this isn't like those text mode programs that preceded it where you have Latex-style markers everywhere and only ever see the formatted text in print (preview). This just hides the page barriers to give you more space to type. Most of the Word documents I've typed never even made it to paper so the only reason I didn't disable pages all together is that some of my school projects had page count requirements.
  - yazantapuz 3y ago
    > What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful. Word 9x was WYSIWYG also.
globular-toast 3y ago
I have a thing about wasted pixels. On my computers I i3 or sway and have minimised the amount of space wasted and maximised the amount of information shown. All GUIs are shrunk to minimum/"compact" settings. Text size is as small as it can be. On my eReader I have plenty of whitespace, though. That's the difference between work and pleasure.
crest 3y ago
The old "pixel art" UI and fonts could fit a lot more on low resolution screens, but there is no reason we should use them on modern >200PPI displays. The real "crime" of modern UI/UX are undiscoverable low contrast interfaces. To this day the classic MacOS 9 UI elements work better than anything Apple or anyone else came up with since. Have a look at this online emulator: https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0 https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0
- crest 3y ago
  The emulator doesn't pass through right clicks and the mouse wheel.
  - Blahagun 3y ago
    Macs had only one mouse button for a very long time and the mouse wheel was new at the time. If you want right click press ctrl while clicking with the mouse.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
As a person who used first word on windows 3.11 - I am scared to use the new Word/Excel when I need to find something more than Bold and Italic. Everything else is successfully hidden from me and I have no idea where to search for it. Google Docs - even worse for me - and lacking really important functionality like image docking as a character
- Aachen 3y ago
  And you didn't ever need to look for what you needed when first using Word on 3.11? There's a lot of implicit and forgotten learning going on because one has no expectation to already know where something is when it's one's first time doing something new. Lots of people use Word for the first time today. I'd be more inclined to agree and say that things are successfully "hidden" from you if a new person today takes more time than a new person then. Or a new person today given then's interface, if we don't already have then-data. I have a diploma for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 and used Microsoft Office until ~2013, but nowadays find it 10x easier to, as you say, do more than marking text bold in LibreOffice Writer than in Microsoft Word 2007 because that's what I've been using this decade. It's a matter of getting used to and anyone saying they can't find anything in LibreOffice (one of the most common objections I hear) is kidding themselves and ignoring the prior learning from the huge discounts Microsoft gives schools and nonenforcement of copyright/licensing such that everyone is used to Word and Windows from the get-go. They'd rather pay, what is it today, 90 euros a year?, than find the bulleted list button again for their holiday checklist and occasional formal letter (that's what I see most people use it for at home) and get angry when I refuse to pirate the software for them.
shultays 3y ago
How does Word 9x look like in 2560x1440 etc? I am going to guess tiny buttons and possibly tiny texts. Yes, things look better for the resolutions they are designed for. Perhaps TextMaker could reduce the paddings or do some other stuff for lower resolutions but then what is the point if that is not an expected use case
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  My copies of TextMaker that support "ribbon" have a config option for classic or ribbon interface, _and_ have an option for UI scaling, on each platform (Win ,Android, Mac, Linux). I haven't used the most recent version.
LoveMortuus 3y ago
This reminded me of: "Nature never hurries yet everything gets done" quote. It is just here in the HN circles that feel that UI has degraded over the years, or do people outside of this highly tech-savvy group have similar feelings?
pushedx 3y ago
The screenshot on the right feels disingenuous to me. There is surely a keyboard shortcut to expand and collapse the currently chosen tabbed portion of the toolbars at the top of the screen, which would leave you a comfortable and less distracting writing experience.
- jug 3y ago
  Yes, and no one mentions that he's including the _host window_ of the virtual machine in the more offending version! I mean come on, it's absolutely disingenuous. The ribbon bar example in fact consumes less vertical space. A _massive_ portion of the white space is from the page display mode where Word 9x uses non-WYSIWYG and the modern one uses the real page layout with page margins. Well of course that's going to introduce a lot of white space because there is on the paper!
rhaway84773 3y ago
Now do those images in a resolution that’s actually in use today. The Windows 9X and Word 9X versions will quickly become unusable while the current Windows/Word, for all their design flaws, will actually be quite comfortable.
DrNosferatu 3y ago
This forgets HiDPI scaling, and, that no one would use a 800x600 desktop today. But of course, there's also SerenityOS ;)
amatheus 3y ago
I like Pages, Numbers and Keynote. No ribbons and proper use of monitor width. It helps that macOS still keeps the menubar too.
pieter_mj 3y ago
Point taken, but the comparison is not fairly made. Word 97 is not shown in page layout mode, where you would have a lot of additional whitespace to show the margins.
jszymborski 3y ago
Come to Libreoffice Writer, the gui is not much different :)
wkat4242 3y ago
I never really use the office apps myself. I mean for work sometimes but writing documents, presentations, spreadsheets, it's just not a thing I do or need much in my private life. I'd never even consider paying for the desktop apps. And other apps I do use are much more efficient with screen space. Browsers, code editors, 3D design programs, text terminals..

338 points by gslin 3y ago

Knights helmet Mode. Slams down, the horse starts galloping, you are in mortal danger a little seasick, but hoping that the battle may soon be over.

henriquez 3y ago
That’s exactly what I thought too. 800x600 isn’t a fair comparison because a lot of other tech has changed.

warning26 3y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that older devices (ie CRT monitors) usually had lower PPI than modern ones, so you could get away with smaller font sizes and it still looked readable.

ChrisClark 3y ago
True, and newer programs aren't designed for 800x600 in the first place. At higher resolutions, I actually prefer the larger clearer layouts because there is room to fit them.

metalliqaz 3y ago

We have been going downhill ever since we left the terminal. Back in the Windows 9x days it was still pretty good, but once we entered the web app era, people lost their minds. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the sheer amount of wasted space in modern apps, as well as the constant user-hostile design choices and an apparent allergy to putting text content on a page. Thankfully HN has not succumbed.

bee_rider 3y ago
The 90’s were weird because people still had hope, I think, that UI could be advanced in a direction that helped get actual work done. So they kept trying to make professional-appropriate, high-information-density UIs. Now we’re bifurcated into toy UI for people who don’t have any idea what they are doing, and terminal interfaces. This is probably the only way to do things. But it does seem like a bit of a retreat.

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago

I'm not sure this is a fair or ones better than the other comparison. Resolutions and density have increased, applications have taken advantage of that, in the case of TextMaker to show much more functionality to the user in a way that's easy to interpret. You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
That's really it. There is basically no need to support a 800x600 monitor these days.
Arrath 3y ago
> You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either. But there are times when I do! Like having two windows side by side so I can transpose text from one into the word processor.
dogleash 3y ago
> You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either. Why not? My 2nd monitor is portrait. The window manager tiles are ~1080x630. I have Word open in one right now. Right above the tile with the browser I'm typing this comment into. But, I know, I said something about a tiling window manager so my options are icky. And I probably have a technical job, double ick. No parallels could be drawn from my experience to what normal people with desk jobs would do or want.

londons_explore 3y ago

Spacing in the GUI seems to be a power user vs beginner tradeoff. Beginners like big UI's with a few large buttons with nice big icons clearly illustrating what they do. Experts like to fit as much functionality in as possible, so want keyboard shortcuts and millions of buttons. The logical thing seems to be some slider to adjust 'UI density' that defaults to beginner mode, but can be slid on a per-app basis. How hard can it be?

js8 3y ago
GNOME 2 used to have a choice for toolbars: icons, icons & text, text.
- anthk 3y ago
  XFCE still has it. And any GTK2/3 config tool such as lxappearance.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  As did every Cocoa app on macOS.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Some still do, even if it's fallen out of fashion.
bandrami 3y ago
Huh. In my experience experts fill their screen with one application at a time and turn off its menus and toolbars.
- bityard 3y ago
  I don't run applications fullscreen and have no desire to turn off menus and toolbars either. I guess I'll never be an expert.
MR4D 3y ago

llm_nerd 3y ago

Seems trite. No one is running their display at 800x600 so apps aren't building for it. And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.

hot_gril 3y ago
Yeah, and more recently 1080p-ish has become the fixed standard thanks to hi-dpi.
zamalek 3y ago
The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th... That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.
- dingaling 3y ago
  I can't see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can't see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!
  - kiawe_fire 3y ago
    One of the many paradoxes that I’ve found (but never figured a reason for) is why I’m able to quickly memorize and find my way to common functions via text-based toolbar menus, but to this day, I STILL have to click through each ribbon menu multiple times, study each icon and struggle to read each label, before finding what I want. Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      I think this has to do with the varying designs of each ribbon. Menus and their submenus are more like an index, closely following a particular pattern. Ribbons are more like grocery store layouts with variations that shift around and sometimes seem to not follow any rhyme or reason. It's not too surprising that the former of the two is more easily memorized.

notatoad 3y ago

and here's a different modern word replacement at 800x600. it's spacious, comfy, and super usable. https://ibb.co/LdTtyBd https://ibb.co/LdTtyBd this seems like a problem with "textmaker from softmaker", not something that needs to be generalized out to the whole modern world

bandrami 3y ago

I still remember the excitement at being able to select "millions of colors"

can16358p 3y ago

Those programs were designed to be used at 800x600, and it was fine. Current apps are designed to be run at much higher resolutions, and are also fine at utilizing the available space. If we try to put current apps into small resolutions there will be very small usable space as they aren't meant to be there. If we try to put old programs to current huge areas there will be too much working space, looking very disproportional and potentially distracting focus. Both are fine for the environments that they are targeting.

irusensei 3y ago

It’s funny because Microsoft loves to overuse your horizontal space. Actually one of the reasons I can’t stand vscode deliberately opening lateral menus on both sides and creaming the actual content in the middle. No, do not lose your time trying to tell me how to avoid that - my relationship with that program is already sour. Also Azure Portal. God damn try to open a Log Analytics query window.

wruza 3y ago
Interesting, because I can’t stand horizontal full width. My editor opens at (60,0)-(100,100) in % of screen coords, the rest is console and browser. Anything more to the left feels like off-center and too wide. So I don’t like vscode too, but for the opposite reason. They pack too few in the sidebar and eat precious v-space instead. Do you have two-display setup btw?
tredre3 3y ago
> No, do not lose your time trying to tell me how to avoid that - my relationship with that program is already sour. That's fair, but VS Code (out of the box) only puts stuff on one side of the content. If you see stuff on both sides, it's because you did that.

breadwinner 3y ago

If you're comparing old vs. new consider this: In early 90s SunOS ran comfortably in 16 MB RAM. It was a powerful BSD-Unix system, with strong network functionality including Network File System, powerful PostScript-based 2D graphics [1], and SunView windowing system that arguably works better than today's UIs [2]. Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Some jpegs take up more memory than that! Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_screen_snapshot.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Tool...

solardev 3y ago
Pfft. But did it have a transparent taskbar and four different screens for the same settings? Ads in its search functionality? New Solitaire modes? That's what I call progress, baby.
- ugjka 3y ago
  Or running a separate chrome browser for each "app"
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Which is essentially an OS with its own application sandbox and task manager
- amluto 3y ago
  My theory is that old systems were too limited for modern BS like this. BIOS had to fit in a couple hundred kB. There was no room for nonsense like UEFI has. Other than POST, it booted pretty quickly because even a slow CPU can do anything that credibly fits in 200kB pretty quickly. (O(n^2) algorithms were pretty unlikely at boot time.) Having three or four different control panels each controlling part of, say, the network configuration takes developer time, compile time, and distribution space. When everything needs to fit on one CD or, better yet, a few floppies and the companies were new and very small and scrappy by modern standards, this would be utterly impractical. There was one control panel because it was cheaper and less code! Want one developer and zero professional designers to make a dialog box? You use one well-designed widget set (from the OS vendor!) and you just do it. Everything is easy to use because the resources needed to make pretty-but-undiscoverable UIs weren’t available. (We see this today writ small in the embedded space. For example, Secure Boot is an abomination that, as implemented in essentially all cases, requires truly bizarre CPU resources and complexity. So embedded systems use vastly simpler chain-of-trust systems.)

mysterydip 3y ago

I know some people are saying "no one uses 800x600 now" so it's not a fair comparison, but I have several lower end laptops at 720p, and vertical space can definitely be cramped in some applications.

giantrobot 3y ago
Even some HiDPI displays are 1440x900 logical pixels at the default scaling. The areal coverage of a button of such a display is the same as a low DPI display that only has 1440x900 pixels.
Arrath 3y ago
And god help you if you try to run some things in anything but full screen. E: Or, a window smaller than 1920x1080, I guess. Even 1366x768 as so many laptops were stuck on for so long was pushing it.
yomlica8 3y ago
So bizarre how web browsers and Windows itself refuses to stop eating vertical space when widescreen monitors have been the standard for probably 15 years now. Windows 11 went so far as to remove the ability to relocate the task bar to the left side!
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Yeah that. I'm not going to 11 until they fix that.

nuancebydefault 3y ago

I still remember the the time upping my res from standard vga to 800x600 when i got my big 17 inch crt that would have a bearable (read: no headaches) refresh rate at that resolution. Suddenly Word did not have icons up until further than the top half of the screen and became usable for writing letters. After that, things _only_ _improved_. When reading posts like this, it reminds me of the times when I re-used an older-than win95 machine and was cursing about the clumsiness of the UI. People seem to recollect past times very differently.

Foobar8568 3y ago
I remember I could up my CRT to 1152xsomething resolution for years (or was it 1600x1200 on the 17"? And 1152 on 15"?) until I moved to a samsung 24 1920x1200 back in 2004?
- wtallis 3y ago
  I mostly used 1152x864 on the 17" CRT and 1600x1200 was only usable on the 21" CRT.
- nuancebydefault 3y ago
  Apologies, it could have been the upgrade from 14 to 15 inch, a really long time ago.
petercooper 3y ago
People seem to recollect past times very differently. I'm mostly struck by the folks who seem to recall GUIs working "instantly" in the 90s. I remember them being incredibly slow and laggy, not to mention how sluggish disk access was. There's much to celebrate about older software and I'm a huge fan of retro computing, but there seem to be a lot of "good old days" glasses being handed out by someone out there.
- anthk 3y ago
  Disk I/O was slow. But GUI's reacted on miliseconds.

chasing 3y ago

Well, yes. You see, no one uses 800x600 monitors anymore so we don't really optimize desktop app experiences for that.

armchairhacker 3y ago

Remember this image? https://static.wiliam.com.au/2014/07/EA/ms-word.jpg https://static.wiliam.com.au/2014/07/EA/ms-word.jpg The author definitely customized the toolbar. This is what it looks like on my Word, granted it's not 800x600, but there's a lot less items and it doesn't look so cluttered: https://imgur.com/a/oZp45vz https://imgur.com/a/oZp45vz

humanistbot 3y ago
Yeah, this is 100% disingenuous and exaggerated for effect. Why not enable the margins and page format for both or neither?

seydor 3y ago

If you make it cool, the Google will send you emails complaining that text is too small for touch devices. I can't get over how cool windows 95-7 looks today, so ergonomic and obvious to use. And it's so simple because it so optimized to use psychophysics in the most computationally efficient way. Pretty much anything today makes me puke. Turning off the animations in any smartphone instantly makes it 2x faster. I wish i could turn off all the flat CSS of the world

mavu 3y ago

first time (that i notice) that a link to such a conversation does not lead to twitter but to some other microbloging/social media site.

cfcfcf 3y ago

A fairer comparison would show Word 9x on a 4K, high-DPI monitor, which would be very difficult to read.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some people don't like the idea of adding more buttons to the UI because it can make it look cluttered and confusing, but rather than just adding padding around everything, why not make the icons higher resolution and maybe slightly bigger to take up the increased available screen real estate? I'm sick of people associating "modern" with "good" and "dated" with "bad". Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. And IMO, they're just plain ugly, but that's a matter of personal opinion. Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.

ChrisLTD 3y ago
The only app that I use on a daily basis that doesn't cram in tons of white space is Safari on MacOS. IntelliJ used to be good about this, until they rolled out their new theme.
- MBCook 3y ago
  I’ve found I really like the new UI, but I may have also turned on some kind of compact mode.
  - ChrisLTD 3y ago
    Yes, the compact mode definitely helps, but it's a bit of a wonder that it's even necessary.
anthk 3y ago
I find Zukitre fine on modern unix/bsd's, it's the only flatish time (among the Tango icon theme) which looks fine to use daily without playing Whack-A-Mole.
spiffytech 3y ago
I discussed the whitespace issue with a Google engineer some years back, when Material UI was the hot new thing and lowering UI density became trendy. He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.

wruza 3y ago

Imagine FL studio or Blender designed by modern ui principles. You can select reverb, pitch, wireframe and shading mode on a big spacy sidebar. Everything else is in a scrollable menu that pops up on hover and glitches if you move your cursor too fast. Also 95% of settings don’t exist because it might confuse a user.

viraptor 3y ago
That's a weird take on "modern UI principles". Blender definitely does use modern UI, but also knows its users so the interface is designed accordingly. FL? Go ahead, compare it to what we could even theoretically achieve a few decades ago. These are also completely at odds with the text processor goals. In music/3d you've got multiple modes (recording/effects/midi-patterns/mastering/playback/... and modelling/texturing/post/...) while in text editing you've got text. Maybe an outline on the side. One favours multiple layouts and modes, the other favours simplicity and presentation.
mauvia 3y ago
I find that comparison hilarious because my first experience with blender I bounced off it entirely because of it not using UI standard behavior like right clicking, etc, that I was used to because of an old trial copy of 3DS Max I had. I still haven't tried it properly since then, because I'm not a 3D artist.

DeathArrow 3y ago

To quote Bill G: : "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

srgpqt 3y ago
Bill G has said that this quote was misattributed to him.

graypegg 3y ago

Honestly, I think this is a contrived example. Picking another company’s app is a weird cherry-picked choice. Here’s (MacOS) Microsoft word, which is as close to apples-to-apples comparison as I can do. https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png That looks perfectly usable to me. Not exactly 800x600 but it’s scaled close enough.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>That looks perfectly usable to me. It really isn't, though. Word 97 has a single row for each toolbar. It is very easy hand-eye coordination (anyone remember that term?) because the toolbars are very orderly and organized. It just takes practice, which most of us did. Word 365 and its Ribbon bar has 1 row splitting to 3 rows combining to 2 rows splitting again to 3 rows and then combining back again to 1 row. And some icons have text, most don't. Also, the menu bar doesn't fit and runs off the window/screen despite having less than Word 97's menu bar. WHY?! That is utterly hellish disorder and requires the eyes to scramble all over instead of moving along one straight line.
- jug 3y ago
  The WHY is because behind these tiny cute menu bar options lies kilometer long Microsoft Word 9x menus and submenus that became increasingly tough to navigate. It was clearly a UI element that was being pushed beyond its limits. This is why ribbons were innovated, combining the menubars and toolbars into one element -- a categorized toolbar with the flexibility of allowing common options to be larger than less common options, helping the eye in finding the most likely tools. As for ribbons, you said it yourself "It just takes practice, which most of us did."

aidenn0 3y ago

Completely OT, but did HN increase the minimum width recently? My phone is only 480px wide and HN doesn't wrap at that width anymore. Probably a good thing for me to make HN worse on my phone, but just curious.

helf 3y ago

Everyone going on about "no one runs at that resolution! Stupid comparison!" Are missing the point. The point is that a properly designed UI will adjust to the resolution in use. And this doesnt just mean monitor resolution when running full screen. This also pertains to /floating windows/. Which often are the equivalent of 800x600 resolution. A lot of modern UIs are full of bullshit white space that takes up tremendous amount of screen estate for no damn reason. You can have a high DPI screen and a UX/UI that comfortably scales information density and widget sizes. That one commenter mentioned running the old word on a modern 4K monitor and of course that wont be great for a lot of people /if it's not scaling at all/ (i try to run everything native but my vision is great). Tl,dr: white space is abused and wasting screen space in modern UIs. High density is wasted on extreme scaling. Modern UIs and UXs are "optimized" for fat fingered geriatrics with tremors (touch) or blind geriatrics (desktop) at the expense of information density. Also, apparently users are too dumb to understand denser UX according to some engineers.

dragontamer 3y ago

You know you can... click the ribbon to hide it right? The idea of the Ribbon is to use more space/text to tell the user what the icons mean. In practice, users don't actually know what those buttons mean on the Word 9x example. While the Ribbon-interface at least has "Paragraph" or "Styles" to describe what their icons are.

Arrath 3y ago
Wasn't this a solved problem long, long ago? Mouse over the icon and get a popup tooltip that explains more. No wasted screen space on a label that's always there and extraneous after you use the program for more than a week.
- jug 3y ago
  But that toolbar consumes more space than a hidden ribbon that only shows on hover. A ribbon has tooltips too. But they aren't there to solve the space problem but the information problem.
ipcress_file 3y ago
I came here looking for this comment. You can also create a toolbar in the titlebar. So if you minimize the ribbon by default and add the old style icons to the titlebar, you end up with a really nice setup.

milesward 3y ago

Yah that is stark. Folks wonder why I push workspace. Woof.

chowells 3y ago

I definitely do not remember 800x600 as spacious and comfy. The best I could call it is "slightly better than 640x480". I had to get to 1024x768 before I actually felt like the screen was no longer cramped. And I had to get to 2560x1440 before I felt like I really had enough room for more than one window at a usable size and placement at the same time. (Not really surprising, as it's finally big enough to put 1280x720 windows next to each other.)

strken 3y ago
This is a comparison of two generations of UI running at 800x600. The claim seems to be about the relative spaciousness and comfiness of the old UI at low resolutions, not the resolution itself.
skissane 3y ago
> I definitely do not remember 800x600 as spacious and comfy. It is all relative. Someone who grew up in a tiny apartment may consider an average-sized house spacious, someone who grew up in a mansion may consider it cramped. When all I had was 640x480, it didn't feel cramped, because it was all I knew. And then 800x600 came along, and "wow this is huge". And now I start Windows 3.1 in a VM, and "I don't remember it being this small?" When I was a little kid, I thought our house and backyard were enormous. Then my parents sold that house and we moved to another city, and I haven't been inside it for over 30 years now. I bet if I went back tomorrow, it would look a lot smaller than I remember it being
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  We have to remember we were also using CRT monitors, which don't have "pixels" per se like the LCD monitors of today do. 800x600 on a CRT back then really did feel as big as 1920x1080 today.
  - danparsonson 3y ago
    > We have to remember we were also using CRT monitors, which don't have "pixels" per se like the LCD monitors of today do. How so? CRT pixels aren't active, is that what you mean? They are still distinct picture elements ("pix-els").

Dwedit 3y ago

Word 97 has the most important feature, a certain helpful paper clip.

aninteger 3y ago

You can get this today again using the FOX toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ http://www.fox-toolkit.org/). This is probably my favorite lightweight toolkit. Patches gladly welcomed for a11y and Wayland.

vkou 3y ago

Good thing we don't use Modern Word in 800x600 resolution. Why not do an apples to apples comparison, and show it in something like 1920x1200? You'll have more page space than you'll know what to do with.

cycomanic 3y ago

What is it with so many recent "software" posts sounding like those grumpy old man (who can be traced back to the ancient Greeks) saying "back when I was a lad, everything was so much better, and we had it real hard..." The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, and if the developers would take away tools from the toolbar they would be the first to complain that they have to access them through a menu (or that the fonts look pixelated). Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. Ironically someone pointed out that you can take away most of the toolbars in textmaker to make it look very much like the old software (except for smoother). So really what are you complaining about?!

kypro 3y ago
> Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. I do agree there, but it's less that more functionality is being pack into menus today, and more that software is confused whether it should be trying to optimise for mouse and keyboard or a clumsy touch screen. As a result context menus get replaced with tabs and icons get replaced with large clickable tiles. Another issue with modern UX is that it assumes far more of the user for the sake of minimalism. If you look at software from around the Windows 98 era the UX was designed to be as functional and clear as possible. The obvious examples of this might be how browsers back then had a button that actually said "Back" and Windows had a button that said "Start". Contrast that with today – my browser has a rotated triangle for a back button and Windows has button with four squares which you need to know is what we used to call "start". These two trends combined imo are what causes most of the problems – the UX itself is often clumsy because it's poorly optimise for your device, and it's confusing because often UI elements aren't clearly labeled (or they're simply removed in a push for minimalism). Windows is uniquely bad for both of these trends. Functionality which would have previously been easy to find with a textual context menu is now often on some randomly ordered tab panel behind a vague icon.
- vel0city 3y ago
  There are more clickable elements in that ribbon than there are in the classic menubars. They're also way more discoverable in that a lot of them are even named. There's more functionality in the ribbon here than the menubar.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Word is such a shitshow now. Not only is the giant "ribbon" a pile of childish, garish trash... but Microsoft has even ruined their once-excellent style management. Now MS forces a giant list of idiotic hard-coded styles on you (many of which appear to consist of different-colored underlines), which you have to wade through to find your own. I've switched to LibreOffice, which suffers from some style-management issues and of course bugs... but is still better than Word and doesn't badger me for a goddamned "Microsoft account."

sharts 3y ago

The bourgeois design and build software for the bourgeois. What kind of empathy can be expected of those that shoot in RAW and sip lattes everyday?

snvzz 3y ago

Hold my beer. Here[0]'s prowrite at 640x256. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBGoQX6H3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBGoQX6H3c

distantsounds 3y ago

The example is mimicking the Office Ribbon toolbar which is obviously taking up a lot of space. It's almost as if those little triangles in the corner of the toolbars allows you to change the size. Who would have thought! This is a horrible, cherry picked example that can be fixed with less than a minute of customization.

kgbcia 3y ago

They computer monitors for watching cinematic movies instead of apps.

tombert 3y ago

When I was a teenager, I was sort of obsessed with learning all the keystrokes in Microsoft Office (and later OpenOffice). I got to a point where I rarely ever touched the mouse. Once I got to that point, I started getting increasingly annoyed that so much space was taken by UI elements that I never used. It has eventually culminated with a rejection of GUIs entirely now; everything I do lives almost entirely in the command line with tmux and Neovim. I am reasonably happy with pandoc markdown for about ~85% of document tasks, XeLaTeX for the remainder. I use LSP for something approximating an IDE. It’s not for everyone, but I really like how little superfluous crap is in my window now.

genmud 3y ago
You sir, are a legend. This has strong stallman [1] vibes, and I say that not in a bad way, but as a norm-busting, trailblazing way. [1] - https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- tombert 3y ago
  Honestly it’s gotten a lot easier; modern terminal applications have decent mouse support, including NeoVim and tmux. I feel like software engineers are more or less used to leaving the WYSIWYG world; virtually all of use have dealt with HTML+CSS via the use of plain text editors. Once you’re used to that paradigm, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to just a command to compile to PDF. Just to be a little clear, I run all this inside vanilla macOS. I live in the terminal 90+% of the time but I am not a complete Luddite!

kwijibob 3y ago

The left one is better - reminds me why I prefer Google Docs.

kelnos 3y ago

Without weighing in on the quality of the specific UI in question, this just seems like a big "so what?". Modern versions of apps are designed with much higher screen resolutions in mind than apps designed ~30 years ago, because higher screen resolutions are now the norm. That's... fine? I'd much rather talk about how, in the name of "rapid development", we write using languages and frameworks that bloat memory usage and CPU needs.

111111IIIIIII 3y ago

hide the ruler and you're halfway there.

shanghaikid 3y ago

In old days, most CRT monitors are 4:3, now most monitors are 16:9, watching movie or playing game are more important than improving productivity?

IIsi50MHz 3y ago
I'm told that in (parts of?) Europe, turning those widescreen monitors into portrait mode and having three of them is pretty common.

emodendroket 3y ago

Rather than just carping about the new thing being bad it’d probably be more interesting to engage with the reasoning and talk about other possible solutions. My understanding is the ribbon was introduced because Microsoft got to the point where most feature requests in Word were for features that already existed. The discoverability with the old UI was poor. The ribbon helped. Also, aesthetics are subjective but I think it looks nice and, more importantly, less dexterity is required to click the intended icon.

nicetryguy 3y ago

Peak Office was 2003. Get off my lawn!

AequitasOmnibus 3y ago

I spend a large amount of time in my profession writing and editing[1]. The industry standard is Word, with some scant holdouts on WordPerfect. Word is a behemoth. The UI objectively makes reading and writing text difficult. Recently, I've switched to using VSCode for my first draft (written in markdown), and then converted via pandoc to .docx. From there, I can reformat to the industry standards. Why the extra step? Because when you're fighting with the UI for your attention, the ability to focus on the written word takes a backseat. I'll often end up tripping over some auto-correct feature (the autocorrects for copyright and euro are two of my greatest foes) or cryptic formatting issue, and end up getting farther and farther away from my original focus. Word processing is broken. VSCode in markdown with a few extra plugins for QOL (e.g. spell check) is a nice balance between something raw and plaintext like VIM and an unbearably clunky MS Word. I can't wait for Microsoft to add Clippy 2.0 powered by ChatGPT into Word so that it can finally complete the slow erosion the author in favor of pure computer-generated text. [1]: Just because I spend most of my time writing and editing for a living doesn't mean I'm great at it. I explicitly disclaim any typos in this comment!

janandonly 3y ago

It is an unfair comparison. The “comfy” window on the left shows Word in "reader-mode" or whatever it was called back then. The “cramped” window on the right shows a word processor on "Print-view", meaning it shows the A4/Letter including lots of white space around all corners... Apples and Pears...

jug 3y ago
Exactly, and the cramped version also includes the title bar of the operating system host.

mo_42 3y ago

I don't have any opinion on for either side as I didn't use any such UIs much. Is it possible that this is just nostalgia? Both screenshots look fairly similar to me. Also, I don't understand why UI developers don't try to replace all those buttons and the menubar with an omni search bar. Something where I can lookup functions that I can perform but also documentation. Still, we should be able to call function also by shortcuts and maybe we also want to show some important ones below so that people could also click them. I think people are very much used to typing into search bars (browser, Google, ...) so this might be a valid approach in general.

hkon 3y ago
How would you know what to search for?
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Perhaps in an accompanying piece of literature. You could call it a manual perhaps.
  - hkon 3y ago
    Manuals are really boring, give me a button I can click.
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      It's a shame that you've never read a good manual. I recommend The TeXbook by Donald Knuth. Being trained in certain things brings so much joy to my life. I would hate it if my life was just a caveman who can only press buttons and see what happens.
      - hkon 3y ago
        Perhaps, but I think both are nice to have. Being trained in certain things?
    - 3y ago

Joeri 3y ago

Everyone here seems to be missing an important detail and that is ppi. That 800x600 screen was probably running on a 14 inch monitor at an effective ppi of 70, with much larger text and clearly visible pixels. Take a 14 inch laptop and maximize the word processor and you’ll get a like for like comparison.

brenns10 3y ago
Yes exactly. I definitely sympathize with the other complaints: the newer Word UI is pretty garbage (I truly do hate the ribbon bar). There is a bit extra padding in the newer UI. But really, it all comes down to the PPI which seems obvious. What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  Word 97 could display the page in WYSIWYG style just as the newer version can. In fact, as I recall, that was its default setting. For some reason this person chose to take the comparison screenshot in the non-WYSIWYG mode.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    It's not even non-WYSIWYG mode, this isn't like those text mode programs that preceded it where you have Latex-style markers everywhere and only ever see the formatted text in print (preview). This just hides the page barriers to give you more space to type. Most of the Word documents I've typed never even made it to paper so the only reason I didn't disable pages all together is that some of my school projects had page count requirements.
- yazantapuz 3y ago
  > What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful. Word 9x was WYSIWYG also.

globular-toast 3y ago

I have a thing about wasted pixels. On my computers I i3 or sway and have minimised the amount of space wasted and maximised the amount of information shown. All GUIs are shrunk to minimum/"compact" settings. Text size is as small as it can be. On my eReader I have plenty of whitespace, though. That's the difference between work and pleasure.

crest 3y ago

The old "pixel art" UI and fonts could fit a lot more on low resolution screens, but there is no reason we should use them on modern >200PPI displays. The real "crime" of modern UI/UX are undiscoverable low contrast interfaces. To this day the classic MacOS 9 UI elements work better than anything Apple or anyone else came up with since. Have a look at this online emulator: https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0 https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0

crest 3y ago
The emulator doesn't pass through right clicks and the mouse wheel.
- Blahagun 3y ago
  Macs had only one mouse button for a very long time and the mouse wheel was new at the time. If you want right click press ctrl while clicking with the mouse.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

As a person who used first word on windows 3.11 - I am scared to use the new Word/Excel when I need to find something more than Bold and Italic. Everything else is successfully hidden from me and I have no idea where to search for it. Google Docs - even worse for me - and lacking really important functionality like image docking as a character

Aachen 3y ago
And you didn't ever need to look for what you needed when first using Word on 3.11? There's a lot of implicit and forgotten learning going on because one has no expectation to already know where something is when it's one's first time doing something new. Lots of people use Word for the first time today. I'd be more inclined to agree and say that things are successfully "hidden" from you if a new person today takes more time than a new person then. Or a new person today given then's interface, if we don't already have then-data. I have a diploma for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 and used Microsoft Office until ~2013, but nowadays find it 10x easier to, as you say, do more than marking text bold in LibreOffice Writer than in Microsoft Word 2007 because that's what I've been using this decade. It's a matter of getting used to and anyone saying they can't find anything in LibreOffice (one of the most common objections I hear) is kidding themselves and ignoring the prior learning from the huge discounts Microsoft gives schools and nonenforcement of copyright/licensing such that everyone is used to Word and Windows from the get-go. They'd rather pay, what is it today, 90 euros a year?, than find the bulleted list button again for their holiday checklist and occasional formal letter (that's what I see most people use it for at home) and get angry when I refuse to pirate the software for them.

shultays 3y ago

How does Word 9x look like in 2560x1440 etc? I am going to guess tiny buttons and possibly tiny texts. Yes, things look better for the resolutions they are designed for. Perhaps TextMaker could reduce the paddings or do some other stuff for lower resolutions but then what is the point if that is not an expected use case

IIsi50MHz 3y ago
My copies of TextMaker that support "ribbon" have a config option for classic or ribbon interface, _and_ have an option for UI scaling, on each platform (Win ,Android, Mac, Linux). I haven't used the most recent version.

LoveMortuus 3y ago

This reminded me of: "Nature never hurries yet everything gets done" quote. It is just here in the HN circles that feel that UI has degraded over the years, or do people outside of this highly tech-savvy group have similar feelings?

pushedx 3y ago

The screenshot on the right feels disingenuous to me. There is surely a keyboard shortcut to expand and collapse the currently chosen tabbed portion of the toolbars at the top of the screen, which would leave you a comfortable and less distracting writing experience.

jug 3y ago
Yes, and no one mentions that he's including the _host window_ of the virtual machine in the more offending version! I mean come on, it's absolutely disingenuous. The ribbon bar example in fact consumes less vertical space. A _massive_ portion of the white space is from the page display mode where Word 9x uses non-WYSIWYG and the modern one uses the real page layout with page margins. Well of course that's going to introduce a lot of white space because there is on the paper!

rhaway84773 3y ago

Now do those images in a resolution that’s actually in use today. The Windows 9X and Word 9X versions will quickly become unusable while the current Windows/Word, for all their design flaws, will actually be quite comfortable.

DrNosferatu 3y ago

This forgets HiDPI scaling, and, that no one would use a 800x600 desktop today. But of course, there's also SerenityOS ;)

amatheus 3y ago

I like Pages, Numbers and Keynote. No ribbons and proper use of monitor width. It helps that macOS still keeps the menubar too.

pieter_mj 3y ago

Point taken, but the comparison is not fairly made. Word 97 is not shown in page layout mode, where you would have a lot of additional whitespace to show the margins.

jszymborski 3y ago

Come to Libreoffice Writer, the gui is not much different :)

wkat4242 3y ago

I never really use the office apps myself. I mean for work sometimes but writing documents, presentations, spreadsheets, it's just not a thing I do or need much in my private life. I'd never even consider paying for the desktop apps. And other apps I do use are much more efficient with screen space. Browsers, code editors, 3D design programs, text terminals..