6 ms·

> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ... I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1]

> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ... I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls. I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available. I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now. Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? [1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.

robviren 9mo ago
I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.
- gary_0 9mo ago
  Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say). Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
  - bigfishrunning 9mo ago
    You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market. I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
    - matkoniecz 9mo ago
      > the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed
      - IAmBroom 9mo ago
        It's been debunked by both research (no such mention at the time) and practice on extant machines.
      - cons0le 9mo ago
        As someone that makes my own keyboard firmware, 100% agree. For most people, typing speed isn't a bottleneck. There is a whole community of people that type faster than 250wpm on custom, chording-enabled keyboards. The tradeoff is that it takes years to relearn how to type. Its the same as being a stenographer at that point. Its not worth it for most people. Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
        zdragnar 9mo ago
        I'd imagine at this point that most social media posts are done by swiping or tapping a phone's virtual keyboard (if one is used at all).
      - Yizahi 9mo ago
        One don't need to be a scientist to take a look at own hands and fingers, to see that they are not crooked to the left. Ortholinear keyboard would be objectively better, even with the same keymap like QWERTY, but we don't produce those for masses for a variety of reasons. Same with many other ideas.
        matkoniecz 9mo ago
        > to see that they are not crooked to the left how it makes ortholinear keyboards better?
  - dijit 9mo ago
    > Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. You might, but you'll never really know. I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
    - gary_0 9mo ago
      I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it. Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
      - dijit 9mo ago
        I sympathise with the frustration, but I think the issue isn't innovation itself: it's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between solving actual problems and just making things different. Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..." The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise. However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting. The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.
  - grvbck 9mo ago
    > I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. 99.5 % agree, because I would love to try SAAB:s drive-by-wire concept from 1992: https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/ https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/
    - KellyCriterion 9mo ago
      The thing why this was only a research project and never came into mass production was regulatory stuff, IIRC? (most EU countries require, still until today, a "physical connection between steering wheel and wheels" in their trafic regulation)
      - grvbck 9mo ago
        This was a few years before Sweden joined the EU, but yes, I think the lack of a physical connection was one of the main problems. From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech. I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
        mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
        Having played enough video games that use joysticks for steering I don't want to drive a real car with a joystick. Crashing in Mario kart or Grand theft Auto because I sneezed is fine but not in real life.
        publicdebates 9mo ago
        Exactly. The control needs to have both an intentional and major motor movement from the driver. Modern steering wheels have the same benefit as the original iPod wheel. Easy for small movements, even accidental ones; possible for big movements. Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.
  - sublinear 9mo ago
    I think there's a ton of innovation left to be done regarding steering and light switches. You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts. We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else? Even lane assist still sucks on traditionally designed cars. Is having to fight a motorized wheel to override steering really all that safe? Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well-established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.
- noduerme 9mo ago
  Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with. There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were: In writing, show, don't tell. In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text. Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
- basch 9mo ago
  I wish for browser ui innovation. The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups. There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere. Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
  - the_other 9mo ago
    If you expect the browser to help you manage your various workflows beyond generic containers (tabs, tab groups), then you become tied into the browser's way of doing things. Are you sure you want that? I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon. In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
    - basch 9mo ago
      shopping assistant was a specific example, but in the process of research, brainstorming, etc theres a bunch of different ways id like to see visualization and record of how i got somewhere, what was discarded, summary of what was retained, whats coming next, options for branching. the web is a document structure, but browsing it doesnt need to be linear.
  - gettingoverit 9mo ago
- brnaftr361 9mo ago
  It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon. The UX is also awful. But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in? And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled. And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.
nottorp 9mo ago
> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? It's still a thing but it went off the rails, see Apple and their latest no-contrast UI.
- estearum 9mo ago
  Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again. Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it. But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
  - pch00 9mo ago
    > Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again. Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
    - estearum 9mo ago
      Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges. That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
      - oarsinsync 9mo ago
        > > Apple ... is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it. > Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges. Vista / Aero 2.0 already did Liquid Glass. At least they had the decency to ship a "turn this shit off" toggle that actually worked.
raincole 9mo ago
If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.
- functionmouse 9mo ago
  ???
  - IAmBroom 9mo ago
    BS claims about a universe that doesn't exist, to sound nihilistically cool.
    - raincole 9mo ago
      Except in the early days of smartphone, people pushed back against pull-to-refresh[0][1][2]. Android devs were confused why it was a thing. It's a design with zero discoverability - how do you know what would happen when you pull down? Perhaps the app would show a search bar. Or pinned posts if it's a forum board. Or ask you to review the app? How do you know pulling down is a gesture at all? The only reason pull-to-refresh got accepted is that it came so early that the UX of smartphone app wasn't well established. Before pull-to-search or pull-to-whatever had a chance. > nihilistically It's quite nihilistic to think history doesn't exist and things were born as they are currently. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastcompany.com/3023421/why-the-pull-to-refresh-gesture-must-die https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastc... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cyrilmottier.com/?p=598 https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cy... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_refresh_antipattern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_r...
      - publicdebates 9mo ago
        If it has zero discoverability, nobody would be using it today. Discoverability is more than simply visual cues. Seeing other people do it counts.
benrutter 9mo ago
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate. It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.
- cons0le 9mo ago
  Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore. There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months. I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ). I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
n4r9 9mo ago
Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.
- aembleton 9mo ago
  Firefox also had it when it was called Firebird, and I'm sure Mozilla had tabs.
  - rauli_ 9mo ago
    Mozilla later added them after the concept became popular thanks to Firefox. Mozilla and Firefox browsers coexisted for quite a while and Firefox was the lite version of Mozilla that didn't include E-mail client and other such features that Mozilla did.
  - n4r9 9mo ago
    According to their own blog [0], Opera implemented tabs in 2000. The earliest version of what became Firefox was released as "Phoenix" in 2002 [1]. Phoenix was renamed to Firebird in 2003 and again to Firefox in 2004 [2], in both cases due to name clashes. [0] https://blogs.opera.com/news/2026/01/opera-one-r3-new-browser-update/ https://blogs.opera.com/news/2026/01/opera-one-r3-new-browse... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
- al_borland 9mo ago
  I was an Opera user. They were the innovators in the browser space back in the day. Eventually it just felt too bloated, and sadly now they are essentially another Chromium fork.
- madeofpalk 9mo ago
  If one thing will always be true on the internet, it will be forum posters saying "Opera had it first".
MadameMinty 9mo ago
[1] Sounds difficult without any other detail. But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...
- publicdebates 9mo ago
  That actually might be it! It's hard to tell, I was only 10. Still skimming it. Why would it be funny though? Am I missing something?
  - observationist 9mo ago
    https://www.ebay.com/itm/257059686708 https://www.ebay.com/itm/257059686708 Since you mentioned Mosaic, this came to mind. There are also a handful of OReilly books. I think it'd be funny because you gave us basically nothing to work with, so for her to pluck the exact right one from the thousands of possibilities would be impressive, lol.
  - MadameMinty 9mo ago
    Funny because it would mean the guess is a hole in one when essentially blindfolded. Glad it looks like it!
- smnscu 9mo ago
  This is a strong contender. Other candidates (hard to find links to the first editions): - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-web-pages-with-html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies_With_Contains_HTML_Transit_Htmled_Pro_2_0_BBEdit_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...
101008 9mo ago
I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that. New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.
whynotmaybe 9mo ago
> Are those days permanently gone? Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity. As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save. Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons. It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
- IAmBroom 9mo ago
  Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better. Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand. Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea. I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
  - whynotmaybe 9mo ago
    > scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool". /* rant / Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section. And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section. And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section. 1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar. And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar. I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti. / end of rant */
nake89 9mo ago
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.
ljm 9mo ago
I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise… Like the AOL browser, come to think of it. Tabs in Firefox were such an unfamiliar thing.
- immibis 9mo ago
  MDI was rightfully seen as a complete failure, but there was also SDI, where each open thing is a separate window. I don't know how we got from MDI in office apps being completely terrible, to MDI in browsers being the accepted norm.
  - adzm 9mo ago
    Tabbed MDI is effectively just a better interface to SDI (for most situations) Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
  - account42 9mo ago
    Well websites and documents are not the same thing so it makes sense that a paradigm that works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. I do find web-based document editors very annoying to use when they are in the same window as other tabs - at least web browser MDIs allow you do effortlessly separate tabs into a new window these days.
  - debugnik 9mo ago
    Actual MDI was so much worse than browser tabs, unrelated tabs can be merged into the same window or split apart into their own, instead of floating on top of an awkward background. The question is why aren't they a feature of the window manager instead of the application. We should be able to have windows with tabs from different applications.
  - efreak 9mo ago
    MDI in browsers isn't enforced though, you can still use each tab in it's own window, and (depending on your browser) you can open other sites in a sidebar (? Used to be possible) or split-tab (I think I've seen this in some desktop browser? I know chrome does it on mobile). Office documents though? SDI is now enforced on office. You can't hide that taskbar entry for every single document you have open, even though there's only 2 important ones each open in their own window and the rest could all share a window for all you care. MDI wasn't a failure, the requirement was a failure. SDI requirement for office is also a failure. More so than the escapable (multiple window support) MDI of browsers on desktop.
shevy-java 9mo ago
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I don't think these are permanently gone, but the corporations failed us, and also the "not for profit" fakers such as Mozilla. We need a new web - one developed by the people, for the people. Whenever corporations jump in, they try to skew things to their favour, which almost always means in disfavour of the people.
- mghackerlady 9mo ago
  We tried with gemini but nobody jumped on
qwertox 9mo ago
> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group. Who designed that? Has that person been fired? Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.
- nailer 9mo ago
  You need to try Telegram. Not because it’s better but because it’s more insane. The QR code you use to add people when you meet them is in Settings
  - qwertox 9mo ago
    We don't want an insane experience, it's an HOA group. That's all I use WhatsApp for. Also, I despise telegram (just as much as X), because in Germany both are rotten to the core in terms of user base, worse than WhatsApp. Signal or Threema would be great, and I voted for Signal, but the majority uses WhatsApp. I used to use Telegram, but ever since Covid and the whackos that found their "truth" over there I say no thank you.
    - encom 9mo ago
      You don't use an IM service, because a subset of its users are "wackos"? I've used Telegram for many years now, and aside from the occasional "hot singles in your area" type spam, I've never been bothered by anyone.
      - qwertox 9mo ago
        Well, the subset feels like the majority. Which does not mean that they are socially a majority, just on those platforms. Telegram and X has been taken over by them, IN GERMANY. I don't know how it is in other countries, maybe it's more civilized there. The actual reason why I use an IM is the HOA, as I said. Else I do not have and do not need an IM, except for my ejabberd server + Conversations clients so that devices can send me status updates, like "backup completed successfully".
gwbas1c 9mo ago
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? No. You just need to look outside of desktop computing, and computing in general. For example, I'm getting into CAD and 3d printing. Learning it reminds me of when my father learned to program in the late '80s, or when my grandfather telling me about how he got his Model A up to 50 mph. Remember: Desktop computers and the web are ultimately tools for a purpose, and that purpose isn't always "nerd toy." We (the nerds) need to find and invent our toys every generation or so.
mghackerlady 9mo ago
GNOME seems to try, though people hate them for it
- workethics 9mo ago
  People don't hate them for trying new things, they hate them for making the new things the only option.
fenwick67 9mo ago
Adding an AI button is not an innovative feature
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  Not the button alone, but integrating AI is.
afavour 9mo ago
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? To an extent, yes. The ecosystem has matured. The things that work have been discovered, the things that don't have been discarded. I think it'll take another big leap in hardware form factor (Apple Vision being an example of an attempt at it) for us to see meaningful UI changes.
- wvbdmp 9mo ago
  Good, then what’s stopping browsers from shipping these standard controls? It’s ridiculous that everyone needs to invent or depend on large amounts of JS to get anything decent that goes beyond a simple textarea. Browsers could start by simply improving the controls they do ship with, such has date pickers and selects. They’re all shit. Slightly more complex perhaps would be a combobox. LMAO, we don’t even have comboboxes. And if you really want to get fancy, rich-text textareas that return standardized, semantic HTML. Also, decent tables with sorting/filtering wouldn’t go amiss. Standardize some HTMX features into HTML while you’re at it, you’ve got a full-blown revolution.
tln 9mo ago
New things do come around. Chrome's new split view tabs is pretty slick new "UI control". Chrome's Whats New seems like half AI stuff and half UI features for people who have tons of tabs.
GuB-42 9mo ago
> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? There is more than enough of it. Now it is, of course, AI agents. Before that, Material Design was quite innovative. Interestingly, with the raise of search engines and later LLMs, we are getting back to the command line! It is not the scary black window where you type magic incantations, it is a less scary text field where you type in natural language, but fundamentally, it works like a command line. It is a good thing? For me, it is a mixed bag, I miss traditional desktop UIs (pre-Windows 8), but I like search-based UIs on the Desktop, an I am not a fan of AI agents: too slow an unpredictable, and that's before privacy considerations. When it is not killing performance, I find Material Design to be pretty good on mobile, but terrible on the desktop. That there is innovation doesn't mean it is all good.
treetalker 9mo ago
> Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser. Would it happen to be HTML Manual of Style: Clear, Concise Reference for Hypertext Markup Language by Larry Aronson? [1] From the description: > This book introduces HTML, the program language used to create World-Wide Web "pages", so that users of Mosaic and other Web browsers can access data. Forty to 50 new "pages" are being added to the WWW every day and this will be the first book out on the subject. Forty to fifty new "pages" per day! </Dr. Evil air quotes> [1]: https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593 https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
groby_b 9mo ago
Can we stop innovating on UI for existing problems? The standard affordances for most well-known problems are long settled. Unless you're solving an entirely new class of problem, maybe you don't need to reinvent a large number of wheels, again. We're all tired of the triangular wheels coming out. Which makes it funny that the request for UI innovation is prefixed with a quote that amounts to "but what if browsers were permanently frozen ca. 2012?". Mind, I can sympathize with some of the thoughts behind the request, even if I disagree - but you can't ask for a stop in new features & problem classes to be accompanied by continued UI innovation. That is, as my art teacher used to say, "intellectual wankery in the disguise of creativity".
MaoSYJ 9mo ago
Vivaldi has pretty good default UX features. They are following Opera advances and keep pushing for UX innovation.
madeofpalk 9mo ago
Eventually we reach some kind of local maximum for UI/UX. So much of these things are a function of the relative immaturity of the platforms. They're all also pretty low hanging fruit. In some ways, this is happening at the moment with AI and LLMs. The tools available, how we prompt them, etc are all "UI/UX innovation" if you believe these things have a use. If we have a huge platform shift in the future (LLMs, AR/VR, ???), we may start from zero and go through "inventing tabs" again until that platform becomes maximally optimised.
jimbokun 9mo ago
New UI paradigms will revolve around how to best interact with AI. Paradigms for existing forms of computer interaction (keyboard, mouse, touch) are pretty much solved.
moritonal 9mo ago
VR gaming had this experience. AR is about to.
dclowd9901 9mo ago
I think UI innovation requires truly novel interaction mediums. Likely, the only innovations left are predicting user behavior using AI, so essentially putting what you're looking for right in front of you before you even knew you wanted it. I haven't seen anyone do this well yet.

robviren 9mo ago

I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.

gary_0 9mo ago
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say). Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
- bigfishrunning 9mo ago
  You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market. I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
  - matkoniecz 9mo ago
    > the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed
    - IAmBroom 9mo ago
      It's been debunked by both research (no such mention at the time) and practice on extant machines.
    - cons0le 9mo ago
      As someone that makes my own keyboard firmware, 100% agree. For most people, typing speed isn't a bottleneck. There is a whole community of people that type faster than 250wpm on custom, chording-enabled keyboards. The tradeoff is that it takes years to relearn how to type. Its the same as being a stenographer at that point. Its not worth it for most people. Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
      - zdragnar 9mo ago
        I'd imagine at this point that most social media posts are done by swiping or tapping a phone's virtual keyboard (if one is used at all).
    - Yizahi 9mo ago
      One don't need to be a scientist to take a look at own hands and fingers, to see that they are not crooked to the left. Ortholinear keyboard would be objectively better, even with the same keymap like QWERTY, but we don't produce those for masses for a variety of reasons. Same with many other ideas.
      - matkoniecz 9mo ago
        > to see that they are not crooked to the left how it makes ortholinear keyboards better?
- dijit 9mo ago
  > Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. You might, but you'll never really know. I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
  - gary_0 9mo ago
    I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it. Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
    - dijit 9mo ago
      I sympathise with the frustration, but I think the issue isn't innovation itself: it's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between solving actual problems and just making things different. Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..." The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise. However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting. The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.
- grvbck 9mo ago
  > I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. 99.5 % agree, because I would love to try SAAB:s drive-by-wire concept from 1992: https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/ https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/
  - KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    The thing why this was only a research project and never came into mass production was regulatory stuff, IIRC? (most EU countries require, still until today, a "physical connection between steering wheel and wheels" in their trafic regulation)
    - grvbck 9mo ago
      This was a few years before Sweden joined the EU, but yes, I think the lack of a physical connection was one of the main problems. From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech. I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
      - mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
        Having played enough video games that use joysticks for steering I don't want to drive a real car with a joystick. Crashing in Mario kart or Grand theft Auto because I sneezed is fine but not in real life.
        publicdebates 9mo ago
        Exactly. The control needs to have both an intentional and major motor movement from the driver. Modern steering wheels have the same benefit as the original iPod wheel. Easy for small movements, even accidental ones; possible for big movements. Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.
- sublinear 9mo ago
  I think there's a ton of innovation left to be done regarding steering and light switches. You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts. We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else? Even lane assist still sucks on traditionally designed cars. Is having to fight a motorized wheel to override steering really all that safe? Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well-established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.
noduerme 9mo ago
Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with. There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were: In writing, show, don't tell. In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text. Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
basch 9mo ago
I wish for browser ui innovation. The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups. There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere. Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
- the_other 9mo ago
  If you expect the browser to help you manage your various workflows beyond generic containers (tabs, tab groups), then you become tied into the browser's way of doing things. Are you sure you want that? I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon. In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
  - basch 9mo ago
    shopping assistant was a specific example, but in the process of research, brainstorming, etc theres a bunch of different ways id like to see visualization and record of how i got somewhere, what was discarded, summary of what was retained, whats coming next, options for branching. the web is a document structure, but browsing it doesnt need to be linear.
- gettingoverit 9mo ago
brnaftr361 9mo ago
It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon. The UX is also awful. But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in? And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled. And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.

nottorp 9mo ago

> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? It's still a thing but it went off the rails, see Apple and their latest no-contrast UI.

estearum 9mo ago
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again. Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it. But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
- pch00 9mo ago
  > Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again. Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
  - estearum 9mo ago
    Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges. That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
    - oarsinsync 9mo ago
      > > Apple ... is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it. > Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges. Vista / Aero 2.0 already did Liquid Glass. At least they had the decency to ship a "turn this shit off" toggle that actually worked.

raincole 9mo ago

If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.

functionmouse 9mo ago
???
- IAmBroom 9mo ago
  BS claims about a universe that doesn't exist, to sound nihilistically cool.
  - raincole 9mo ago
    Except in the early days of smartphone, people pushed back against pull-to-refresh[0][1][2]. Android devs were confused why it was a thing. It's a design with zero discoverability - how do you know what would happen when you pull down? Perhaps the app would show a search bar. Or pinned posts if it's a forum board. Or ask you to review the app? How do you know pulling down is a gesture at all? The only reason pull-to-refresh got accepted is that it came so early that the UX of smartphone app wasn't well established. Before pull-to-search or pull-to-whatever had a chance. > nihilistically It's quite nihilistic to think history doesn't exist and things were born as they are currently. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastcompany.com/3023421/why-the-pull-to-refresh-gesture-must-die https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastc... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cyrilmottier.com/?p=598 https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cy... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_refresh_antipattern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_r...
    - publicdebates 9mo ago
      If it has zero discoverability, nobody would be using it today. Discoverability is more than simply visual cues. Seeing other people do it counts.

benrutter 9mo ago

> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate. It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.

cons0le 9mo ago
Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore. There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months. I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ). I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.

n4r9 9mo ago

Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.

aembleton 9mo ago
Firefox also had it when it was called Firebird, and I'm sure Mozilla had tabs.
- rauli_ 9mo ago
  Mozilla later added them after the concept became popular thanks to Firefox. Mozilla and Firefox browsers coexisted for quite a while and Firefox was the lite version of Mozilla that didn't include E-mail client and other such features that Mozilla did.
- n4r9 9mo ago
  According to their own blog [0], Opera implemented tabs in 2000. The earliest version of what became Firefox was released as "Phoenix" in 2002 [1]. Phoenix was renamed to Firebird in 2003 and again to Firefox in 2004 [2], in both cases due to name clashes. [0] https://blogs.opera.com/news/2026/01/opera-one-r3-new-browser-update/ https://blogs.opera.com/news/2026/01/opera-one-r3-new-browse... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
al_borland 9mo ago
I was an Opera user. They were the innovators in the browser space back in the day. Eventually it just felt too bloated, and sadly now they are essentially another Chromium fork.
madeofpalk 9mo ago
If one thing will always be true on the internet, it will be forum posters saying "Opera had it first".

MadameMinty 9mo ago

[1] Sounds difficult without any other detail. But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...

publicdebates 9mo ago
That actually might be it! It's hard to tell, I was only 10. Still skimming it. Why would it be funny though? Am I missing something?
- observationist 9mo ago
  https://www.ebay.com/itm/257059686708 https://www.ebay.com/itm/257059686708 Since you mentioned Mosaic, this came to mind. There are also a handful of OReilly books. I think it'd be funny because you gave us basically nothing to work with, so for her to pluck the exact right one from the thousands of possibilities would be impressive, lol.
- MadameMinty 9mo ago
  Funny because it would mean the guess is a hole in one when essentially blindfolded. Glad it looks like it!
smnscu 9mo ago
This is a strong contender. Other candidates (hard to find links to the first editions): - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-web-pages-with-html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies_With_Contains_HTML_Transit_Htmled_Pro_2_0_BBEdit_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...

101008 9mo ago

I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that. New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.

whynotmaybe 9mo ago

> Are those days permanently gone? Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity. As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save. Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons. It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.

IAmBroom 9mo ago
Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better. Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand. Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea. I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
- whynotmaybe 9mo ago
  > scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool". /* rant / Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section. And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section. And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section. 1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar. And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar. I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti. / end of rant */

nake89 9mo ago

Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.

ljm 9mo ago

I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise… Like the AOL browser, come to think of it. Tabs in Firefox were such an unfamiliar thing.

immibis 9mo ago
MDI was rightfully seen as a complete failure, but there was also SDI, where each open thing is a separate window. I don't know how we got from MDI in office apps being completely terrible, to MDI in browsers being the accepted norm.
- adzm 9mo ago
  Tabbed MDI is effectively just a better interface to SDI (for most situations) Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
- account42 9mo ago
  Well websites and documents are not the same thing so it makes sense that a paradigm that works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. I do find web-based document editors very annoying to use when they are in the same window as other tabs - at least web browser MDIs allow you do effortlessly separate tabs into a new window these days.
- debugnik 9mo ago
  Actual MDI was so much worse than browser tabs, unrelated tabs can be merged into the same window or split apart into their own, instead of floating on top of an awkward background. The question is why aren't they a feature of the window manager instead of the application. We should be able to have windows with tabs from different applications.
- efreak 9mo ago
  MDI in browsers isn't enforced though, you can still use each tab in it's own window, and (depending on your browser) you can open other sites in a sidebar (? Used to be possible) or split-tab (I think I've seen this in some desktop browser? I know chrome does it on mobile). Office documents though? SDI is now enforced on office. You can't hide that taskbar entry for every single document you have open, even though there's only 2 important ones each open in their own window and the rest could all share a window for all you care. MDI wasn't a failure, the requirement was a failure. SDI requirement for office is also a failure. More so than the escapable (multiple window support) MDI of browsers on desktop.

shevy-java 9mo ago

> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? I don't think these are permanently gone, but the corporations failed us, and also the "not for profit" fakers such as Mozilla. We need a new web - one developed by the people, for the people. Whenever corporations jump in, they try to skew things to their favour, which almost always means in disfavour of the people.

mghackerlady 9mo ago
We tried with gemini but nobody jumped on

qwertox 9mo ago

> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group. Who designed that? Has that person been fired? Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.

nailer 9mo ago
You need to try Telegram. Not because it’s better but because it’s more insane. The QR code you use to add people when you meet them is in Settings
- qwertox 9mo ago
  We don't want an insane experience, it's an HOA group. That's all I use WhatsApp for. Also, I despise telegram (just as much as X), because in Germany both are rotten to the core in terms of user base, worse than WhatsApp. Signal or Threema would be great, and I voted for Signal, but the majority uses WhatsApp. I used to use Telegram, but ever since Covid and the whackos that found their "truth" over there I say no thank you.
  - encom 9mo ago
    You don't use an IM service, because a subset of its users are "wackos"? I've used Telegram for many years now, and aside from the occasional "hot singles in your area" type spam, I've never been bothered by anyone.
    - qwertox 9mo ago
      Well, the subset feels like the majority. Which does not mean that they are socially a majority, just on those platforms. Telegram and X has been taken over by them, IN GERMANY. I don't know how it is in other countries, maybe it's more civilized there. The actual reason why I use an IM is the HOA, as I said. Else I do not have and do not need an IM, except for my ejabberd server + Conversations clients so that devices can send me status updates, like "backup completed successfully".

gwbas1c 9mo ago

> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? No. You just need to look outside of desktop computing, and computing in general. For example, I'm getting into CAD and 3d printing. Learning it reminds me of when my father learned to program in the late '80s, or when my grandfather telling me about how he got his Model A up to 50 mph. Remember: Desktop computers and the web are ultimately tools for a purpose, and that purpose isn't always "nerd toy." We (the nerds) need to find and invent our toys every generation or so.

mghackerlady 9mo ago

GNOME seems to try, though people hate them for it

workethics 9mo ago
People don't hate them for trying new things, they hate them for making the new things the only option.

fenwick67 9mo ago

Adding an AI button is not an innovative feature

charcircuit 9mo ago
Not the button alone, but integrating AI is.

afavour 9mo ago

> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? To an extent, yes. The ecosystem has matured. The things that work have been discovered, the things that don't have been discarded. I think it'll take another big leap in hardware form factor (Apple Vision being an example of an attempt at it) for us to see meaningful UI changes.

wvbdmp 9mo ago
Good, then what’s stopping browsers from shipping these standard controls? It’s ridiculous that everyone needs to invent or depend on large amounts of JS to get anything decent that goes beyond a simple textarea. Browsers could start by simply improving the controls they do ship with, such has date pickers and selects. They’re all shit. Slightly more complex perhaps would be a combobox. LMAO, we don’t even have comboboxes. And if you really want to get fancy, rich-text textareas that return standardized, semantic HTML. Also, decent tables with sorting/filtering wouldn’t go amiss. Standardize some HTMX features into HTML while you’re at it, you’ve got a full-blown revolution.

tln 9mo ago

New things do come around. Chrome's new split view tabs is pretty slick new "UI control". Chrome's Whats New seems like half AI stuff and half UI features for people who have tons of tabs.

GuB-42 9mo ago

> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing? There is more than enough of it. Now it is, of course, AI agents. Before that, Material Design was quite innovative. Interestingly, with the raise of search engines and later LLMs, we are getting back to the command line! It is not the scary black window where you type magic incantations, it is a less scary text field where you type in natural language, but fundamentally, it works like a command line. It is a good thing? For me, it is a mixed bag, I miss traditional desktop UIs (pre-Windows 8), but I like search-based UIs on the Desktop, an I am not a fan of AI agents: too slow an unpredictable, and that's before privacy considerations. When it is not killing performance, I find Material Design to be pretty good on mobile, but terrible on the desktop. That there is innovation doesn't mean it is all good.

treetalker 9mo ago

> Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser. Would it happen to be HTML Manual of Style: Clear, Concise Reference for Hypertext Markup Language by Larry Aronson? [1] From the description: > This book introduces HTML, the program language used to create World-Wide Web "pages", so that users of Mosaic and other Web browsers can access data. Forty to 50 new "pages" are being added to the WWW every day and this will be the first book out on the subject. Forty to fifty new "pages" per day! </Dr. Evil air quotes> [1]: https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593 https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

groby_b 9mo ago

Can we stop innovating on UI for existing problems? The standard affordances for most well-known problems are long settled. Unless you're solving an entirely new class of problem, maybe you don't need to reinvent a large number of wheels, again. We're all tired of the triangular wheels coming out. Which makes it funny that the request for UI innovation is prefixed with a quote that amounts to "but what if browsers were permanently frozen ca. 2012?". Mind, I can sympathize with some of the thoughts behind the request, even if I disagree - but you can't ask for a stop in new features & problem classes to be accompanied by continued UI innovation. That is, as my art teacher used to say, "intellectual wankery in the disguise of creativity".

MaoSYJ 9mo ago

Vivaldi has pretty good default UX features. They are following Opera advances and keep pushing for UX innovation.

madeofpalk 9mo ago

Eventually we reach some kind of local maximum for UI/UX. So much of these things are a function of the relative immaturity of the platforms. They're all also pretty low hanging fruit. In some ways, this is happening at the moment with AI and LLMs. The tools available, how we prompt them, etc are all "UI/UX innovation" if you believe these things have a use. If we have a huge platform shift in the future (LLMs, AR/VR, ???), we may start from zero and go through "inventing tabs" again until that platform becomes maximally optimised.

jimbokun 9mo ago

New UI paradigms will revolve around how to best interact with AI. Paradigms for existing forms of computer interaction (keyboard, mouse, touch) are pretty much solved.

moritonal 9mo ago

VR gaming had this experience. AR is about to.

dclowd9901 9mo ago

I think UI innovation requires truly novel interaction mediums. Likely, the only innovations left are predicting user behavior using AI, so essentially putting what you're looking for right in front of you before you even knew you wanted it. I haven't seen anyone do this well yet.