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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.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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>
> 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.
[1] Sounds difficult without any other detail.
But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
GNOME seems to try, though people hate them for it
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.
> 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.
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.
VR gaming had this experience. AR is about to.
Vivaldi has pretty good default UX features. They are following Opera advances and keep pushing for UX innovation.
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.
> 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.
Adding an AI button is not an innovative feature
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".
If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.
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.