alt Hacker NewsI think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life.
I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies.
LOL.
Replies
Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well.
Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond.
All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and mouse input should be optional.
Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.
A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. Since the modern trend is to have rounded corners on everything, it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists anymore. It seems to exist outside of the physical boundary of the window, and the actual activation point is barely a few pixels wide. Apparently this is an issue on macOS as well[1].
Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.).
So, my point is that eschewing graphics as much as possible, and relying on keyboard input to perform operations, gets rid of the graphical ambiguities, minimizes the amount of trend following making the UI feel timeless, and makes the user feel more in command of their experience, making them more efficient and quicker.
This UI doesn't have to be some inaccessible CLI or TUI, although that's certainly an option for power users, but it should generally only serve to enable the user to do their work as easily as possible, and get out of the way the rest of the time. Unfortunately, most modern OSs have teams of designers and developers that need to justify their salary, and a UI that is invisible and rarely changes won't get anyone promoted. But it's certainly possible for power users to build out this UI themselves using some common and popular software. It takes a bit of work, but the benefits far outweigh the time and effort investment.
> I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life.
Agreed. I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI hit at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by. The lack of a "classic" mode in Win10 was one thing that motivated me to switch fully to Linux. To make the switch, I spent a good amount of time trawling the themes to find one that mimicks the look of Win95/95/2000. (The one I use is a KDE theme called "Reactionary".)