Comment by ReleaseCandidat
2 years ago
> Every application had application menus that worked the same way, in the same font, and they all responded to the same keyboard shortcuts.
My experience had been that most (almost all) of them _only_ worked with a single font in a single font size and a specific window size. If you did change any of these, it got unusable.
About consistency: except for those that didn't, not even MS themselves were consistent. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html
The 90s had been also the time of programs like Kai's Power Tools https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ and Winamp.
I'm sorry, but "interface consistency" is not something that comes to my mind when I think of 90s and early 2000s Windows programs (neither was Linux). Irix with 4DWM had been quite consistent at that time.
In the "hall of shame" you linked, they list applications which misuse radio buttons. Uh oh, call the police. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies. But honestly, up until the ribbon in Office, it was incredibly homogeneous compared to today.
In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners.
They aren't even pretending any more.
This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows.
Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today.
Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.
You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.
They're pretty fast to create, relatively consistent, simple and fast/easy to create.
That's not what people want, they want all the flexibility and features of say Gmail or maps. B along with some communication and flexibility. Not to mention running on every OS under the sun, and being able to use accessibility and screen reader tools on all those platforms.
> You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.
Uh, no you can't. Web forms aren't rich enough to build most desktop applications. You can't make vscode, gmail, slack or spotify using web forms. They're just a bad set of primitives for applications. (In the web's defense, it was never designed as an application platform).
Yet - we had some version of all of those applications in the 90s, on every OS at the time. And (mostly) using the platform's built in UI libraries so the look and feel was consistent and delightful.
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Interfaces were WAY more consistent than they are nowadays even when taking into account some applications slightly altering their themes. One application using a listbox instead of a tree (like one of the Microsoft examples in the site you linked) does not make a UI inconsistent (even as the wrong control, the listbox still looks and works exactly like the other listboxes in the system), it only makes it an odd/bad choice. And from a quick browse, most of the issues mentioned there are things like that (including, amusingly, a ribbon-like interface in Windows 3.1 in the tabs section[0] :-P).
IMO the fact that someone cared enough to make a site about what is largely nitpicks like this shows exactly how these stood out in the otherwise consistent landscape of UIs in the 90s.
Nowadays such a site would have 99% of every application released. It could even be automated, just somehow track all new .exe files in GitHub, MajorGeeks, Softpedia, etc and add them automatically to a hall of shame list, chances are even without human supervision the overwhelming majority will be correct :-P.
[0] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/tabs.html
I used Windows 98SE for eight years. I never saw any issue changing window sizes.
I can't speak to font sizes since IIRC that was an option but I left it default.
For all my apps that had controls pinned to a specific coordinate, I made sure to make the windows fixed-size.
I taught courses on VB from versions 3 to 6 and this was always something we went over.