Comment by iamcalledrob
12 hours ago
We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.
I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day.
Yet we risk desktop experiences becoming less useful due to the UI becoming "dumber" as we keep shoehorning websites onto the desktop. Website UI is dumb. It's mouse driven, keyboard is an afterthought. There's no consistency, and you have to re-invent the wheel every time to get the details right (almost never happens).
>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.
I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers.
The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen.
For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser and all its responsibilities - but rather cross-platform, reliable, predictable on all platforms - i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.
This is attainable and there are many great examples of apps which are in fact, old wheels not re-invented, which still work for their particular user market.
I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.
The cognitive load of doing a web app that can do all the things a native app can do, is equivalent to the load required to build a cross-platform app using native frameworks, so ..
It seems you fumbled your starmenue click, the start menue will be right back, right after these messages.
>i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.
Based on my experience, I would be quite reluctant to rely on any non-native cross-platform desktop UI framework that is not web-based. These tend to be either less performant, look outdated or are bug-ridden.
What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks.
It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.
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That's your prerogative, but web-based UI's have their hard limits, and native cross-platform desktop UI's are no more/less problematic than the browser.
> I have the most respect for apps I can use on MacOS, Windows, and Linux - with the same hotkey/user experience on all platforms, equitably - and the least respect for apps which 'only run on one of them', since that is of course nonsense in this day and age.
No. I want things like keyboard shortcuts to reflect the platform norms of where the app is running (macOS in my case). A shared core is fine, but the UI framework must be native to be acceptable. Ghostty is a "gold standard" there.
This is why most web apps are lowest-common-denominator annoyances that I will not use.
Indeed, if the framework is sensible, keyboard shortcuts reflecting platform norms is entirely attainable in a manner that developers don't have to bother with it, much, if they don't want to.
There are plenty of examples of cross-platform UI's surviving the hotkey dance and attaining user satisfaction. There are of course poor examples too, but that's a reflection of care, not effort.
Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.
>their telemetry showed that few users used them
I wonder if they ever stopped to think that power users are the ones that disable telemetry immediately upon install.
That's not remotely universal, but they did consider that. It's immaterial.
Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the novice users who, over time, become power users through repetitive usage. If there are no user efficiency gains to be had through experience in a UI, then it just prevents the emergence of power users. Users just have to wait until a product manager or designer somewhere notices their pain and create a new feature through 10x the effort it would have taken to simply maintain the lower level shortcuts (e.g. keyboard accelerators, simple step automations).
Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_
Personally, its not so much about customisation as it is consistency, quality, and attention to detail.
Being able to keyboard through menus as standard. Focus being deeply considered and always working as expected.
Compact UI elements -- in the 90s/00s we decided buttons should be about 22px tall. Then suddenly they doubled in size.
Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well.
Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.
Container tabs, independent proxy config (chrome only respects system-wide proxy), vertical tabs, and functional adblockers are the four big features for me.
Try installing Sidebery or a good adblocker on Chrome.
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>Firefox has nothing
Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it.
God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.
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This resonates deeply. I build native macOS apps in Swift/AppKit and the difference in keyboard-first design between native and web is night and day.
On macOS, if you use standard NSResponder chain and menu items properly, you get Cmd+Z undo, text field navigation, menu bar keyboard access, and accessibility basically for free. The framework was designed around the assumption that users would become experts.
Web apps actively fight this. Every Electron app I use has broken Cmd+` (window cycling), inconsistent text selection behavior, and that characteristic 50-100ms input lag that you stop noticing until you switch back to a native app and remember what "responsive" feels like.
The sad irony is that making a power-user-friendly desktop app is actually less work if you go native, because the frameworks already handle the hard parts. Going web means you have to manually reimplement every platform convention, and almost nobody does.
> We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.
Power users are less susceptible to suggestion and therefore less profitable. They have largely moved to OSes that do not interfere with their wishes, allowing them to make their own choices about what they can or can't do/run (Eg. Linux).
I know this isn't really your main point but I don't think they've been trying to reduce complexity but rather increasing ease-of-use for the end-user*. Those things are often completely at odds with each other in software as I'm sure you know.
*well, that seems to have been their goal in the past; nowadays it just seems like they've been trying to funnel windows users to their other products and forcing copilot into everything.
If you become a power user you realize that nothing matches the power of the command line. And at that point you also realize that are better OSes that allow you to fully explode the true computing power that is terribly limited and constrained by a GUI.
>And at that point you also realize that are better OSes
Nothing beats Windows 11+WSL2; literally the best of both worlds.
Nonsense. Do you read and write your email using the command line? I use Mutt and Vim for that, and that’s not the command line. GUI with power-user support is just as efficient as Mutt and Vim. Did you use curl to read this thread and submit your comment? I use Firefox with Vimium C, which allows most web pages to be navigated and operated efficiently by keyboard.
Wait, mail clients other than mutt exist?
The issue is that everyone wants a full-featured remote with only "on, volume, and channel changing" buttons.
> Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web.
The web is not consistent itself. Lots of sites, and most web apps, invent their own UI.
I'm planning on writing a desktop (I've wrote about some of my goals here before) precisely for this reason
> We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.
I think the world changed. "Power users" in the traditional sense use Linux and BSD now. Microsoft and Apple dropped them when they realized how lucrative it would be to dumb things down and make computers more like cable TV.
This is why, for me, year of the Linux desktop was 2008. It's been atrocious since then.
In the future it will all be done by AI, no need for GUI. Just write or say what you want to do
Hopefully /s