I had some reflexive reaction of wanting to disagree because there are also a lot of things that got better. But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment, getting more and more erratic, and apparently all getting great feedback from their users (not sure if all the feedback systems are broken or something else is going on). Of course, Microsoft who in recent years started following the "roll a die for what UI-style we use today" paradigm is one of the worst offenders.
> But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment
Get off my lawn!
More seriously, old apps were way worse. Specially on windows, as soon as APIs for creating non-square windows became available, everyone wanted to use them. Nevermind that performance was horrible.
And frankly, every single printer, scan, or motherboard utility. Some are bizarre to this day.
We can't even say that Microsoft apps followed the rules. They were one the first to break with paradigms, mainly because they could ship their own version of Microsoft's common controls library. This is how detachable button bars came about, or the infamous ribbon.
I absolutely do remember this. Horrible. I think, during that time, Windows was the absolute worst offender.
I always used windows/mac and linux together during that time.
Early versions of OSX on PPC were pretty consistent. I didn't particularly like some of the "candy" design styles, but the UI guidelines seemed like a breath of fresh air. Note that Apple themselves started to destroy the consistency by introducing questionable things like "sheet metal" windows, sheets, and abuse all of them in iTunes first. Consistency went down pretty fast.
Looking back, GTK2 for me represented the pinnacle of consistency under Linux. As a toolkit it enforced resizable UIs (at a time when both OSX and Windows used fixed-width all the time) and decent components, not to mention that it supported system-wide themes to a degree never seen before. You can even set Qt4 to render GTK2 style widgets.
I have to absolutely laugh when I see that apps today "support a dark mode", where you could (and partly still can) switch THE ENTIRE UI to a dark theme in seconds in gtk.
But I don't want to defend Linux either. This has too regressed in GTK3 and Qt5 as well. The internal support for skinnability with CSS has caused most UIs to override the system theme irreparably. Many UIs ship with hard-coded themes that you simply cannot change anymore or break horribly when switching to a non-default theme. There are a ton of widgets which have incredibly poor consistency and often bring UI paradigms from phones that have _no_ reason to exist on the desktop. Qt5 QML widgets are so bad I cannot even describe how frustrated I am every time I see a good UI being converted to downright crap for "reasons?".
Ubuntu keeps following the latest fads with absolute zero consideration for UI customization, consistency _and_ performance. We have LXDE, but they too will have to inherit all the inconsistency on the programs running on top of it and since they too inherit GTK, there's no escape on the long run.
Still, Android beats the crap on all three easily.
It seems like nobody is even trying anymore when even developer tools gets rewritten in electron UIs with appalling performance and glaring bugs, yet they receive praise (and excuses).
It seems to me like this article should be titled "Decline of UI Consitency".
I think UIs have gotten better in general... but now instead of learning one difficult interface, users have to figure out many different interfaces. For power users who already had the difficult interface figured out, it definitely seems like a downgrade.
Partially I agree, partially for power users, partially for casual users. Sometimes this even overlaps. But a lot of designs nowadays are radically different which I’d say is just as much a problem for more casual users.
It is the web browsers fault, of course. It's amazing, it has been only a few years that web designers have discovered the concept of "components", but even today it's all a big laugh because nothing is actually properly composable. No guarantees, the web developers idea of a component is something equivalent to a "draw()" interface. Combined with the mess that CSS is this encourages people to just throw everything away with every project and redo it.
Nowadays the hottest business model is to throw out a piece of software for "preview", and asks your customers to pay to beta-test it, and then grow it to maturity gradually during a 2-3 years span.
Guess it's very good looking to the bankers, especially if you manage to pull off a subscription model, which many of them did.
Compare Power BI nowadays with an earlier version 18 months ago or even 12 months ago, and you know what I'm saying. I mean I'm fine for patches, but a lot of basic functionalities are missing from very early versions. That's beta testing, not patching.
