Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs.
> in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab
Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.
It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
But we did gain some nice things!
- Tabs.
- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.
- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings.
- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).
- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).
I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha).
We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.
Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...
As much as it pains me to say it: custom Linux distros are not often deployed en masse. Especially not the ones that “look old”.