I don't think this is true. If anything, we see more oversized buttons and empty space nowadays. It's as if developers forgot that PC users have keyboards and mice. Remember, display resolutions and monitors were a lot smaller back then, and making space count was arguably more important 20 years ago than it is today.
The space also really has nothing to do with “mobile first”. It’s for touch screens (and also modern aesthetic that avoids crowded controls).
To be clear, I am not saying that all apps are optimizing for saving screen space. I was specifically talking about browsers, which are broadly optimized to give as much area as possible to the content.
It was a mildly useful point of view when they were designing things meant to be the first computer program someone might ever use. Like Microsoft Bob or Apple “At Ease.” But it’s idiotic to have things following that dogma as the only interface to tools that people need to use daily and will become expert users of.
To think some of us nerds complained about the Luna theme of XP as too “Fisher Price.” Fisher Price products look like industrial control panels compared to today’s contemporary operating systems and apps.
If that was the case they wouldn't put giant margins around every UI element and dead space everywhere.
Ironic to say on hackernews which shows massive whitespace in the margins-- and if I try to widen my tab sidebar it actually indents the margin rather than eating into it.
One can look across the computing space as a whole and see that, it is surely not the case that we're "maximizing screen space".
The key element missing from this thread is that the Internet going from a text based to a multi-media (and increasingly video-centric) experience.
A lot of Internet users, at this point, do as much reading on their phone or laptop as I do reading on my TV (almost none).
The Wells Fargo website screams this for me - it used to be dense and packed with info, now it's got large elements and wasted space.
Oh really? I, sadly, use nearly none. Open on my desktop right now: Slack, Outlook, Zoom, Windows Terminal, Edge, Claude, Obsidian, whatever the Windows image viewer is called, Cursor, and VS Code.
Only the last 2 have menu bars. And I can’t be certain that I didn’t dig through the preferences of one or both of them when I first installed them to tell them to knock off the bullshit and give me back the menus. Once in a while, there is an option buried somewhere like that.
I see some have gone the “browser” direction with tabs folded into the title bar and the menu bar dropped. Windows Terminal, File Explorer, and Notepad are all that style now.
Edit: Actually Notepad has the tabs in the titlebar thing but retained the menu bar and folded it into the command bar.