<story><title>I Used Netscape Composer in 2024</title><url>https://plbrault.com/blog-posts/i-used-netscape-composer-in-2024-en/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc.&lt;p&gt;Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.)&lt;p&gt;The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madeofpalk</author><text>Ugh. Not this HN trope again. &amp;quot;Web is bad, the old days were good, designers are the worst, developers are the best&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Lazy, inaccurate, and offensive.&lt;p&gt;How is this limited to the web? &amp;#x27;The Desktop&amp;#x27; suffers significantly more from not having a single, understandable paradigm. Is this UI modal? If I click this will it &amp;#x27;pop&amp;#x27; me to another view? Or will it open a new window? Is that window represented in task bar&amp;#x2F;switcher&amp;#x2F;dock&amp;#x2F;whatever? How do I get back to where I was before?&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the issue that both macOS and Windows suffers from being in the middle of a UI-kit transition, with a bunch of half-and-half apps across the system, with the new system being of... dubious quality (I&amp;#x27;m staring at you, new macOS Settings)&lt;p&gt;I think overall, I think there is a positive trend for usability of software on both the web and &amp;#x27;desktop&amp;#x27; (whatever that means). But still, just like 20 years ago, people can still make bad software.&lt;p&gt;Edit: lol - just now as I&amp;#x27;m trying to uninstall some AMD drivers, I get a dialogue box asking me to visit a long Microsoft Store URL, and it&amp;#x27;s neither clickable nor copyable. Desktop is perfect!</text></comment>
<story><title>I Used Netscape Composer in 2024</title><url>https://plbrault.com/blog-posts/i-used-netscape-composer-in-2024-en/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc.&lt;p&gt;Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.)&lt;p&gt;The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yashasolutions</author><text>While we have more option when building app for desktop, the reason the web took over is because of the fragmentation of desktop experiences (+ potential complexity required to install desktop app) so overall, it seems it was more important to achieve interoperability and simplicity of deployment than powerful UX. Even in recent history, if you take Figma vs Sketch (which was a serious contender to Figma in terms of features and UX) Figma won because interops + no need to install.</text></comment>