Ah, yes... many buttons. I can see that there are buttons. What do they mean? Dunno. But, yep - they're definitely buttons.
Now let's look at Pages. (Admittedly, I myself am still not 100% happy with Big Sur's look)
https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd
No! How am I supposed to know what I can click on? Never mind the fact that everything is much better labeled and structured. How will I ever remember that the row of icons at the top are actually a toolbar.
I could go on about other aspects in which Win95 falls short, but this sums it up quite nicely.
No, standardized widgets are not the most important aspect of an interface and no, Win95 was not the peak of design.
I honestly don't see why the Pages example would be a big improvement over Word.
The labelled sections for the broad categories of formatting are nice, I guess, but I'm not sure they're a good use of screen space, especially given the individual formatting options are, just like Word 95, represented only by icons and unlabelled drop-down boxes. In either UI you have to hover over buttons if you're not sure what they're mean, and it's telling that the iconography is essentially unchanged from the 1990's. Except for one quite important aspect: Word 95's icons use colour to help the eye read them and distinguish them from one another. I know what the Pages icons mean but it's harder to quickly find the right icon when the only difference between the icons is shape.
By the way, if you really want that more spaced-out and verbose vertical list of formatting options, Word has it too, at least in 97 (haven't used 95). It's available as a dialog box and actually offers more formatting options than Pages does.
Moreover, the Word 95 UI's compactness is valuable. You can quickly find all the formatting options you'll ever need without clicking around in menus. Most of the screen space is occupied not by UI text and padding but by commonly-used commands and useful information about the document. Since the icons are laid out close together and horizontally rather than vertically, it's also easier for my eyes to quickly scan them than in Pages.
It's not nostalgia speaking when I say that I'd much prefer to use Word 95 on a daily basis than Pages.
Lets look at Word 95: https://live.staticflickr.com/5161/5199339764_7a2b6036eb_b.j...
Ah, yes... many buttons. I can see that there are buttons. What do they mean? Dunno. But, yep - they're definitely buttons.
Now let's look at Pages. (Admittedly, I myself am still not 100% happy with Big Sur's look) https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd
No! How am I supposed to know what I can click on? Never mind the fact that everything is much better labeled and structured. How will I ever remember that the row of icons at the top are actually a toolbar.
I could go on about other aspects in which Win95 falls short, but this sums it up quite nicely.
No, standardized widgets are not the most important aspect of an interface and no, Win95 was not the peak of design.