Definitely rose-tinted glasses when people look back at Windows XP and earlier in particular. So many HN posts waxing poetic about how great the UIs were then. No! They were ugly, unreliable, inconsistent, and slow. It was a bad OS. Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.
> Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.
If you read through old HIGs, they generally have actual concrete reasoning behind the choices they made. They're pretty interesting to read because back then they did scientific user studies to try to make computers more usable.
For example, Microsoft didn't make the UI gray because of some aesthetic preference. They chose gray because black-on-gray text is easy to read, and because it makes it immediately obvious what's UI vs. what's content (vs. if they made the background white or something). They made all the buttons three-dimensional because it makes it immediately obvious that something is clickable. Getting rid of stuff like this makes the UI prettier, but it also gets rid of hints for how to use the software.
My favourite example is the "click start to shut down" joke. It's not a joke, it's good design.
How do they know it's good design? Did they think long and hard about where people would click to shut down? Maybe, but the more direct reason is they had user testing labs, and at the end of the test they asked users to shut down the computer, and almost all of them clicked on Start.
They didn't start from "everything is in the Start menu" for no reason. The initial Windows 95 design had different buttons for different functionality. They ended up combining the buttons into a single "Start" button because during user testing, they saw that users found multiple buttons hard to use. They had to learn which button did what, and it was often confusing because sometimes the functionality overlapped between buttons. To find something in Help, do you click the "Find" button or the "Help" button?
Then clearly Apple has ignored or not performed user studies. Windows users know that you click Start to do things. The user doesn't know or care what is part of the system and what is part of an application and what is a whole separate application.
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
Windows 95 didn't even have scroll wheel support in the first place. Tweak UI allowed you to turn on focus-follows-mouse (aka X-Mouse), but that's a different thing.
Note: I've deleted this once, and edited it even after reposting it, apologies for rapid changes
I've been trying to piece together what was actually there based upon some historical sources [1], [2], [3] and it's quite murky to me. As far as I can tell, scroll-follows-mouse was not truly possible in Windows 95, because the custom MSH_MOUSEWHEEL event lacked a way to carry the keyboard state, and an unfocused window would not have received the keyboard events to infer it correctly, so it would have been broken in a lot of edge cases. Then, Windows 98 added the standard MS_MOUSEWHEEL event, which does carry the keyboard state, but only 32-bit applications are able to access it, so the O/S locked scrolling to the focused window. Finally, Windows 10 pulled the plug on 16-bit compatibility, and so could and did make true scroll-follows-mouse possible.
Perhaps I'm misremembering then. I too did have an Intellisense mouse. So that may have been a factor. It's also possible I was thinking of focus follows mouse, which I believe is in TweakUI for Win95.
Inconsistent? I feel the opposite. Right now, every app seems to have its own UI design. Back then, most apps were native Win32: maybe ugly, maybe too serious, somewhat limiting, but mostly consistent. And relatively fast, despite running out of a spinning HDD and a single-core CPU.
It’s hard to determine what was aesthetically good from a different time because tastes change.
But there’s nothing wrong with small buttons when your only input tool is a pixel accurate mouse. Arguably what’s worse is too large a button.
But what’s inarguably worse are things like window corners where the click zone extends far beyond the actual window, and parts of the window are not click zones.
One thing that old UIs had were visible and usable scrollbars, while for some reason on that website you need a magnifying glass to see it on Firefox Android
Everyone is just assumed to have a scroll wheel and know how to use it. Scroll wheels came out after Windows 95 did. You used to have to actually drag the scrollbar or click the buttons to move down a page - scrolling was actually quite a pain to do.
Hence it was also extremely important to put the important stuff above the bottom of the first visible page.
I personally don't know any less convenient way to scroll (ok, except clicking on the scrollbar arrows).
And if mice with the scroll wheel weren't widely available at the Windows 95 launch, they became shortly after. You've also always been able to scroll with the keyboard, btw.
Scrollbars became disdained with the modern smartphones, because some ##### thought that touch scrolling was enough.
Except that without a scrollbar it's extremely hard to figure out how long the page you're considering to read is.
And, rather than scroll wheels, I love and always use chirals on laptops, but both with them and with touchscreens, to make big jumps in a document a scrollbar is often more convenient.
