Post #1775771
2026-04-27 23:27 UTC
Replies (5)
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@mwichary@mastodon.online 2026-04-27 23:29
@wilfredh@mastodon.social This is a great question. I remember Microsoft itself immediately started pushing on Windows 3.x, too — introducing the “3D” look before Windows 95, for example.
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-04-27 23:33
@wilfredh@mastodon.social I'd say #Windows 95 was peak UI consistency. I guess because everybody was madly in love with that slick new look #Microsoft came up with, and didn't want to deviate from it. Also because users could customize the fonts and colors of just about everything on #Win95, so if you *did* deviate from the standard look, then your UI would break horribly if custom fonts and colors were in use. Unless your app drew its own widgets, like GTK or Qt, but that wasn't really a thing back then.
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@hannorein@mastodon.social 2026-04-27 23:39
@wilfredh@mastodon.social The answer probably correlates strongly with each person's age.
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@badtuple@mastodon.social 2026-04-27 23:41
@wilfredh@mastodon.social completely un-researched response...but when was the height of the Web 2.0 craze? 2006 maybe? I feel like that's the point where each operating system had a really coherent design language that people tried to import directly to websites and keep their GUIs coherent with. Around that time is when the web (which already had weird experimental layouts and indie pages) started really diverging and experimenting with their own design language on mainstream sites.
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@ChuckMcManis@chaos.social 2026-04-28 00:11
@wilfredh@mastodon.social Suntools in SunOS 3? That would be a contender. The smalltalk environment would be another. And XDE at Xerox PARC in the 80’s @prozacchiwawa@functional.cafe