I just accidentally clicked the “clear all” on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks
Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?
Overriding browser functionality because of designer preferences or shitty implementation of tracking or whatever.
Don’t fuck with my scrolling.
Don’t fuck with my ctrl clicking to open links in a new tab.
Don’t capture keyboard events unless you have a really excellent reason to and even then think about really hard and decide not to.
And learn how to support basic keyboard navigation, damn it. It’s just about marking up your html properly, no scripting required.
I think all of these opinions are popular on the user side.
I don’t have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don’t see people echo much, yet.
One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it’s also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.
Switches have become way to obvious to what “on” and “off” is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn’t clear whether it’s saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.
Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.
Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?
Microsoft’s “Ribbon” interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything’s a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it’s harder to scan through them to find the option you’re looking for.
A lot of so called “dark mode” should be called “medium mode” or “gray mode”. In my opinion “dark mode” is where the main colour of backgrounds looks more black than gray. Also all borders should be high-contrast, preferably brightly coloured lines, or medium-contrast for low-importance borders, but never low-contrast borders or borders without a line where it’s just a change in background colours.
I see the dark convention to mean that the background is darker than the foreground.
Light mode means dark text on lightt background.
I see it to mean how dark the page actually is
Any button that’s grayed out should say why it’s grayed out when you hover the cursor over it, or attempt to tap it.
UIs should strive to always be as customizable as possible.
Colors should be able to all be manually set by the user if they want to, rounded corners should be configurable, and the user should be able to overwrite icons and some UI elements if possible, but it shouldn’t have to be on a per-app basis.
Instead, apps should ready system settings configured by the user and apply their theming unless the app is configured to do otherwise, again, by the user. Consistency by default unless you don’t want it.
I can see why this opinion would be unpopular (maybe designers want to make their UI a very specific way idk)… but I like theming!!
Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn’t have a blindingly white background.
I can see why this opinion would be unpopular
The reason that it’s unpopular is that it’s hard enough to design a nice app and when you add theming it gets way harder. I still think it should be supported, but I can see why it isn’t.
I thin it should be like this: the system defines something like 10-15 main colors (text, text background, foreground, main accent, highlight bright, highlight dark …). All programs are designed in terms of those colors. Designers don’t put “green here, black there” but “main color here, highlight there”.
But they also have the option to recommend the user a app specific color set that can either be applied to that app only or system wide.
By default every app uses their own recommended theme unless the user has set the option to override app themes with the system theme.
Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn’t have a blindingly white background.
While I would still use dark mode if this existed, this would be a lot nicer than the blinding pure-white themes. There should, instead of light and dark themes, be white, light gray, medium gray, dark gray, and black themes everywhere.
Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it. Actually, bring back the top bar and the file menu while you’re at it. And for software that opens tabs, allow the user to position the tabs bar on the bottom or side of the screen.
Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it.
What OS was this on? Not sure it’s ever been a feature of Windows as far as I know. What’s the benefit of doing this vs just single clicking on the X button?
That was actually Windows. I think I first encountered it in Win 3.1, but I started really using it in 95. It’s not actually Windows that controlled it, but software. Application windows used yo have a top bar, and on the very left they had a small version of their shortcut icon. Clicking on it would roll out a short menu for minimizing, closing, etc, and double-clicking would exit out of the program. I think Chrome was the first popular software to remove it.
Using this method for closing programs is just a matter of preference and muscle memory. I guess it made sense when the last thing you did was File -> Save, so your cursor was already near the top left. Nowadays it’s not as obvious, but some of us are too rigid to easily change.
Omg i want a top bar soo much. I hate no bar on browsers filled with tabs, and here i am trying to position my mousr in a tiny bit of non tab apce so i can grab the window and move it.
One of my only non-minor complaints about KDE Plasma is that I can’t have the options that appear on the Global Menu panel widget (They’re like macOS top bar app options) appear as part of the window decorations on each window instead. There is a button on the window decorations to access these options as a dropdown, but that’s slower to use.
I really like minimalism. These new simplified logos for things look much better in my opinion. Shame pretty much everything has become enshittified along with the logo changes.
I don’t know how unpopular this is - I’ve never asked anybody:
Phone-optimised UIs suck, even on phones. One of the first things I do on setting up a new phone is tick ‘request desktop website’ in the browser.
Ooh, that one is probably pretty unpopular… Most desktop sites are absolute garbage on mobile.
Though I do hate when a mobile site won’t let you zoom for some asinine reason.
Some things should be 100% outside of the control of developers. Zooming in/out and selecting/copying/pasting text are my main issues. You have no right to decide I am not allowed to copy the text from your site. Fuck you. It doesn’t protect shit. You sent the text in a HTML file to my computer and then dare to tell me i am not allowed to copy it? I can read it on my screen. I can type it myself. I can use OCR to have a program read it for me. I can open the source code and copy it there. All it does is make your site awfull to use!
Setup wizards that let you configure some settings easily but not telling you where to change them later.
Stuff can be functional and not look like shit.
I think the default styling of browsers is pretty neat in a lot of cases and I hate animations. Layouts, spacing and grouping are the things that actually provide value.
Instead of a fancy popup with a cart contents the button should just say “Adding 1 item…” and “Added” for 2 seconds.
I hate infinite scrolls, especially when there’s stuff like opening hours at the bottom of the page. Just give me a “Show more” button and preload the content.
My dream world would be that styling would only be about layout and the rest is up to the user’s theme.
I, on the contrary, hate non-infinite scrolling
I figured there has to be someone that likes it.
For every UI app that runs commands in the background, Instead of a “Doing XYZ. Please Wait”, I want the logs of the commands being run. Not just the commands themselves, but their verbose outputs too. I want it ALL on display.
I want to know what the software I am using is doing to my computer. I dont want black box software on my PC.
Running a program in terminal on Linux gives you a detailed output log that you can pipe into a txt file.
This used to be so common with installers in the past. Sometimes you had to click a button to show it. But I don’t really see it anymore
While I do want the logs accessible, I don’t know if I want it all on display.
Ever like, dig through Windows or Proton logs? Plain text files measurable in megabytes within seconds.
Yeah, try telling that to my boss. Or any dev boss for that matter.
Scroll bars are way too fucking thin now. When I have an app on one monitor, and try to scroll it, I’m battling the move to the next monitor with the teensy tiny scrollbar.
I’m even someone that knows how to use the mouse wheel and page down keys. It still has its place and so many refuse to acknowledge that. Sometimes I can’t even tell where on the page I am because the scrollbar activated its Octocamo.
Even worse are the scrollbars that are hidden until your mouse is over to of it.
I posted just now about this to someone else but I just updated my Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is horrible, convoluted, and had scroll bars hidden by default with no way to show their MINUSCULE TINY ASSES without hovering over their one-pixel-wide bullshit bars ughhh
Mouse over for anything needs to die.
What’s even worse is when everytime you happen to move the mouse you get popups you didn’t want blocking what you are trying to see.
Especially when you want to click something but those pop-ups are clickable too.
I prefer a start/taskbar on the right side of the screen. I’m right handed and it just feels natural since square monitors became widescreen. I can’t think of 1 os or desktop manager that defaults to this, and windows 11 requires 3rd party software to even move it there.
I’ll +1 your gripe with my old man yelling at clouds thing. Windows XP gave you the option of creating arbitrary taskbars/toolbars to locations on the desktop that could be floating or docked. I have always kept my data on a separate drive or array from the one my OS lives on. In Windows XP I would create a toolbar that contained the root of my data drive, dock it to the right side of my monitor, and then set it to autohide the same way you can set the taskbar to auto hide.
That in conjunction with the way that Windows XP allowed you to remap “My Documents” to a different location made for the cleanest workflow I have ever had.
They removed the toolbar functionality after XP and changed the way remapping system folders works slightly since then. I haven’t really found an application that gives the exact same functionality as the arbitrary toolbar from XP, but even if I did I still spend over half my day at work on a computer that is locked down by corporate IT where I can’t install whatever I want, and I like to try and mirror workflows between home and work because of muscle memory.
I’m in my mid 30s, lol.
I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.
Pretty much the only reason this is unpopular is because we’re conditioned to expect it at the top or bottom. Having it on the side is a huge advantage for real estate, especially now that we don’t really have text on window tab thingies anymore.
we don’t really have text on window tab thingies anymore
I prefer text on those (I use KDE Plasma)
Here’s my reply to what you’re replying to:
I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.
Every modern design trend sucks. Overly minimalistic/simplistic UI harms usability and actively makes users dumber and helpless.
I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…
Give me boring panels with clear boundaries between conceptual sections, explicit text on buttons, and no theming. I don’t care if it’s a fugly Win95 grey, I’d rather it be usable than flashy.
I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…
real
- Rounded corners are ugly and a bit wasteful and it not being square sounds annoying for devs.
- Transparency is ugly and less performant.
- Shadows are sometimes nice (movable floating windows/popups, large boxes of any sort, and text on images) but otherwise not.
- Animations are really annoying. The recent Firefox mobile UI update features even slower and more annoying animations. WHEN I OPEN A MENU IT SHOULD BE FULLY OPEN NEXT FRAME.
- I don’t really care about modern icons, but they should be coloured. Also old firefox logo better.
Always makes me laugh what people prioritize. Perfectly blended shadows underneath my windows that takes noticeable resources to render
“But computers are so powerful these days, clock cycles are basically free”
My partner and I watch a fellow (Brutalmoose) play retro/vintage games. Mostly Windows 98/XP/DOS/older consoles. When he busted out his Windows 98 machine built by LGR on YouTube, I was astounded at how simple and professional 98 looks. Windows XP looks like a toy compared to 98.
I will never get over Windows 7 Start Menu/Explorer, though. I loved it. I use OpenShell to make all of my Windows 10 machines have Windows 7 start menus, with their good indexed search (no internet results) and excellent Explorer UI I’ve been used to forever.
I got a Windows 11 machine at work and I fucking hate everything about it. They won’t let me install OpenShell because they “don’t allow open-source software” (insane)
Yeah, I remember going from 98 to XP. My schoolmates and I used to joke that it looked like an OS made by playskool. But to be fair, iirc, that was kind of the trend then and not uniquely some MS bullshit. We were saying the same about the appearance of the GameCube controller (even though it’s objectively great to use).
Not allowing open-source software as a blanket policy sounds pretty unhinged. I feel for you.
I see you are a fan of FVWM style of UI design.
I wish UI design had followed that kind of paradigm to be honest. My high school library had some Sun workstations running Solaris, instead of the shitty outdated Windows computers that would have been the norm then. I was in the minority enjoying it, but that’s how I got to use my first Unix system.
…win95 had the same minimize, maximize/restore and close buttons that modern ones do. _ □ x in the left upper corner…
You mean in the right upper corner.
Yes. It did. And?
Haha, mixed my directions up.
I just find it curious how modern minimalistic design harms users when we have had those in use from the very beginning of the visual operating systems.
