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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Google. Microsoft. Apple. In the years where "mobile is cool" became a mantra, basically everybody fell for the trend. Several examples in this random blog post that talks about the topic:

https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909...

You asking this means (maybe?) that you're too young to have used the abhorrent default start menu of Windows 8, but yeah, forcing down users' throats the result of tucking what essentially was a mobile design into a 32" desktop monitor was the pure definition of "stupid decisions driven by marketing".

And it was not only OSes, too much of the web got "infected" with these design trends that are only appropriate for small screens:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/

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I'm old enough that the first computer I used was an IBM PC. Running PC DOS. Granted, I was very young and only remember it because of the little turtle in Logo. Then it was Apple IIs. Then Windows. I actually used Linux in the 90's. I remember Windows 8, but mainly because of the complainers. I was Linux full time by then anyway.

But I do happen to enjoy having extraneous menus hidden. Why are they cluttering my screen and workspace when I'm using keyboard shortcuts anyway? I want to see my actual work, not some menu I don't need and will never click on...

Using a mouse to click on a bunch of tiny menus littered all over the place is horrible for productivity and screams "boomer"...

Oh! then you've lived well through all these design fads of the last decades. Let me assure you, a bad designer is going to do a bad job whether you give them a desktop-first framework or not, that's the kind of desktop interfaces you might be thinking of. But a mobile-first framework will always render poor results on desktop, regardless (and in spite) of the skill and knowledge of the designer.

I cannot say this based on evidence, but I'll say anyways based on subjective common sense, that the Start Menu of Windows 95, 98, XP, and 7 were all immensely better than the Start ..."screen" thing of Windows 8.

It's not that mobile is "cool". I've had analytics data for many apps across different types of industries. Consistently, even on mainline web pages, traffic is dominated by mobile. The vast majority of people visit apps and pages on their phones.

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