Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.
I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.
When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.
I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.
Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.
On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.
I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.
I don't want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.
A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.