Yeah, to me much of this sounds great. No menu bar? Great, I never use it. Keyboard shortcuts make it unnecessary. No reload button? Great, one less thing I don’t use cluttering up the UI.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
Can you name any non-niche casual website that requires you to refresh the current page?
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.
Then why not remove ALL the buttons. Stick them in a hamburger menu. And present everyone with a list of keys they must memorize during OS first boot?
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
Your comment doesn't reply to anything in mine. I haven't written anything about hamburger menus, things looking lean, chrome or gestures.
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
I don’t even remember when was the last time I clicked the reload button. I just press command + R.