Hear, hear. On our new serious workstation, we mostly run a variety of developer tools and browsers, some basic office software, various graphics/DTP/modelling stuff from companies like Adobe and Autodesk, and a bunch of tools to automate things and join the dots.

On a quick look, exactly none of the major products there uses the standard Windows 7 UI conventions.

I, for one, am sick of:

- not knowing which keyboard shortcuts perform frequent tasks like undo/redo, or more generally, not being able to navigate a UI using systematic and intuitive keystrokes;

- every application's windows having different conventions for dealing with multiple documents, docking panels, and so on (and making the labels ever-smaller wherever they are, so your documents all look like "C:\users\Fred\..." and your web pages are all "Favourite Site | The S...");

- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;

- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious auto-update policies that break stuff;

- every application having different ways to download and maintain plug-ins;

- more and more applications trying to squeeze every last square inch of screen space by hiding commands behind a small number of tabs or, worse, meaningless menu-icon-things (we bought large, hi-res monitors for a reason, and having access to browser bookmarks within two clicks is worth far more to us than reading a web site at 2560x1400 instead of 2560x1370);

- every application shoving its executables and config files in its own place (not helped by Windows 7's holier-than-thou "you can't put that in that directory" and "are you sure you want to do that" messages);

- and many other things that just make day-to-day work horribly inefficient.

I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.

And then I wish other software, including everything I mentioned above and most definitely including Firefox and Chrome, would just follow the conventions or make some effort to collaborate and standardise in connection with Microsoft (or whoever else writes the platform(s) they run on).

This, to me, is one the biggest pluses for Macs at this point. Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent the GUI, but they don't get rid of the old stuff, even in their own systems.

I also wish Microsoft would adopt actual application bundles. 99% of applications should not actually need installers and uninstallers. Despite what Raymond Chen says, a simple folder is not the same thing.

You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.

The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)

I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?

This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.

Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.

I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.

As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.

I think they are ugly but they are certainly not inconsistent.

This is one area in which the browsers seem to be getting better. Consider the humble Javascript alert, which used to grab and hold focus so that you could not interact with any other browser window or dialog until you had addressed the alert. Nearly all of the browsers have now switched to less intrusive alerts that display but do not dominate.

If you remove the word malicious I think this very fact is the future of browsers. The browser should be designed to prevent a developer from doing anything malicious, but they should fade into the background and allow the web developer to make many (all?) the UI decisions.

Also: you disagree with the poster. That doesn't mean he has been proven wrong. Your post comes off as unnecessarily rude.

Trying to be an "app" or not: For me, it is about the courtesy of respecting my main OS settings. It is about introducing accessibility concerns by overriding system settings such as demonstrated in this active bug report from 2008: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=92

> They aren't going to, and shouldn't, waste their time

It looks like they are going to, and really should fix this bug report. Improving the usability, interoperability and accessibility of your "app" or "operating system" is not a waste of time. You'd have a hard time backing that up.