Wait, you simply let users know what's a button by the visual decorations and differentiated edges?

And you let them know the status of toggle buttons without forcing them to toggle multiple times and guess based on which colors what might mean what?

Blasphemy!

Next you'll be letting web pages readers know what is and is not a link by using a consistent underline scheme. Which would be a completely unacceptable level of interpretability.

Remember when buttons, when pressed, looked pressed? I remember!

Wow I've somehow completely missed the gradual disappearance of this. So many buttons now only have the hover effect.

The UX & UI design department of Pepperidge farm members, too.

There were still some differences back then too.

I remember in the late 1990s you could usually tell if a desktop app was written in VB6 or Delphi based on certain hints. For example Delphi apps usually had those cool looking OK / Cancel buttons with an icon.

But yeah, nowadays it feels way more different because developers have a blank canvas with Electron vs using a standard set of controls from a popular UI toolkit.

It’s not about “today”, it’s about Linux vs Win/Mac. The former is a lot less consistent than the latter and this was just as true in 1995 as it is today.

At least with respect to Linux and Windows, both suffer from similar problems with consistency. Both have suffered from a great deal of churn over the years. Both have a variety of toolkits that vary in both appearance and functionality. If you compare current software on both platforms, it is difficult to claim that one is much better than the other. (Though I will agree that Linux was incredibly inconsistent in 1995.)