I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.
Funny that you bring macOS, because for _decades_ I've struggled with navigating it without a keyboard. Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible
To reinforce your point, by default on macOS you can't use Tab to select different options in a dialog box. You have to enable that in System Settings -> Keyboard -> "Keyboard navigation" which is off by default.
As a system macOS definitely has some holes in keyboard navigation, as well as a couple corners which are KB-navigable but the way to focus them is not immediately obvious.
On the app level, keyboard navigability depends on the developer. If they take the time to dot their I's and cross their T's it's between decent and great, but if they don't care it'll be bad.
MacOS has intentional holes in keyboard support. You have to go into settings and turn on a config for keyboard navigation to reach all elements. Apple intends for most users to navigate with a mouse.
Because it's stupid. Why would accessibility features enabled by default on Windows and Linux be disabled by default in MacOS? There is literally zero advantage to disabling it, and it makes life harder on users.
Same thing with tap to click. Once everyone else enabled tap to click Apple disabled it. They just HAVE to be different, even if it's bad for users, and that stubbornness is frustrating.
To a large extent, I believe it's a holdover from the earliest days of the Mac, when the mouse was brand-new, and many developers had to essentially be forced to even support it, let alone treat it as a first-class interface device.
I agree that it would be nice if Apple would have more keyboard navigation available by default now than they did then, but given that it is readily available for those who want it, I don't really see it as a huge issue.
If you expect your users to mostly work with both mouse and keyboard, it can make sense. Dropping stuff from the tabbing order means that the stuff left is is quicker to tab through. I find it mostly annoying.
Tap to click, though, that’s infuriating. I don’t know how people can stand it. I know people who insist they like it and then I see them accidentally “click” regularly and get annoyed by it.
No, keeping it disabled makes zero sense. There's no reason now to force people to enable it. Most people don't even know you can do it in windows so it's not like there's a huge problem for them. No reason not to leave it on here.
There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard. And there are no keyboard accelerators _AT_ _ALL_. Windows will underline the shortcut characters when you hold "alt".
The philosophy was that anything visible in a context menu should also be in the app-wide menu bar. Instead of bring up a context menu and click Copy, you would find the Copy menu item in the menu bar. Therefore such menu items can be assigned any keyboard shortcut by the user.
> Always make context menu items available in the main interface, too. […] In macOS, an app’s menu bar menus list all the app’s commands, including those in various context menus.
Therefore one can rightly conclude that there is no need for a key to bring up a context menu.
In this case it's not a context menu, it's just a menu. User experience is degraded, see GP's case. There is an expectation and a common paradigm which is intentionally ignored because the OS developers thought they knew better than the users.
This reminds me of frequent conversations with other developers when presented with a bug report. "That's not a bug, it's working as intended." The intention is wrong, then -- the bug is in the design, not the code, but it's still a bug.
Not working for your particular preferences isn’t a bug; your preferences are just wrong for the vast majority of users.
The hubris of HN posters never fails to astound me. The most niche of workflows, then wonders why regular users don’t all learn esoteric keybindings and use TUIs.
I don't know if this is aimed at me or not. I don't use this workflow; in fact I'm pretty bog-standard in many of the ways I use my computers. In any case, I don't see how expecting to be able to bring up a context menu is in any way esoteric. We're in a thread about navigating GUIs using a keyboard. On many keyboards there's literally a key dedicated to opening a context menu, and on most OSs there's a pretty standard shortcut to do it as well, which is what GP was talking about and what sibling comments discuss being added more recently in MacOS. So, again, not very esoteric.
I also don't see how trying to emphasize empathy toward users translates to hubris. But sounds like you've got a bone to pick, so keep picking I guess.
> There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard.
That used to be the case but has changed. Since at least macOS 15 the context menu key on typical keyboards is recognized and functions, and on other keyboards it can be opened with Ctrl+Return.
My theory is that Mac was born with a mouse while Windows (and Windows apps) originally had to function on machines that might not have one. Thus, keyboard navigablity was prioritized, and that design sensibility stuck around longer.
You would be baffled to know that after the creation of the mouse, Steve Jobs wanted to remove the arrow keys so developers would be forced to create mouse only interfaces.
I think it probably has more to do with Mac's lack of adoption by the US Government and large corporations.
Microsoft took accessibility of Windows and apps as a basic requirement. The fact that Windows is the daily driver desktop for the staff of the regulatory agencies that would bring complaints would not have gone unnoticed.
But really, why wouldn't you? You almost get it for free if you use the standard widgets, and smooth keyboard navigation is far faster for experienced users than having to repeatedly move one's hand between keyboard and mouse.
> Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible
Bing, Bing, Bing! I came here to vent how the new windows 10 and windows 11 interfaces (made by Mac enthusiasts, ughh) have omitted keyboard accessibility for a cleaner look. They also dropped drag and drop support (which I never knew about in windows 7) and I completely missed how useful it could be on Windows 10/11.
For whatever it's worth, the new W10/11 designs aren't in line with traditional Mac design philosophies either. They're more in line with those of iOS and Android with how they tend to bury and omit options entirely and prefer massive whitespace.
The article is a clickbaity rehash of a Tom's Hardware article, which is a rehash of this Reddit post [0], in which it clearly indicates the extra stick was shipped back to the customer.
/r/selfhosted enacted a policy where any post gets auto deleted by a bot and an automated comment is generated. You must reply to that comment disclosing how you use AI. Then the post will be made public.
What ends up happening is anyone that has any positive sentiment towards AI gets downvote bombed and their post never gets attention. Of course this ends up breeding posters that claim they have made absolutely 100% no use of AI, and then their repo README is full of emojis and emdashes.
In Windows this is currently being transformed with MSIX... Whenever that gets a foothold that is. But this is also why it was expected that you were to bundle an uninstaller with your application. It was expected that the developer was to handle cleanup. Obviously too many developers cut corners. The only way around this really is to have a system-wide hook that tracks what files an executable touches, and then have that executable registered to an overall application definition.
It's never going to be perfect. You can be really anal about it where you end up with iOS where, yes, you can sleep pretty well knowing that when you delete an app it has cleaned up after itself. The obvious tradeoff being that it's inherently limiting the scope of what you can do with the app.
I think it's gotten much better in recent years for the Windows crowd. I've been running the same install of 11 for about two years now. Back in the XP days I'd be lucky to be able to make it 6 months without feeling like everything was incredibly bogged down with no way out.
"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.
8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.
I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement.
Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.
I have a port of BuildGDX in the project backlog that was basically just throwing Claude at it to go from Java to .NET. The only thing it really got hung up on was Java's byte being signed.
What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.
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