Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago. The overall non-cherrypicked quality and especially security were actually a lot worse across the board, and stuff that won't fly today such as segfaults/crashes and lost data was pretty normal. There was a point in time (several, actually) when installing Windows XP on an internet-connected machine was essentially impossible, because it would get infected during the installation! The only thing that has degraded a bit is UI latency, not universally. And yes, browsers and Electron-based apps are resource hogs, even for today's amounts of RAM.
saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware.
microsoft has a lot to answer for after 50 years of normalizing poor quality software
Not sure about this. All OSes were janky and buggy, Linux desktop up until at least late 2000s (I've been using it since ~2000), early Mac OS X, I don't even want to talk about classic Mac OS which was an abomination. Software quality and user experience was notoriously worse than it is today. This applies to everything - I've lost a ton of work to bugs in ZBrush, Maya, Word, FL Studio, backup software, and more.
> Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago.
Yes, and now compare a fully-patched Windows 7 and Windows 11.
You understand that there aren't just 2 valid points in time for comparison - it's not 2025 and 1995 that are being compared. It's trends of 2020+, or 2015+
> The only thing that has degraded a bit is UI latency, not universally.
Yes, universally. And no, not a bit. It's 10-100x across varying components. Look no further than MS Teams.
>Yes, universally. And no, not a bit. It's 10-100x across varying components. Look no further than MS Teams.
Universal latency regression is a ridiculous claim. For one, 20 years ago it was common to have 1-5 minutes loading time for professional software, I spent way too much time staring at splash screens. Can you imagine a splash screen on a music player? It was a thing too. Nowadays splash screens are nearly forgotten, because even big software starts in seconds. SSDs have nothing to do with it either, the startup reduction time trend started in mid-2000s by big content creation shops such as Adobe, precisely because people were fed up with long startup times and started complaining. Jerky mouse movements, random micro-lags due to hard disk activity and OS inability to schedule I/O properly, it definitely wasn't all smooth and lag-free as some people paint it. MS Teams is pretty much the epitome of bloat, counterpoint would be software like Zed, which is really fluid and optimized for latency, so it's already not universal. Software like MS Word was laggy then and is less laggy now. (and crashes a lot less these days)