Why is modern UI design stealing usable space by making massive paddings around everything and massive buttons?

Surely they focus on touch screens but why they ignore desktop users needs?

The biggest factor is probably accessibility. It helps people with visual and motor impairments. Think of it as improving the usability for one edge case (a handicapped person) while no impacting a different edge case (you, who complains, but can still use the UI just fine).

>>459616
>(you, who complains, but can still use the UI just fine).

i'm grateful that i'm not vision or motor impaired and i think accessibility is based, but why is 'dense' windows9x ui not even an option in most software?

i just want to see the content, not have so much shit in scroll areas and toolbars constantly off-screen (FUCK GNOME Desktop and GTK the most for pointlesly large tolbars with 3 buttions while making you scroll forever through 20 items with their just as ugly visually unbalanced, xxxxxxl height padding)

surprisingly it is in office outlook on mac out of all things you have multiple options to make ui text decently large while having stuff neatly together

in firefox it's
user_pref("browser.compactmode.show", true);
user_pref("browser.uidensity", 1);
and then applying userChrome.css to slim it down more to the 2009 opera levels

>>459618
also fuck ui animation i do not want to look at some shitty modern ui toolkit javascript react """"native'""" abomination trying and failing to slowly render transitions in reality choppy sub-60 or even sub-30 fps slide-fade effect wrong timing curve function slideshow this is just distracting crap it should be instantaneous

>>459618
>i just want to see the content
I sympathize, anon. There are a lot of other factors involved. First, an optional, "dense" UI would mean double the work and double the code, practically speaking. Few want to invest in that and would rather try to make something everyone can use. Second, some of the problem lies in monitors stretching horizontally while web design patterns stretch vertically. This is partially because early designers came from print and then later because of phone scrolling (up/down is easier with one hand). Let's not get into monitor scaling issues. Lastly, most software developers work within the boundaries of UI toolkits for which there aren't that many. Those toolkits have preset widgets (buttons, fields, etc) and often can't be easily modified. Example: GTK.

>>459612 (OP)
Blank space helps create specific areas of the UI to facilitate item recognition. Cramming information is counterproductive and will alienate the user, thus making the product useless.

>>459616
>Think of it as improving the usability for one edge case (a handicapped person) while no impacting a different edge case (you, who complains, but can still use the UI just fine).

There should be a specific option for something like that...
Even on Windows 7 there were accessibility settings where you could increase text size and make contrast color rendering.

>>459621
corporate ux is borderline cargocult

in neovim text editor a 'ui' (TUI) element is in height of 1 text row. every ui element is. it doesn't need more padding than the line-height (~1.34) you set in the terminal settings. there are no icons on the screen at all. no animations. i am just as if not more productive than vscode users. friction-less pure uninterrupted muscle-memory experience, ui loads first, async heavy workloads in the background, fuzzy finder for files. tiling window managers that just split up the screen.

win 9x win32 ui toolkit proportions that persisted till mid 2010s relative to the display fractional scaling resolution are fine. even macos ui toolkit retains those for the buttons and menu items, making the vertical padding much smaller than horizontal. but then you get shit like androjeet/chrome and gtk3+ with css variables set in stone and hidden away. we still use mouse in 2025 ok

>>459620
>double the code, practically speaking
no. it's a single css numeric variable associated with 1rem constant associated with system font size tied to an already existing multi-option tablet vs desktop ui proportions setting if they use some webjeet shit underneath.

it's just that if would suddenly look less 'modern' or something if user 'accidentally' switched to it.

>>459626
>it's a single css numeric variable associated with 1rem constant
Tell me you're not a programmer without saying you're not a programmer.

>>459644
you can weight all spacing values against a single variable tied to the font size especially when it's a shared stylesheet

>>459657
but webshit may be hundred years ahead in this regard compared to native-ish toolkits. i haven't looked to what extent gtk supports the CSS features.

>>459657
Here you go:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/main/ui/gtk/gtk_ui.cc

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/themes/shared

I'm sure you can do a pull request and submit a patch in no time and it will work great!

>>459660
>https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/themes/shared

firefox already does what i mentioned with a few preset CSS variables. it's UI supports the same things as normal websites. it's piss easy to configure it that way.
it's ui frontend is not some arcane big brained coooder c++ 20 compilation steps nightmare microsoft horror story from 2000s where you need to set these things.

their avoidance supporting of a 'dense' UI proportions option is entirely a product/UX choice rather than some big development constraint.

it looks good in figma to give user exactly 2 trendy and modern looking options - cripple tier padding or even more cripple tier padding, switched semi-automatically when a touch screen is present, not 3 options with a normal mouse using peoples one (that would be a lot of options).

>>459663
by the way the option is still there, just tucked away behind a hidden setting for like 3 years now, and causes no visual breakage when enabled. it's just not part of their 'product vision' to have it.

>>459664
and to further confirm, it works on windows, linux and macos setups with very different combinations of non-'default' dpi and system font size settings, so that's not an excuse either

>>459664
>hidden setting
Why did they make it a hidden setting?
Fucking faggots. They want to always remove useful things for power user.

>>459664
this annoys me to no end. how difficult is it to keep "supporting" compact?
seriously, what's the reason it's not supported? if they add something new you switch between these three and see how it looks, why is it such a problem that they need to drop support for it but at the same time not such a problem that it is removed?

it's these little things i hate the most with the Firefox devs. tabs MUST be bubbles. compact MUST be hidden.
can't just leave something that's already in the browser either, it MUST be removed. ftp capability MUST go. flash plugin? it MUST go. unsigned addons? they MUST go (can't censor otherwise). funder donates to a pro-traditional marriage group? he MUST go.

i get how important firefox is as an alternative (if there's no life boat alphabet would just control the web) but why are so many things removed and a lot of them are hidden behind editing about:config -- and why isn't about:config still not commented with what everything does when you hover something? i bet my grandmother that the code has comments on what all variables does, those should have been visible in about:config 15 years ago

some things we need to edit outside about:config as well, like css if we want tabs back instead of bubbles. assuming that's even still possible, haven't tried in a few years now because i happen to like the bubbles (still should have the option to use tabs though because many hated the bubbles when they came out, yet devs said we MUST use them).

>>459612 (OP)
modern is the one doing that? not classic design?