It's Hard to Justify Tahoe Icons

But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.

EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.

Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.

That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.

Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.

Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?

That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.

It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.

Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they'd completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.

If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.

For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices

Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste.

Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.

Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.

TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online

It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.

I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/

EDIT: Yep, still works!

It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.