[badsectoracula]

Unified interfaces and allowing users to transfer any transferable knowledge between programs was one of the main ideas behind GUIs like the original Macintosh and Windows, but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke.

But there was a time when interfaces were unified, sometimes to an absurd level (e.g. applications having a File menu when they had nothing to do with files) but IMO that is still better than every app being its own thing.

[jen20]

> but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke

The rise of electron as an 'acceptable' (to some people) substitute for platform-native applications and the myth of the possibility of the "cross platform UI" has accelerated this, really. It's quite unfortunate.

[tikhonj]

Seems like Electron would make a stronger foundation than native toolkits for Emacs-style flexibility, extensibility and composition. The DOM, for all its faults, charts a solid path between being flexible and still being structured, all while making it easy to change and extend from the outside. I've found it's much easier to write a browser extension that adds functionality to GMail—even without GMail actively supporting extensions—than it is to write a similar extension to, say, the native Outlook app (even with explicit plugin support from Microsoft).

I haven't paid much attention to the Electron world myself so I don't know to what extent anybody is taking advantage of this, but even if they're not, I expect it would be easier than with alternatives.

[jsrcout]

My first job out of college was developing software on the Macintosh in the late 80s/early 90s and I absolutely took for granted being able to count on the user interface to work in a sane and consistent way for 99% of all software. I fondly recall and very much miss that.