[The_Colonel]

> Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases.

The problem space is much larger now than it used to be. 20 years ago, you didn't care about things like responsive design, accessibility, fractional scaling, even internationalization was basic/non-existent. There's a long tail of features (often extremely complex, like accessibility) which are not immediately obvious for an english speaker with normal vision staring at a standard sized display.

[red_admiral]

Microsoft specifically cared about all that, way more than 20 years ago - Windows, for all the criticism it takes, from early days had internationalisation (they wanted to sell across the world after all), accessibility features, ways to adapt to different screen and DPI sizes etc. I think Explorer windows since at least Win 98 did something responsive-ish in that various side bars/panels would disappear if you made the window narrow enough. Of course, the icons would rearrange themselves into fewer or more columns as you resized the window too.

[vendiddy]

I would expect some overhead, but none of the features you describe seem to justify performance hit apps have taken.

[The_Colonel]

Performance is a feature just like any other. Customers are looking for a good combination of features, including performance. At some point, the feature (in this case performance) is good enough, and it doesn't make economical sense to improve it.