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Ask HN: What software has gotten better?

13 points by Felz ↗ HN
I was talking with some nontechnical friends who said that updates only make software worse in their experience, and they try to avoid them where possible.

I struggled to name a single piece of non-technical software that has significantly improved in terms of user experience. I've seen better programs replace worse ones (e.g. Discord replacing Skype), but it seems like the general trend is for good software to be ruined, rather than good software becoming better.

Is there anything relatively popular I can point to that bucks this trend?

36 comments

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el_dev_hell
Probably not ideal for a non-tech example, but I love the improvements made to VS Code over the last 3 years. Plugin support and Azure integrations are insanely productive and nice.
solus_factor
I am still using MSVC6.0 and loving it... There was a clear drop in quality when MS switched to the "modern" VS.

It seems most people here look at a short period of history: they take some crappy software, like modern VS or Office and point that it improved from the initial very crappy version to a less crappy one. Hurray, progress!

What they don't take into account is how much crappier the whole "modern" range of product versions is compared to the original.

karmakaze
You can still run msvc6? Is it only 32-bit on command-line or what?
noodlesUK
I would echo the other commenter on here - developer tools and other FOSS generally improve with each release. Video games too. For instance, Star Wars battlefront II (the new one) sucked at release, and now it’s an excellent FPS.
rusinov
Apple Maps, improved a lot in past few years, especially noticeable in the US.
A_Venom_Roll
I would say the Microsoft Office software has definitely gotten better over the years. This applies to the user interface, but also usability and performance. I think they did a great job over the last 25 years improving the software, without making it complicated. annoying or sluggish.
solus_factor
I don't think this is the case at all! To me Excel, for example, peaked at 2003 version, which I still use, and after that it followed the same pattern the topic started described - worse and worse and worse.

Same with Google Chrome (I am using v43 whenever possible) and pretty much all the software.

2rsf
Can you explain why Excel 2003 is better, or as good, as the latest Excel ?
mceachen
Wholly disagree.

MS loves to redesign their UI, but does it half-heartedly. There are dialogs that have had things moved to the ribbon or sidebar or property panel, but only some fields, so the sidebar contents are incomplete and you still have to find where they "hid your cheese."

For simple tasks like writing a memo, it's fine.

But as soon as the task is non-trivial (like changing default styles in word, or making a scatter plot line graph with column a as the y axis), office is a terrible user experience for new users, and guaranteed frustration from previously-proficient prior users. It's click-something-shit-not-that-undo whack-a-mole.

zzo38computer
Although I don't use Microsoft software much these days, one thing I can say about their UI is that keyboard commands usually remain consistent. (This is the main reason I was not completely lost at it when needing to use it on someone else's computer.)
tubularhells
KDE as a whole keeps improving every update.
gnusty_gnurc
Agreed here! Really loving KDE over the years.
yen223
Google Maps has improved a lot over the past few years, especially around public transport and commute.

Having said that, Google is starting to add more ads, which degrades the experience somewhat and I guess proves your friends' point.

throw51319
Yeah and I noticed a lot more ads on youtube.

I think they figured that they locked in people to their services and ecosystem, and now's the time to cash in on that and stock up on cash capital.

Felz
My friends accepted that Google Maps adding eg useful info about stores was a useful improvement. I guess we'l see if it gets ruined in the future.
cpach
Hm... Non-technical software you say. I would say Inkscape. Maybe web browsers...?
LarryMade2
Web Browsers - Pretty much most of the browsers have improved significantly year over year - likely because of direct competition between each of them. They've added features, optimised performance, resource management, etc.
zzo38computer
I do not see that at all. I see many features of web browsers have just been made worse. However, there are still improvements too. And many of the added features are unwanted.
bruce511
>>.. Unwanted

This is a subjective standard which means nothing. For example browser access to the Camera may be unwanted by many, but at the same time has enabled a whole range of video-chat, barcode-scanning, and translation Web apps.

If the definition of "better" is only "I like Everything" then clearly nothing qualifies.

There have been lots and lots of great new features added to browser engines (html, css, js) over the past 10 years. Stuff that has rendered IE (which had 90+% market share) obsolete in less than a decade.

If you want an example of apps getting better look no further than the browser.

zzo38computer
OK, it is subjective, which one is better. Still, different people will have a different opinion, and may have an argument for/against it, too.

> For example browser access to the Camera may be unwanted by many, but at the same time has enabled a whole range of video-chat, barcode-scanning, and translation Web apps.

I don't mean access to the camera or stuff like that in general; I mean the way they aren't very user-oriented.

Web browsers don't do things like these:

- A command to save form data to local files and later recall them on the same or a compatible form. (I don't mean for a document script to contain such a command. I mean for it to be included in the "File" menu, or a keyboard command, or such.)

- Play back a GIF or PNG animation as a video, rather than as a picture.

- When file uploads are expected, you could specify a different remote file name than the local file name, you could specify a pipe, or you could specify to capture it (that is the way to design the camera access working better, at least if you only need a still picture or non-live video; it doesn't work for live video, but even when live video is allegedly needed, you should be allowed to specify a file or external encoder program instead if wanted (e.g. if you do not have a camera)).

- A table of contents window (it can auto-generate it).

- Regular expression search.

- ARIA view suitable for non-blind users too.

- Be able for the user to disable and/or override various features.

- Edit <textarea> fields in external editors.

- Meta-CSS (usable only by the end user, not by document authors).

Some features they have in older ones, but they tend to remove stuff instead and just make it worse. Some browsers do actually do some of these things better, but some don't. Some of them can be implemented in extensions, but WebExtensions is limited compared with XUL/XPCOM. Why does it need an extension even to edit cookies (although you can view cookies without an extension)? Their priorities aren't very good. The "no user recourse" feature is especially terrible.

One good feature is the web developer console, but the main reason it is helpful is due to the mess they made; it isn't needed much when viewing old fashion web pages.

(Another disadvantage is trying to use it in bad ways, when there are much better protocols and VMs and stuff that you can use for various other purposes. And yet, another disadvantage, they waste too many resources, making it slow, even when you can do it more efficiently. Of course, a lot of this isn't the fault of the writers of the web browser.)

cblconfederate
PHP, blender (maaaaybe), video stuff i guess because of higher resolution

but everything else seems to be going down the drain of bloat and slowness

-- oops i notice now that you said non-technical stuff

Honestly? Hard to even think of any - maybe Chrome is faster?. Everything seems a worse , huge-padding, mobile-lookalike travesty of what we had 10 years ago. My daily desktop apps are purposely downgraded to old versions: Office 2007, photoshop CS5, the old windows Photos App (because the windows 10 one crashes!), an old PDF reader, old reddit, VLC and others. I wish i could also downgrade skype or adsense reports, or the bluehost.com control panel, or imgur.com, or the vodafone f*ckin payment page, or paypal all of which waste more of my time than they did before.

It's sad really, and should be alaming , but who cares when everyone is sleeping upon piles of cash

antoineMoPa
Some would say that blender 2.5 changed so much that users had to relearn tons of things. A lot of users postponed updating to 2.5 at the time because of this.
cblconfederate
do you mean blender 2.8 with the new interface? i haven't switched to that yet, i m talking about previous versions.
decasteve
Open source image editing/processing software has gotten better: Digikam, Darktable, Inkscape, and GIMP. (while Photoshop/Lightroom have gotten worse imo)

Linux and BSDs have gotten significantly better and with better hardware support.

In general, if I had a choice between today's software and the software of 15 years ago, running on today's hardware, I'd choose the software of 15 years ago in a heartbeat.

karmakaze
Discord replacing Skype is a good example. It was the early consensus that a web app couldn't be better than native and now we have so many amazing examples (GDocs, Figma) and growing.
fiftyacorn
Is the issue not that software has improved and their expectations are higher.

I mean how many of your friends could live without their phones?

Felz
Funny enough, a lot of the complaints I heard were about how Android has made their slightly older phones unusable, taking up a lot more storage space while delivering no perceived benefits.
dave_sid
Software that gathers data on you for advertising purposes has gotten a lot better.
mguerville
photo editing software keeps getting better, Photoshop, capture one, etc.
zzo38computer
A lot of updates do make software worse, although there is some FOSS stuff that does get better, but I do not really know if they are sufficiently popular, such as: ImageMagick and SQLite.
zzo38computer
Perhaps also of note is that many updates will improve some features and also makes others worse (often the important ones, unfortunately).
nt2h9uh238h
macOS and linux got a lot more secure and stable, so is Microsoft Windows (less random crashes).
nt2h9uh238h
My big WISH to all SWEs and PMs: make software fast again! <3 In 90% of cases I abandon software (like Gmail, like Evernote, like Facebook, ...) because it's unbearably slow.