98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

Not anymore for chrome & edge

https://blog.chromium.org/2020/03/updates-to-form-controls-a...

All part of Google's master plan to commoditize desktop OSs. Everyone outside the US already uses Android, soon your computer will be a Chrome box instead of a Windows/Mac/Linux box.

First they did the browser title bar & tab bar integration/styling & removed the normal OS title bar, then they made Chrome OS, now they are removing the last traces of OS-specific styling for those who haven't already switched to Chrome OS.

And Gmail, Gdocs, and Chromebooks are huge in kids schools. The kids don't know anything outside the non-Google universe. Most of the kids I know think MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint are lame (not that I'm a fan, but you have to admit MS Office is unrivaled in its abilities).

20 years from now they will have a gigantic monopoly over a huge range of computing.

I ... have no issue with those Chromium changes. I don't want Google to control the web, but I certainly wish there more standards based work went into designing a set of controls that was default across all browsers that was coherent, consistent, and was a safe default if you didn't want a theme. Sadly, Bootstrap become this a while ago, followed by a plethora of other web "defaults" that you just plunk into the top of your HTML file to get a whole new design without changing much.

I'm hoping Firefox Foundation or something like that will do some work in this area.

That's an interesting perspective. I guess for those of us on Mac and some Linux-ish OSs, we expect things to just work and look standard. I don't use mac but I think most users are accustomed to applications fitting in with the system, and Apple seems to make a big deal on both macOS and their mobile OSs about this. This is also true on the Gnome desktop where every single Gnome really looks and feels like a Gnome application - it's very coherent, and though I am not a fan of Gnome, I really enjoyed that part of the experience when I used it recently. On KDE this is also true, where every single application, whether Qt or GTK, looks like it's made from the same components.

And I think that web applications should be like this. They may be delivered differently, but they should be part of the system like everything else. Making the UI elements look like the OS ones is good.

I especially notice it on KDE, since on the default KDE theme the checkboxes and radiobuttons and scrollbars look a bit different from most other OSs and the Gnome default theme. But in the browser my checkboxes and radiobuttons and dropdowns look exactly like every other checkbox and radiobutton and dropdown on my computer, and the scrollbars have the distinctive KDE look too.

Most web apps do behave differently from normal applications, and also have stupid company-specific theming, but it's nice having at least parts of them fit in.

I suspect those who come from a Windows background will not have the same opinion, because on Windows basically every app is a mess of different themes and window decorations.

Windows has only been like that recently. The 9x days, and even a good chunk of the XP days meant standard looking applications.

Now that CSS and Javascript are so widely used, it would be interesting for OS vendors to provide a default OS theme along with their packaged browser, that allowed some kind of sane default for web applications to use. You could use a native skin, or load your own CSS to customise it. Microsoft kind of tried this with ActiveX controls, and then Java Applets tried it, and then Flash was fun by ultimately not a good idea, and now we're here with thousands of themes to choose from and a rough set of guidelines that some follow and many don't.

I think you’re a little mistaken — it’s been a while since I’ve used Chromium on GTK, but on Mac and Windows it has never really used native widgets/controls. This change is good because it goes from something that looks straight out of the late 90s no matter what your computer’s OS is, to something that _probably_ looks a _little_ more like whatever your OS looks like.

> 20 years from now they will have a gigantic monopoly over a huge range of computing.

I'm not worried. Mozilla/Microsoft used to be in a similar position with Firefox/IE at one time.

Now they're both playing second fiddle to Chrome. The only constant in tech is that everything changes.

"Most of the kids I know think MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint are lame "

Wait until they reach the age and get hired in a corporation. I am a die hard linux user ( been on linux desktop more than i can remember ), but the latest stuff (=365) from MS is really appealing compared with gSuite. It has a level of sophistication that Google cannot reach.

It's funny, back in the day it was "It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop until all applications look consistent". People hated the fact that this app was Gtk, that one was Qt and this one here was Motif. But on Windows, it was winapi button windows and common controls all the way (except a few MS apps like Encarta - leading the way in modern flat guis already back in the Windows 3.1 days). The world has turned so far around!

Surely Mozilla and Firefox have never been anything more than a geeky alternatives to the lead browser! It's true that once upon a time IE had a monopoly and some dedicated used Firefox, and then Chrome was on the up and up and broke the monopoly and a few people switched to Firefox, but now we're back in the time of monopoly and Chrome is on top.

>on Windows basically every app is a mess of different themes and window decorations

My experience disagrees, as long as we're not talking about Electron or UWP applications. Your description sounds exaggerated.

Just about every Windows program I use is styled differently from the others.

Right now I'm running Outlook, Firefox, Solidworks Electrical, Solidworks, Skype for Business, and ECi M1. Outlook uses the latest style ribbon and flat UI, Firefox uses its own style for everything, Solidworks Electrical uses the old style ribbon UI with panes and stuff from I think .NET toolkits, Solidworks uses its own ribbon and UI theme that's unique to it, Skype is inexplicably blue with its own blue icons, M1 uses its own ribbon style and has somewhat standard controls on a gray background, with a custom tree view that scrolls horizontally when you click on things...

I also have PLC and HMI programming software. Omron CX-Programmer, Sysmac Studio, and NB-Designer, which all look different from each other and any of the other software I'm running.

I think it's harder for me to pick two programs that look alike than it is to find ones that look different.

I was mistaken, Firefox is the one that uses OS controls for webpage elements. At least on Linux.

Everything works well for me other than excel. It's not even close to being as capable. Of course I've never been a pro at Microsoft Word or PP either, but I'm quite well versed in Excel and the online version is a huge let down.