ThatBashhScriptKid

Form does, and ought to, follow function. Whoever designed this new UI has understood neither concept. It appears that they think "form" just means "aesthetics" and that "function" somehow follows from that. Form is what makes a thing what it is, not how it looks. In a tool, the end dictates it: the helmsman, knowing what a rudder is for, knows what form it should take; the shipwright knows what material to make it from. The order is explanatory rather than chronological. A found object only becomes a tool once its form is judged against a use. (n.b. I am not talking about the architectural "philosophy", but Aristotle's ordering principle: hypothetical necessity.) The registry editor exists to navigate a deep, sprawling tree of keys. Its form follows from that: as much of the tree in view as possible, with clear cues for depth. The old one was "cramped" because it was dense, and dense because that is what the job demands. The new one trades that for whitespace and prettiness. They have probably never had to use the registry. All they have done is follow the fashion for airy, spacious UIs instead of asking what the tool is for. Dense is not cluttered for goodness sake. I really hate that UIs keep getting sparser and larger at the expense of function.