Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

That is the failure of market optimization nobody wants to talk about.

It's an undeniable fact that competitive pressure and desire to make money incentivize people to solve other people's problems, leading to products that get cheaper and better-aligned to customers' needs over time. A fact that's often brought up in defense of free markets and entrepreneurship. What is however ignored or left unsaid is that, it's true up to a point.

The same feedback system that initially aligns producers and consumers doesn't have a stop condition for "the most value for customers". There is no local minimum there either. That's because the market process is not actually optimizing for providing value in the first place. It happily blows past the point of being optimal to the customer, and continues to optimize for profitability by making things worse and worse for the consumers, until the end result is just "worst possible thing that's still marginally fit for purpose".

FOSS in particular tends to lean into the Customizability aspect far too much; I'm a big fan of it, but it took (for example) GIMP years to actually shift it's interface to being single-window by default and making it less easy to close the default side-panels (which unless you knew how those were put together were also basically impossible to get back, so the thing most people did was either stop using GIMP or wipe their installation, hoping that a reinstall would restore the windows).

A lot of that comes down to the rather... weird relationship FOSS has with depreciation; most projects will gladly break people's workflows because "it's just better to do it that way" and at the same time, you have some obscure workflow nobody but the dev who wrote it still relies on, so you can't update a default that should have been changed 3 years ago because then they start complaining (and usually gets to keep the defaults fucked because of project seniority, which in my experience tends to matter far more than anything else in FOSS projects).

There's a balance to keeping things simple with the advanced tools needing to be deliberately sought out. SumatraPDF in my experience manages to walk that balance very well. It's the kind of software where just using it feels intuitive; I've been able to let elderly people install it and use it without needing to spend hours educating them on how it works. It just shows documents and the basic icons make immediate sense.

(On the other extreme end, proprietary software can come across as almost completely nannying nowadays to the point where I stop using it because I feel like I'm getting lectured like I'm a 5 year old. Again, there should be a balance.)

On AMOLED displays, that #000000 not only looks nice, it also saves battery, as it shuts the given pixel off. The difference is substantial - with modern UI trends that waste most of screen space, a "grey on pure black" color scheme can often keep more than 50% of the pixels off! Meanwhile, a typical "grey on grey" dark mode will keep 100% of them on.

It hints at what I think is a natural cycle of software. Software evolves with its user base, its existence and modification over time proving its value. Then, there comes a time where the weight of its history (and feature set) becomes too much of a burden to its current user base. At that point, something happens to shed the weight.

If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc.

Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web:

https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/

It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented.

On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your computer (needs File System API). Otherwise files are stored in the browser in IndexedDB.

Not sure if it makes sense but here it is.