The sad thing about this joke is I kinda miss this UI ...

I wonder if might see UI fashion go full circle and come back to this style at some point. The flat style of the past 5 years came in reaction to the over-rendered skeuomorphic look that had been growing out of control. But I feel like when I look back at what Windows and Mac OS looked like in the 90s, it almost feels fresh again. It doesn't attempt to look like a photo, it just uses very a simplified, graphical style of light and shadow to hint at affordances and visual hierarchy.

I miss it too. I kept iOS6 on one of my iPads and stay with Win7 (instead of the ugly as butt newer editions).

Win9x classic theme, XP's Luna theme, Vista/Win7 glass theme, iOS 1-6 theme were all so nice. I can also live with iOS7+ theme and actually quite like Android 5+ material theme.

Older UI themes were often done by real experts. XP's Luna theme was done by Frog Design.

Some newer designs seems like be done as an afterthought, "designed" by an color blind programmer.

I miss the speed and features. 15 years ago email or IRC applications (The Bat, mIRC) started in milliseconds, and had tons of features.

Today webapps take forever to start and are severely limited.

Exactly. I feel really sad that my computer from 10 years ago with Pentium3, 256 MB of RAM and a 40 GB HDD felt faster than my current i7-7770 with 64 GB of RAM and a SSD.

The copy.sh emulator of Windows 98:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

I miss it too. When XP launched I used classic mode for years.

At this early hour, I miss high quality desktop apps with low-latency user interfaces. And high density. And a consistent look in all applications.

Man I miss UIs using depth. So easy on the eyes.

I'm confused, did they mimic the windows 95 feel with HTML / CSS? Or did they use WINE? Why did they want to make a serious application resemble Windows 95?

april1.js does all this

What date was this published? :o)

Yup, all done in HTML and CSS!

It's April 1st :)

It might be worth pointing out that as part of the joke they did actually make the app. You can download it, and it does have a convincing Windows 95 GUI.

I wonder how well it would perform on windows 95/98/ME.

Probably has a thing or two to do with today's date...

Forgot it is 4/1. Time for my annual day off of social media because of stupid things like this.

I get tuning out on 4/1, but what's stupid about this? I think it's kind of neat.

Some people just don't take kindly to being tricked.

Speaking to your point, some speculation follows:

We'll start with the stereotype/assumption that many engineers prefer stability and consistency in many aspects of their environments.

April Fool's day upends consistency in a significant fraction of consistent events and assumptions. The corollary is that the only consistency introduced on this day alone is the inconsistencies introduced elsewhere, and even this isn't certain given that not everyone participates.

Therefore, if many engineers strongly prefer consistency and April Fool's Day disrupts consistency, it potentially stands to reason that many engineers do not prefer to be involved in/with April Fool's Day.

...I'm less of an engineer and more of a manager now, so I've come to appreciate the gags, but man was there a time when I didn't. lol