This is key to being a product manager, as well as a UX designer. It is the single most important lesson to learn for anyone managing stable, longterm software.

I used to be the PM for the Delphi IDE (RAD Studio, C++Builder) and we did a UX refresh. The software needed it, it wasn't arbitrary (there is an old product management joke: if you don't know what to do, do a UX refresh. Same as a CEO: don't know what to do, do an acquisition.) But it was needed, and IMO we did a good job.

This specific view -- that people use our software eight hours a day and we need to respect that through retaining expected behaviour, not arbitrarily moving things, and so much more -- was the guiding principle through that work. Toolbars stayed with the same contents; when settings pages were reorganised, it was with thought and care and we communicated why so that people would understand; UI was more adjusted than redone.

It was not perfect work, but it was done with an attitude of respect for users, and an attitude of minimising surprise. I hope and believe that was visible.

None of it lost functionality like this, which looks like they used an entirely new UI framework under the hood. I wouldn't be surprised to hear Photoshop was using some web renderer these days to render their UI.

I feel like I started registering this same thing around the time JS developers started rebuilding every manner of form control in the browser. A text input isn’t fancy enough, it needs to be inside several divs with custom event handling for mouse in, mouse out, keypress etc. but it’s always half baked.

Looks like the very top of another, secret checkbox. Mystery checkbox!

This looks like it would require deeper changes to a user's workflow.

(Of course the missing focus/tab functionality does the same in breaking keyboard-driven workflows that worked before)

Those responsible -- all of the people -- should be promoted to digging ditches.

No one cares anymore.

"Claude, rewrite all dialogs in Spectrum and create a new Photoshop release."

In a multi-display macOS setup, do you think my layout is ever remembered? Nope. If I save a layout preset, and then try to use that, do you think that works? Nope. If forced to stake my life on being able to position or use palettes in a predictable way, I'd be long gone.

One pet peeve related to a mention on the page is when you typo an alphabetical character into a dimension, Photoshop steals focus with an "Invalid numeric entry" popup. Just strip it and leave it at that. Stealing focus is a high crime, IMO.