And the related phenomenon that I've seen more of recently: layouts that try to be mobile friendly, but then have some giant horizontal element sticking way out and ruining the experience.

> some giant horizontal element sticking way out and ruining the experience

And more often than not, this giant horizontal element refuses to scroll down properly and makes the whole page sluggish like hell. You gotta love 2014.

It varies a lot.

Mobile-only which strictly emphases the content and removes all other distractions can actually be a bonus. I've found some such sites (with appropriate margins restored) to be preferable to many desktop sites.

Mobile sites with lots of gee-wizardry are almost always horrible.

My ideal is actually very close to how TBL's original WWW proposal documents are styled. I have a default "unstyled" stylesheet I apply to most such sites, which consists largely of:

Setting body background to #fffff6, foreground to #330, font size, width to auto, max-width to 50em, and margins to 2em (top/bottom) / 4em (sides).

Setting anchor and heading colors and sizes, and size of standard text elements.

It's a pretty good foundation for fixing a bunch of sites.

Is there a firefox extension for applying that stylesheet to pages?

I think Stylish is the most popular one:

Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/stylish/

Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...

Stylish.

Nah, mobile has forced some level of sanity on us, and flat has curbed some of the worst design excesses. The 2008 web was worse for usability (though the 2003 web was probably better).

Interesting viewpoint. Can you provide any examples of 2008 sites that you think were "worse for usability" than their 2014 counterparts?

I cannot think of any myself, but I'm happy to be proved wrong.

microsoft.com. My bank's website (Halifax). I think Yahoo and Livejournal, though I can't get either to work in the wayback machine to be sure. The content is fairly front and center now, where the 2008 trend was very "boxes in boxes" with lots of rounded corners to show you could. I'm actually struggling to remember what was big in 2008 - I remember Amazon and Ebay kept to a 2003-style design.

In order to create a decent mobile experience, I've tried to reduce the amount of javascript to nothing when I code. It makes you think completely different in terms of design, but the huge upside for a fast desktop and mobile experience is well worth it.

So on point.

The biggest issue with the modern web (IMO) is JS (but mostly JS frameworks). They're just so miserably slow on mobile. Slow to download. Laggy. Supplanting native controls with ones with a noticeable input delay.

It's gone so far as designers interpreting "mobile first" as "your default layout should be the mobile optimized one, and media-queries used to reformat for the desktop".

Why? It makes no difference to a modern smartphone. But it breaks IE8. For no reason. I'd like IE8 to go away as much as the next developer, but I also try not to deliberately break things if I don't have an actual justification. Especially when IE8 is a contracted requirement. It's just plum crazy.

Functional JS can be a great tool. I'm not suggesting it be completely banished. But JS abuse seems to be at an all time high. And to think the "conservative" developers were worried about abuse of AJAX back in the day...