The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.
I mainly use Chrome, and in their newest M121 release they made not one, but three major UI changes and I hate every single one of them.
For the curious, they are (together with my rant):
1. the new "simplified" bookmark save flow which is more complicated than the old one;
2. loss of the ability to disable system notification (i.e. to use Chrome's built-in one, which I prefer);
3. loss of the ability to disable "copy to highlight" context menu option via a command line argument, which I never use and it just messes up my muscle memory for right click -> copy.*
* Seriously, why is it so tough for software in the CURRENT YEAR to just offer fully customizable context menus? How hard is that? Funnily enough, this used to be a staple feature in nearly all the popular freeware back in the 2000s and 2010s. It feels like the whole UI/UX scene has taken a nosedive lately.
Simon Schneegan's "Kandu" cross platform pie menus, as well as his older "Fly-Pie" and "Gnome-Pie" projects, let you create and edit your own pie menus with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface.
Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu (github.com/kando-menu)
I recently got fed up with Gmail and downloaded Thunderbird, which I haven't used in a looong time. I was wildly disappointed by the modern incarnation. The lack of checkboxes feels mind boggling... I still feel like I must be not grasping something. Sometimes one of my hands isn't on my mouse or keyboard, but the interface felt like it constantly demanded I use both together (e.g. shift+click) to get things done.
I ended up cleaning my inbox with the Gmail web interface. Despite my gripes, at the end of the day Gmail was just better and more efficient at it. Maybe it's nostalgia, but it legitimately feels like a 15 year old version of Outlook would run circles around Thunderbird's UI.
This is painting with a broad brush, but coming from a background that included design, I've honestly come to resent modern UX designers. There are great ones, but there are also ones who are more interested in the design than the user and who ignore or bend the user data to support their (sometimes wild) opinions.
