Products · Product
Swing
Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Layout managers are confusing and hard to get a simple UI working withUnreviewed
20102026- Layouts are hard to get sane, components are too layered, and the event system is terrible2025-08-07
- Very hard to build UIs that look good and perform well2020-11-17
- Layout managers are confusing and hard to get a simple UI working with2019-02-13
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 25 complaints
- Seemingly random UI lag and delays because updates aren't sent to the window system2026-05-05
- Layouts are hard to get sane, components are too layered, and the event system is terrible2025-08-07
- Customising UI widgets is very time consuming, and overriding defaults has unexpected side effects2022-09-29
- Swing layouts are frustrating and counterintuitive for the developer to use2022-03-03
- Swing applications feel ugly, slow and painful to use2022-03-02
- Keystrokes in Swing text fields lag a second or three, making it unusable2022-03-02
- Windows flash in wrong place and redraw layout several times on opening2020-11-17
- Very hard to build UIs that look good and perform well2020-11-17
- Swing menu bar handles submenus so badly it is unusable2020-11-17
- Window goes black and repaints very slowly while being resized2020-11-05
- Constant resizing glitches and poor visual compatibility with the host OS made Swing UIs a nightmare2020-10-29
- Swing apps are slow to draw and look bad on every platform2020-05-16
- Swing struggles to respect system user preferences and accessibility settings2019-11-10
- Java applets and Swing interfaces look ugly and feel clunky to use2019-07-17
- Layout managers are confusing and hard to get a simple UI working with2019-02-13
- Windows jump to the wrong stack position after switching virtual desktops2018-09-25
- Swing file picker is hard to use and looks ugly2018-02-22
- Swing layout is harder than SWT, and its components are bloated, buggy and slow2017-05-19
- Swing apps offer a poor, hard-to-be-productive user experience2016-09-12
- Desktop Java apps have a poorly-designed Swing interface that feels bad to use2016-05-10
- Swing-based interfaces feel slow and unresponsive to interact with2013-10-17
- Swing fonts looked bad on Linux, so the commenter couldn't stand using the apps2013-06-13
- Swing has a frustratingly complicated API and provides a woeful user experience2012-08-27
- Swing UI lags perceptibly and controls behave unnaturally compared to native apps2012-03-07
- Swing was slow before Java 6 and its look and feel was hard to get right2010-07-21