When good interfaces go crufty has lots of well thought through examples of user interface traits that are artifacts of obsolete design constraints.
One such example: applications use awkward little filepickers to open or save files because when the Mac was first designed, it wasn’t able to run the file manager and an application program at the same time.
Installed base dependencies and cultural habits can cause cruft to be highly persistent. Think about it — the school year in the US begins in September and ends in May, to allow students time off to help with the family harvest.
One nit — Internet Explorer’s lack of an exit menu item is a bug, not a feature. If you’ve got more than one window open, you need to close them, tediously, one at a time.
The essay was slashdotted, so you may have read it already 🙂