
Slashdot Launches Re-Design - Mithrandir
http://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/01/25/163257/Slashdot-Launches-Re-Design
======
jessriedel
I was hoping Slashdot was going to reduce the huge amount of padding around
each comment, but no luck. For instance, on my screen right now I can fit 13
comments on HN or reddit but no more than 5 on slashdot. This makes it _much_
harder to navigate comment threads, connect replies with comments, etc.

I'm I the only one who thinks this is easily the worst part of Slashdot? It's
reminiscent of a bad forum where each 3-word quip comes with an avatar, a
custom border, and a 5-line signature.

~~~
moe
The original slashdot was actually very readable. Here's a screenshot:
<http://images.slashdot.org/faq/screen_nested.gif>

Not pretty, but readable and very usable.

The padding and useless decoration that you (rightfully) complain about was
introduced with the first ajax-redesign a few years ago.

------
atgm
I liked slashdot more when it was plain, quick-loading HTML. I liked most
sites more when they were plain, quick-loading HTML. Ain't It Cool News is the
only other one coming to mind at the moment, though.

~~~
jinushaun
Google's Marissa Mayer said it best: The web likes to be square. Rounded
corners and other elements slows down a site.

~~~
julian37
Huh, why would that be? Drawing a round corner is in fact more complex than
drawing a square one, but surely for a few dozen rounded corners the number of
additional CPU cycles spent pales in comparison to things like anti-aliased
font rendering, calculating CSS box model layouts, decompressing gzipped
contents and the myriad of other tasks that a browser has to perform during
loading and rendering of a web site nowadays.

~~~
sanswork
For 4 rounded corners you probably need to download 4 images. Thats 4 extra
connections to the server to connect to, download, process.

It isn't the processor time that is taking longer its the transfer time.

~~~
robgough
Most modern browsers (all but IE I believe) will let you round corners with
CSS. An extra line or so of CSS is hardly much of a transfer overhead.

I believe current thinking (on non-enterprise sites anyway) is to let the IE
people have their square corners, and those on new browsers get all the curvy
goodness.

~~~
sanswork
Yes, that is why I added the probably. The vast majority of rounded corners I
see are still done with images however.

------
peng
The old Slashdot design bothered me so much I proposed a minimalist layout
last year: <http://nylira.com/p/slashdot>

Thoughts on this one:

Slashdot's homepage is much cleaner than before, but the thick green bars
denoting each story is visually oppressive. I understand that it's a branding
element, but it hampers readability.

The fixed navigation annoys me, but that's a personal preference: I don't
think the menus are important enough to be constantly on-screen.

I see they still haven't added a max-width to text columns either. It's
difficult reading comments on a 1440px+ screen.

~~~
robgough
Much prefer your clean design, but I'd move the story icon to the whitespace
under the author/submitter info on the left.

Did you design a comment page too?

------
btrask
It's unfortunate that they've jumped on the fixed positioning bandwagon. Non-
scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work, because
the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area.

Luckily there's a user style in the Slashdot comments that changes the fixed
elements to absolute positioning. It isn't a perfect solution, though (e.g.
for when you use an alternate browser).

~~~
kd0amg
_Non-scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work,
because the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area._

It also seems to break their "Parent" links -- it ends up with the top bar
partially covering the comment's header. I've yet to encounter a web site
where floating title bar is a good idea.

------
andresmh
I was going to make a snarky comment like Slash..who? But I clicked and it the
UI looks much better!

~~~
steve918
It definitely looks better, but as with everything new I see on Slashdot and
SourceForge these days it seems a little to late.

~~~
GrooveStomp
It probably looks better, as I remember Slashdot being really ugly, but the
new design is still ugly. The Slashdot header font in particular is an
eyesore, but very little on the site actually looks modern or pleasing.

------
bermanoid
Ugh, all this time, a whole new revamp, and it _still_ suffers from the
problem where hitting "Get more comments" moves everything around, and you've
got to look through everything to figure out what the hell actually just
loaded...

Why would anyone ever think that hitting more should load more comments
_above_ the comment you just finished freaking reading? And yes, I realize
they're loading low ranked deeply nested comments that are underneath ones
that are already visible, but yeesh - just clip the damn comment tree after a
certain number of comments are displayed, FFS, no need to try and be clever
about it...

~~~
wladimir
I might be alone in this, but I actually preferred the old-fashioned
pagination approach to to 'get more articles' buttons. Actually, I might not
be alone in this as HN does the same thing :)

------
zeemonkee
I don't really care so much for design as content. Slashdot looks tired,
whatever design you slap on top of it. For example they've updated the Bill
Gates Borg icon. It looks very dated now, though.

------
benjoffe
These kinds of designs often work badly with flash, as can be seen by the
flash ad on the page: <http://i.imgur.com/qycS8.png>

(flash in most (all?) browsers appears on top of even html regardless of
specific css rules)

~~~
randall
For the record, Flash will respect z-index if you set the wmode param.

<http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=e5141>

~~~
asnyder
If I remember correctly, setting the wmode param slows down flash performance
significantly. I also remember it having significant trouble in opera.
However, it's possible that these issues are now fixed in the newer browsers,
but I'm pretty sure that older browsers still experience them.

~~~
randall
Def some quirks back in the day (I think FF on Linux still doesn't even listen
to the wmode param, iirc) but I think modern browsers deal with wmode better
now.

------
Duff
This is probably the first good redesign that /. has done this century!

I actually stopped visiting Slashdot because the previous rounds of
"improvement" to the comment system was always a pain in the butt if you had
to switch tabs while typing. It will be good to be back.

------
wazoox
I hope it will work better than the previous one. It was unbearably slow on my
puny work PC and hardly usable on my other machines, and frankly, I don't
think that I should upgrade to quad core because of ONE website.

------
tjansen
I am glad they kept much of the original design, especially the rounded edges
and the green. Yes, it's not pretty, but for me it's like listening to an
oldie station. Slashdot was there in the 90s when you felt like participating
in a revolution for using Linux (or, if you wanted to be even more avantgarde,
one of the BSDs). It helped people get through the time of the Columbine
massacre, was the best place to discuss the Halloween documents, offered
endless First-Post/Nathalie-Portman trolling opportunities, and with Jon Katz
you always had something to talk (or complain) about.

The problem is that the culture did not really evolve. There's nothing that
Slashdot stands for anymore. I wonder whether it would be a good idea for
Slashdot, now that the readers as well as the authors are older, to cover
topics for geeks in their 30s or 40s: homes, families, kids... I believe that
there would be a range of interesting topics, and I don't know any news site
that covers them.

------
yaix
Now it looks like a framed site from good ol' 1997 again. Fixed header, fixed
menu cluttering up your 800x600 pixel smartphone screen, and a small
scrollable area (of which most is white space) with the actual content. Wow,
that went seriously wrong.

------
tzs
It looks uglier than the old version, in my opinion. On the other hand, it
looks like paste now works correctly when entering comments. (It used to often
fail on Webkit-based browsers if there was any text already in the box), so
that's a huge improvement.

------
jasonkostempski
I really thought I'd be saying 'digg-a-what?' before i'd ever say '/?' ever
again.

------
easyfrag
My problem with /. was that the stories were not voted in on by the community
but rather by a select few curators who added editorial content in the
headlines.

And they're still using the Bill Gates Borg icon?

~~~
recoiledsnake
That could easily be called a feature, looking at how Reddit's focus changed.
Hacker News is able to keep it's narrow focus, but it's the exception rather
than the rule.

You're right about the editorial content in the headlines and summary though
but I like that the stories have a small blurb explaining the story unlike
Reddit or Hacker News.

------
invertedlambda
Slashdot? I read HN.

~~~
ubernostrum
Slashdot was here before HN.

It is likely Slashdot will still be here when HN is gone.

There's a lesson in that.

~~~
cabalamat
> _It is likely Slashdot will still be here when HN is gone._

My gut feeling says no. I used to read Slashdot as much as I now read HN or
Reddit. I hardly ever go there any more, and when I do it just doesn't seem
interesting.

For me, Slashdot lacks the buzz it used to have.

------
VMG
Still no Unicode

------
JonnieCache
Same basic design but like half the number of DOM elements. Well done for
doing the right thing :)

------
halo
I like the redesign. Have they fixed the unusably bad commenting system?

------
risotto
This looks really great. Kudos to the designers and programmers.

------
jonhendry
The Apple category seems to be gone from the front page.

------
mahmud
Looks like CRAP in Opera. Sheesh.

------
fleitz
Does the redesign involve removing most of their userbase? There's some kind
of aversion to people charging money on that site that just doesn't jive with
me. I assume that HN will at some point reach the critical mass that killed
slashdot for me. Hopefully that day will be far far in the future.

------
jeberle
Looks like a trainwreck w/ K-Meleon, plus it chews major CPU cycles. Ah, the
web...

------
leon_
I don't like the feel to it. When scrolling it feels sluggish and the screen
seems to flicker.

~~~
kaiwetzel
I noticed the same (i7-920, FF 3.6) - after removing the fixed position bar
(using firebug) the site at least seems significantly less sluggish. Weird how
a seemingly simple thing can hurt performance so much (or maybe it's just a
psychological effect ?)

On a large screen I find it visually more pleasing than the last version but I
stoppped using the site completely after they introduced that silly ajax-abuse
and the new one wouldn't make me come back if for that reason alone.

