Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Launches Re-Design
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of the third major re-design in our 13.5 year history, and I don't think it looks half bad.
The new theme represents a serious gutting of the underlying HTML and CSS, as well as all-new graphics. There will be many design wiggles, bug squashes, and compatibility glitches that survived testing, so bear with us for a bit.
Please direct your bug reports and feedback (good and bad!) to Garrett Woodworth who is currently
in charge of such things.
Thanks to him, Wes, Vlad, Dean, Phil and Tim, who have each worked hard to get this out the door. Juggling the needs of users, editors, and various business functions is a hard job, and you guys did good.
And Slashdot has now gotten on the "waste your screen space with bullshit" fixed-position bandwagon. Luckily this is easily solved. Install Stylish and add the following to a new user style:
Now the sidebar/header scroll with the page, rather than remaining fixed in place.
Armenian text:
Georgian text:
Hindi text:
Japanese text:
Korean text:
Greek text:
Hebrew text:
Vietnamese text: Vit Nam
Cyrillic script:
Notice how /. scrubbed the text away for most of these (including a single Vietnamese character).
Still broken.
SSC
The funny thing is, from the HTML:
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
No ponies, but sidebar-hides-content seems a fairly close substitute.
Validate -> "94 Errors, 14 warning(s)"
Some things never change. :/
First of all, as many people have commented the text is small and the whitespace is huge.
Second of all, even in Chrome it eats CPU and memory. Why is it necessary for an idle page to consume so many resources? I can no longer have anything else running besides Slashdot. While I don't visit as often as I used to, this will make Slashdot much more difficult to visit.
In order to fix the font size, I tried Shift-Ctrl-+. That did increase the font size, but it broke the fixed left sidebar. The left sidebar then scrolled with the rest of the page. Resetting the page back to my default font sizes with Ctrl - fixed the scrolling problem.
I'm curious. What user interface / site requirements were you trying to address with this new design? A quick look at the generated HTML makes me cringe. Hopefully the back end Perl code is much cleaner.
In short, it seems that there has been a lot of effort spent for very little end user enhancement.
Preview also seems to be slower.
On the topic of scrolling, like in Idle in the old version, the top bar thing breaks the behaviour of page up/down. Usually when you press page down the browser keeps a little of the previous page in view to help you keep track of reading. Now it is the exact opposite, where you actually lose a few pixels when you press page down. I might as well attach a belt sander to the scroll wheel.
When I click on the arrow buttons on the scroll bar it will sometimes use so much CPU that Firefox becomes unresponsive to the fact that the mouse button is no longer clicked on the scroll button and will continuously scroll down slowly for about 4 screens worth before stopping. (It could also be the shitty 2D of Nvidia's Linux driver factoring in, but it hasn't happened to any other pages.)
Firefox is eating 26% CPU (52% of one core) doing barely anything.
Why is there a preview button in the preview? It does nothing when I click on it
Unicode in Slashdot
Try the following:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
That's the D1 preferences page. As far as I can tell, there's not actually a link to it anywhere on the site.
you could still turn off the ajax crap in 2.0
now you can't
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
One tab of comments is using about 15% of one of my two cores which are running at 3 GHz. Two tabs uses another 15% and four tabs maxes out that core. Which sucks since I prefer to read the front page and open multiple tabs of stories and comments all at once.
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
This is terrible... before I could at least zoom the text, now if I try the columns overlap and cuts off text.
Big suckage.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I've found that blocking images.slashdot.org, a.fsdn.com, c.fsdn.com, and s.fsdn.com, and using the classic (D1) view with JavaShit disabled, it loads quite quickly (and it should, as it goes from around 300-400K to about 76K to load for the main page). Sure, it looks like crap, but it works and there's not lots of Web 2.0 crap. Though it seems now none of the stories on the main page show the number of comments. Oh well. What do you expect when the world is constantly moving towards more bloated, frilly designs?
Huh. Sure enough, having 3 slashdot tabs open is eating an entire core for me (out of 8, so meh - but still...). Spending five seconds with Chrome's JS profiler reveals the guilty party: adupdate:
adupdate(){
if($("#tophat #fad1 img, #tophat #fad1 iframe, #tophat #fad1 embed, #tophat #fad1 div, #tophat #fad1 table").width()!=728) {
$("#tophat").remove();
setTimeout("adupdate()",0)
}else{
$("#tophat").show();
setTimeout("adupdate()",0)
}
}
So, run this very computationally-intense function (that selector is pretty bad, and the width calculation is disgusting) in a continuous loop. Nice work, guys. The goal of this is what, exactly? Continually scan the width of the banner ad, and if it's not 728px, hide it, otherwise show it? Oooookay....
I could see this as valid to run... once. Even once every five seconds, if there's a good reason for it. But calling itself again after a 0ms delay? *sigh*
Please fix this, guys.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?