I actually tried to convince osnews to do something about the comments because they’re so integral to osnews. More optimal websites usually won’t have these issues but the world just accepts them with wordpress. Since wordpress is often too inefficient to use without caching, many wordpress websites including osnews end up experiencing caching anomalies in the form of stale content and bad links until the cached pages refresh after an hour or so. WordPress searches are objectively bad & incomplete. The longer the discussion the worse it gets. You can’t even tell which comment is being replied to half the time even before exceeding the max comment depth. There is broad consensus that wordpress comments are awful for discussions. Without going into wordpress’es internal shortcomings, there are user facing problems. It’s more than just font and size though. But font choice and size are all in the eye of the beholder. I guess what I miss most is a like/dislike indicator (like ArsTechnica) to get a feel for the public consensus. It’s part of a larger trend, the market for custom websites has dropped off a cliff with many switching to wordpress to save on development costs. There was a database breach and they didn’t have the resources to fix the code so they went to a managed wordpress website. But is it me with my nostalgia? Or is the new layout worse? There is no objective standard. OSNews also changed the GUI (I believe for the same security reasons) and I still miss the old layout. I question the wisdom of using limited resources on unwanted changes, but since they were going to sign off on it regardless one of the requirements should have been to provide a more conventional theme as an option to not off-put users (again). This isn’t just mozilla but a widespread issue. For better or worse I think designers feel the need to change things because that’s their job even though most users can do without it. Why did they mess with the tabs? They’re really awkward. It’s what you’re used to and change is hard. Without going into the merits of a GUI (re)design, it doesn’t matter if the new GUI is objectively better.
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