I don’t know. What it looks like on my end is that scrolling takes time. It is as though my browser has to do some shit to figure out what the text is, instead of just displaying it like on a normal page.
So I read a line, hit down arrow, nothing happens, I start reading the next line etc. After a while the page starts jumping around like it’s doing all the down arrows at irregular intervals. Ok, that’s annoying, so I stop hitting down arrow and instead read the 1-2 paragraphs that are on the top of the screen, then hit page down. Nothing happens, hit page down again etc. So I scroll back up to where I was, hitting page up once at a time and waiting for the page to scroll like it’s twenty years ago and I just downloaded a large picture. Then I read the part of the text that I can see, hit page down again, sit and wait until it reacts, notice that I don’t understand what I’m reading, notice that that’s because I skipped a paragraph because it was behind the hoverboard, hit page up to find where I was and then try to scroll down part of a screen using the scrollbar. Nothing happens. I wait a while. The text starts to jump around again, because getting no feedback I scrolled a long way. Then I gave up.
I don’t remember what the article was about, I didn’t actually get to the meat of it. On most sites I would have given up and forgotten it ever existed after the first time that page down didn’t work instantly.
Firefox 55.0.2 32 bit, on Linux Mint KDE. No relevant add ons (adblock thing, EFF badger thing, greasemonkey but not with any scripts that should load for this page, pop up blocker thing).
We’ll be doing a lot of work to optimize the site experience. (Right now, I don’t have the sort of issues you describe, but it does take an unacceptably long time to load the comments on a page, for example). I expect some of that to help with these sorts of issues.
It wouldn’t be practical to have the old and new sites running in parallel (they don’t communicate with each other easily, they’d basically be two separate sites and part of the whole point is that this current site has too many underlying issues to make it practical to maintain), but if it’s still having issues running on older hardware we may figure out some kind of “accessibility mode” that renders less complicated stuff, possibly with fewer features)
(I expect the people currently working on it to not get to that sort of thing for awhile because there’s a long list of things that need doing fairly urgently, but it’s worth noting that it’s open sourced, so anyone who has time to fix an issue that’s bugging them is welcome to do so)
Sorry, but it is. Simple test: open a page and view source. Do you see HTML or do you see a big chunk of obfuscated JavaScript?
Browsers today are wicked fast at rendering HTML. They are ungodly slow on anything that replaces HTML with JavaScript. A text-heavy site such as LessWrong is very well served by pure HTML with a small scattering of JavaScript here and there. LessWrong 1.0 isn’t perfect markup (too many divs and spans, too little semantic markup) but it is much better designed for speed than 2.0.
What, specifically, is the problem you’re having that requires patience? It’s not using any notably weird/esoteric/advanced technology...
I don’t know. What it looks like on my end is that scrolling takes time. It is as though my browser has to do some shit to figure out what the text is, instead of just displaying it like on a normal page.
So I read a line, hit down arrow, nothing happens, I start reading the next line etc. After a while the page starts jumping around like it’s doing all the down arrows at irregular intervals. Ok, that’s annoying, so I stop hitting down arrow and instead read the 1-2 paragraphs that are on the top of the screen, then hit page down. Nothing happens, hit page down again etc. So I scroll back up to where I was, hitting page up once at a time and waiting for the page to scroll like it’s twenty years ago and I just downloaded a large picture. Then I read the part of the text that I can see, hit page down again, sit and wait until it reacts, notice that I don’t understand what I’m reading, notice that that’s because I skipped a paragraph because it was behind the hoverboard, hit page up to find where I was and then try to scroll down part of a screen using the scrollbar. Nothing happens. I wait a while. The text starts to jump around again, because getting no feedback I scrolled a long way. Then I gave up.
I don’t remember what the article was about, I didn’t actually get to the meat of it. On most sites I would have given up and forgotten it ever existed after the first time that page down didn’t work instantly.
What os, browser and add-ons are you using?
Firefox 55.0.2 32 bit, on Linux Mint KDE. No relevant add ons (adblock thing, EFF badger thing, greasemonkey but not with any scripts that should load for this page, pop up blocker thing).
Sorry, did you say weird/esoteric technology?
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
We’ll be doing a lot of work to optimize the site experience. (Right now, I don’t have the sort of issues you describe, but it does take an unacceptably long time to load the comments on a page, for example). I expect some of that to help with these sorts of issues.
It wouldn’t be practical to have the old and new sites running in parallel (they don’t communicate with each other easily, they’d basically be two separate sites and part of the whole point is that this current site has too many underlying issues to make it practical to maintain), but if it’s still having issues running on older hardware we may figure out some kind of “accessibility mode” that renders less complicated stuff, possibly with fewer features)
(I expect the people currently working on it to not get to that sort of thing for awhile because there’s a long list of things that need doing fairly urgently, but it’s worth noting that it’s open sourced, so anyone who has time to fix an issue that’s bugging them is welcome to do so)
Sorry, but it is. Simple test: open a page and view source. Do you see HTML or do you see a big chunk of obfuscated JavaScript?
Browsers today are wicked fast at rendering HTML. They are ungodly slow on anything that replaces HTML with JavaScript. A text-heavy site such as LessWrong is very well served by pure HTML with a small scattering of JavaScript here and there. LessWrong 1.0 isn’t perfect markup (too many divs and spans, too little semantic markup) but it is much better designed for speed than 2.0.