back to article You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Here at El Reg towers, our backroom boffins have been toiling away improving our proudly Perl-based homegrown online publishing system. Among their latest work is rejigging The Register's website so that it looks spiffing on desktop and mobile, automatically adjusting the layout depending on your device's screen size. Whether …

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    1. onefang

      Re: DARK MODE

      "I ask only for one thing: An optional dark site theme."

      That's what one of my browser extensions does for me, only on all web sites, coz every one and their dog thinks that black text on white background is the way everything should be. "Page Colors & Fonts Buttons" lousy name, works reasonably well most of the time, not particularly obnoxious when it doesn't work.

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: DARK MODE

      "Have mercy on my aching ocular orbs."

      A couple of points that can be addressed without losing the current 'look'.

      a) off-white background to limit the blue level. Lowers eye strain

      b) no more "grey on white". *EVAR* (especially when hovering).

      (and the 'edit comment' text size is just TOO SMALL - can you fix THAT too, please? I didn't test with the new site appearance, though, so maybe you DID fix it?)

  1. Florida1920
    Pint

    Don't miss the sidebar

    Right away, the home page looked friendlier. The sidebar was distracting. Good job!

  2. mfisch

    News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

    Perhaps I'm not your median reader .... I've been a (nearly) daily reader for almost 20 years. Days where I'm too busy I catch up later in the week somehow.

    In short, I spend a lot of time looking at your content and don't need 'sort by popularity' to save me time (by pulling the less popular stories out of the page feed it actually costs me a lot of time or information).

    In the average week I peruse perhaps half the articles you have on offer and rely heavily on your information feed to keep up to date in the industry. Your headlines are predictable enough that I can quickly determine whether I want to click through.

    The redesign alpha seems to show just a few of the most recent or perhaps pinned articles up top followed by a 'MOST READ' section which I presume is based on popularity.

    I find it unlikely that the half of the articles I read thoroughly from your outlet are the same half that are most popular. This means I'm going to miss a lot of stories.

    Please make sure to include a chronological feed ... I could resort to XSS to track your content but more likely I'll just switch to an outlet that doesn't force me to click through 10 sections to make sure I'm not missing anything.

    1. Marco Fontani

      Re: News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

      The redesign alpha seems to show just a few of the most recent or perhaps pinned articles up top followed by a 'MOST READ' section which I presume is based on popularity.

      It's one ROW of FOUR articles, with a distinctive grey-ish background. It's the same four articles which are shown on the forums or "old homepage" RHS.

      The row below "continues on" with the chronological article list.

      What I take from this is that it's not too clear to many that the "most read" bit only applies to that row of four articles, _despite_ the distinctive background.

    2. mfisch

      Re: News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

      hmm .... I'm looking closer now. Is "MOST READ" just those four articles in that box and the remainder of the bottom of the page all chronological?

      It's not really clear.

      If the entire bottom of the page is chronologically inclusive (so I can catch up etc) .... then I like the new format.

      Two other notes:

      There's not nearly enough whitespace, everything is too jammed together making it difficult to read. Are you afraid people don't like scrolling?

      I'm very happy with the responsiveness of this new design. The old design was obviously geared for desktops which means half the time (mobile device) your site is difficult and feels like it was designed in the stone age. Cheers for horizontal bounding to screen width!

      1. mfisch

        Re: News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

        Re: whitepace

        The thing that makes the new design difficult to read:

        - The gray line around the article boxes is super distracting. The old format (just white space) was much easier on the eyes. Perhaps even a more subtle gray would make a difference here. I've tested this on both desktop and mobile and the eyeball burn problem is there in both.

        - 4x articles wide is strange.

        I see as I resize the window it goes from one article wide (phone, good), 2 articles wide (tablet? small browser window? Good), ... then straight to 4 articles wide (crazy jumbled looking). Even at max-width of the main content page 4 articles wide is too busy.

        If I had to redesign this part with no other considerations I would do 3 articles wide until the viewport width is sufficiently wide to fit 4 articles with pleasant whitespace. Instead I've got empty grayspace padding the left and right sides and text thats so squished in the middle I can't read it.

      2. Marco Fontani

        Re: News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

        hmm .... I'm looking closer now. Is "MOST READ" just those four articles in that box and the remainder of the bottom of the page all chronological?

        Yes!

        It's not really clear

        The "most read" unit has a distinctive light grey background, in contrast with the white background used by the other stories, which at least right now are in chronological order.

        This all points to the "most read" unit maybe needing a little further hint that it's really just those four stories... but IMVHO the background colour change should be enough.

        1. eldakka

          Re: News Prioritization by Popularity not ideal.

          The "most read" unit has a distinctive light grey background, in contrast with the white background used by the other stories, which at least right now are in chronological order.

          This all points to the "most read" unit maybe needing a little further hint that it's really just those four stories... but IMVHO the background colour change should be enough.

          Just my 2 cents on this section:

          The grey background is very subtle, I didn't even notice that there was a grey background until this thread noted it (note that I think that that grey shade would actually be a better background for the entire site, not the bright white you currently use).

          While the articles themselves might be 'in' the grey box, the headline "MOST READ" and the heavier grey horizontal next to it aren't in that grey box, they are on the main white background of the page. There is a roughly the same weight grey line at the bottom of the greyed background area that looks like it is part of the grey background zone, not a terminator to the "MOST READ" heading.

          So what I see, how I comprehend it (prior to you explanation), is a new section headed "MOST READ", that includes within it (i.e. it is a component of "MOST READ", not the sole content of "MOST READ") a very subtly shaded grey area, and then continues on with more "MOST READ" content after it.

          At the very least, the "MOST READ" heading and it's grey horizontal line need to be within the same 'box", with the same background grey, as those 4 articles.

  3. Wilco

    Comments on redesign

    I like the general direction but there are some things that could be improved. I'm using latest Chrome with adblock on.

    1) I don't like the hover over grey highlight. It seems more extreme than the current site Also the hover state is much lower contrast than the regular state, which makes it hard to read for old blind people like me.

    2) The alignment of boxes seems quite random. The main headline width doesn't align with the smaller story box underneath. The picture width doesn't align with the story boxes.

    3) Ad boxes mess up the size of the other boxes. There is a random ad at the right in row 3 whose size is completely unrelated to other boxes, bit which makes the other story boxes smaller and messes up the alignment.

    4) The new page seems to be divided into "Top Stories" and "Most Read". Is the most read section fully controlled by page views? Is this different to the current site?

    5) Too many ines around things - I would get rid of them all

    6) The top row of the most read section has a grey background for no obvious reason

  4. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Is a redesign strictly necessary at this point?

  5. Marco Fontani

    On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

    The new layout is "row based". Each row may have different content, but that content is limited to that row, and doesn't "bleed over".

    That means, the "top stories" is just that very first row of stories, comprising of one with images, and three without. Those are editorially picked. You might see that it's a "whole section of one row" as it's got a distinctive border before it (well, next to its title) and after it, delineating it.

    You may see instead a "breaking news" row, of one story. If set, it's shown _instead of_ the "top stories" unit.

    After it, you'll see a chronological set of stories - from most recently to least recently published.

    BUT...

    We may instead show you a row of four "most read" stories; that'll have a distinctive light grey background. After that row, the main content resumes.

    Or... we may show you a "don't miss" story. That one will be Editorially picked, but the three stories to its right will be the "rightful" stories, from most recently to least recently published.

    Or, there may be an Editorially picked story, "stickied" in that position. After it, there'll be three more chronological stories.

    Interspersed, you'll see about three ads; some will be full-width and won't impede the display of stories before and after; others will be usually set to the right (or left!) of stories, and the three (or five) stories preceding it will shrink slightly, as (at least on desktop) we can only display ads of a given width (300px or so) on a desktop-sized device.

    On a mobile device, the "most read" unit is also four stories, and also has the distinctive background.

    Nothing's changed with regards to our displaying stories "generally" in most recently to least recently published order. It's kinda literally just how we portray the stories that has changed.

    1. Dave559 Silver badge

      Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

      Unfortunately, if you have to explain how the design works, that means that it hasn't really worked, I'm afraid(!).

      I think it's not at all obvious to (m)any of us that "Top Stories" contains only 4 articles: the way that the next row just continues straight after those first 4 articles, I really thought that was a (long) continuation of "Top Stories", and not actually the start of the "Newest first" section. Some sort of much clearer separation is needed, perhaps the "Top stories" section should be on a slightly darker background (similar to "Most Read"), and with a much "harder" break between it and the start of the "Newest first" section (perhaps even a "Newest articles" heading just to make it explicitly clear?).

      "Most read": I very much get the feeling that very few, if any, of us care about that in the slightest (the nature of the readership probably makes us more likely to be general information junkies than the sort of people who care about who or what is "popular"), and you're possibly best just getting rid of it entirely? (If you had had a, say, "?src=mostread" parameter in URI links from the "Most read" section, you would be able to tell from your webstats whether (m)any people actually do find it useful. I know that I have literally never used it myself.)

      By all means do highlight "Top Stories" that you feel are editorially important (as that is useful and helpful), but, otherwise, I think we're mostly happy with a chronological list of articles (easy to tell when you've caught up with where you left off on your last visit, etc).

      I also endorse the requests from others for a less bright background (I really hate pure bright white backgrounds, and since most of your readers probably stare closely at computer screens vastly much more than many people in our jobs, a less dazzling colour (eg, light grey) would be so much less straining on the eyes. Alternatively, the ability to choose custom themes (dark on light, pale pastel, sepia backgrounds, etc, would, I am sure, go down very well.)

      (And, for the avoidance of doubt: I'm not meaning to be overly critical, it's a good initial step forwards.)

      1. Marco Fontani

        Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

        If you had had a, say, "?src=mostread" parameter in URI links from the "Most read" section, you would be able to tell from your webstats whether (m)any people actually do find it useful. I know that I have literally never used it myself.

        Unless the client-side devs screwed something up, we've tracked clicks on "most read" since its inception (and separately, when the RHS "most read" unit used to come in a few A/B variations) and continue to do so in this new design, "simply" using GA, with sampling - and a little chunk of JS.

        Re your "how many find it useful", I'm not looking now at the actual stats, but speaking in general... "most read" is quite a good source of additional page views for enough readers to make it worthwhile to be kept. It's maybe not as good a source of additional page views for assiduous readers who've already read those articles, but it certainly is for readers who find the contents of those highly popular articles interesting, as they've not seen them before.

        Same goes for all other "editorially picked" slots - they're "pinned" because they'd otherwise "fall down" in the sea of bland, ordered by date published articles - and they'd risk getting missed by less assiduous readers.

        If you've not read the news on the site for a few days, chances are that between the "most read", "top stories" and "don't miss" slots you'll find good articles to read - although you might also do well looking at the homepage for recently published articles which might not have had enough time to "rise".

        Hope this makes sense! Not all readers are as assiduous as most readers commenting on this article; not all readers actually comment on articles; not all assiduous readers comment. Not all commentards read the articles, either...

        In general, this new design tries to give the Editorial team more ability to shape the homepage in a way they weren't able to previously; moreover, it has been a pretext for also going towards responsive design / mobile friendly - which we weren't previously.

        Many design matters are mostly a matter of personal taste, and one's choice on what should be on a homepage depends on how they use the site. We have to cater to a lot of users, very different between each other. It's sometimes the case that what works for the power-user hurts "new" users, or the other way around.

        It's a difficult balancing game.

        1. Dave559 Silver badge

          Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

          Re: "mostread". Remember that Google Analprobe (and similar third party trackers) only run for those of us who don't block them, and given the audience of this site, any data you (don't) get from GA is likely to be substantially more skewed from what might be typical elsewhere (which is why I was suggesting a URI parameter for more reliable link tracking).

          1. Marco Fontani

            Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

            Remember that Google [...] only run for those of us who don't block them [...] any data you (don't) get from GA is likely to be substantially more skewed [...]

            We do use url-based tracking elsewhere, i.e. on whitepapers - which isn't ads-supported - where we track the "source" for a download, to be able to tell what works (newsletter link, RHS link, "most read papers" etc) and what doesn't. As it's not ads supported, and as the "business" of that site only relies on people downloading whitepaperes, we can't merely use GA as we'd indeed lose a lot of trackability.

            That said, you might concede that for the ads-supported site we're instead far more interested in the behaviour of those seeing ads (as the site is ads-supported) which are unlikely to see ads but block GA, as those are likelier to be the ones that keep the site afloat - money wise, not merely comments wise.

        2. tiggity Silver badge

          Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

          using Google Analtics (typo deliberate for a change) will be a problem as likely that a fair proportion of techy people have that blacklisted, so metrics cannot always be relied on ..

          Web log analysis, if configured, could give an idea how useful it is ... as you can set yourself up to log all requests quite easily (spot the person who thinks whats the use of GA when you can log stuff & be unaffected by js blocks, GA blocks etc)

          1. Marco Fontani

            Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

            Web log analysis, if configured, could give an idea how useful it is ... as you can set yourself up to log all requests quite easily (spot the person who thinks whats the use of GA when you can log stuff & be unaffected by js blocks, GA blocks etc)

            We use both, but each to their own purpose.

            In an ideal world, "web log analysis" would be the best of the crop, but how do you propose one filters for real, actual users ONLY (the things we're most interested in knowing whether things work for) instead of the zillions of differently behaving crawlers?

            For the use case I highlighted, using GA gives us the best 80% of gain for 20% effort. Going the "analyse log files" route for that gets me instead pulling my hair out, and I'd rather keep them for the time being, thanks.

            For other stuff we absolutely rely on log file analysis; each has their own purpose, and they're not - to the best of my knowledge and experience, interchangeable.

            1. Dave559 Silver badge

              Web stats analysis and crawlers

              A good point about the need to filter out crawlers, etc, from pure log file visit analysis.

              However, there are less painful alternatives to the perhaps most well-known method of probing, that most readers would probably be willing to accept; it's not really the analysis of web statistics (an understandable thing for a publisher to want to know about) that is the issue for many of us, but that that data is passed to an untrusworthy third-party.

              You are probably aware of Matomo (formerly Piwik), which you could install locally, and which is very full-featured in itself. It has an "opt out" function (and even respects "Do Not Track") for the truly secretive.

              https://matomo.org/

              1. Marco Fontani

                Re: Web stats analysis and crawlers

                Yup, "shame" that the industry has instead pretty much settled on GA, and that's kinda the only metric they accept.

                1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

                  Re: Web stats analysis and crawlers

                  "Yup, "shame" that the industry has instead pretty much settled on GA, and that's kinda the only metric they accept."

                  Probably the advertisers have been stung by less than honest site operators too many times so prefer an "independent" 3rd party analysis of page and ad views. Google has become all pervasive and "trusted" in that respect so the bar is incredibly high for other to be able to join in.

      2. Marco Fontani

        Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

        I think it's not at all obvious to (m)any of us that "Top Stories" contains only 4 articles: the way that the next row just continues straight after those first 4 articles, I really thought that was a (long) continuation of "Top Stories", and not actually the start of the "Newest first" section.

        I completely "get" where you're coming from, but may I point out that the "classic" homepage has the exact same unit (and has had that for 3+ years) and what's changed between "classic" and "new" for that unit is... merely where the "top stories" title is (moved from right to left) and how the "main" pic is portrayed? :^)

        I take your point that the "separation" between those section isn't as clear to many people as they'd prefer; we did briefly AB test a "dividing header" between the top row and the slightly lower rows, but the result from that was roughly inconclusive. We'll see!

        1. Dave559 Silver badge

          Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

          > I completely "get" where you're coming from, but may I point out that the "classic" homepage has the exact same [Top Stories] unit (and has had that for 3+ years) and what's changed between "classic" and "new" for that unit is... merely where the "top stories" title is (moved from right to left) and how the "main" pic is portrayed? :^)

          Ah, but you can see the code, we can only see what the matrix wants us to perceive!

          On the current normal (desktop) site, I had only ever 'seen' "Top Stories" as an entirely separate column on the right, and had just assumed that the "hero" story (yuck, I hate that term) was either a separate "hero" story in itself or perhaps merely the newest date-sorted story(!).

          (And when browsing on my mobile, that was still that confusion as to where "Top Stories" actually ended and date-sorted stories began (I'd guess at the point where the story titles stopped having accompanying pictures, but without a "harder" divide of some sort, it's perhaps not especially clear (although I suppose also not especially important).)

    2. Nick Kew

      Re: On the layout, for avoidance of doubt

      The new layout is "row based".

      That is BAD. Many of the same faults as 1997-style tables-abuse.

      But I hadn't realised that. Indeed, I gave it a quick test by narrowing the browser window, and four boxes per row went down to two nice and smoothly, which looked like evidence of flexible design.

      I also took the general untidiness of those boxes (looked a bit like packing to move house) as a good sign that it wasn't the work of some deezyner-wannabe from a marketing department.

  6. Nick Ryan Silver badge

    Lines, lines and other visual distractions

    The sheer number of lines are visually distracting - as noted above already the brain will automatically make lines therefore adding so many of them doesn't add anything - in fact it makes it unnecessarily complicated. Not quote as bad as the "stacked chocolate box" of GUI designs that was inflicted on users quite a few years ago.

    The article age and comments indicator are unnecessarily intrusive compared to the content itself. What si more important? The article teaser text or the age and comments indicator?

    The use of JavaScript to load images is unnecessary. JavaScript should be an enhacement, not an implementation.

    1. Marco Fontani

      Re: Lines, lines and other visual distractions

      The use of JavaScript to load images is unnecessary. JavaScript should be an enhacement, not an implementation.

      I agree; unfortunately, this is what allows us to simply NOT load those images at all on device sizes which won't be showing them. I'm not aware of any HTML+CSS-only based solution which allows them to NOT be loaded if they're not going to be shown.

      Even if you set an element to "display:none", they will get loaded, and that's wasted bandwidth for mobile users.

      We have to draw the "JS as enhancement" line somewhere.

      1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

        Re: Lines, lines and other visual distractions

        CSS media selectors can be used and the images shouldn't be loaded unless required. This would require using CSS for the article image which isn't hard, but possibly annoying depending on how the output code works.

        1. Marco Fontani

          Re: Lines, lines and other visual distractions

          CSS media selectors can be used and the images shouldn't be loaded unless required

          You're right, "shouldn't". Unfortunately some browsers still do, and instead of having to go the '90s style of doing browser sniffing, we've decided for a simpler, and mostly better, client-side solution.

          While I understand that this solution doesn't show images to users who keep on disabling the site's javascript, it makes the overall experience a TON better for most mobile users, and that's who we did this mostly for.

  7. Lennart Sorensen

    As if it matters what we think.

    Maybe you could just undo the previous change and go back to a proper page width? I don't want the page to look the same on my phone and my desktop. They have vastly different screen sizes and shapes. I still want my screen width used properly.

    And I am not convinced by the idea of highlighting anything. I go daily to read the days stories in order and don't care to have them shuffled around since that just makes catching up a pain.

    But well what we thought didn't matter last time I have little hope it will this time either.

    Oh and having the area outside the articles on the home page be a clickable link to some add or other sponsored content should be punishable by death. I have only ever clicked on it by accident when changing focus of my windows. If it doesn't look like a button it should not be a button.

    Well at least so far the new layout doesn't seem obviously worse than the current one, unlike the last update. Of course it also doesn't fix any of what the previous update screwed up.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: As if it matters what we think.

      " Of course it also doesn't fix any of what the previous update screwed up."

      I spent some time with filtering to get the last changes (mostly) eliminated. It was a new thing to do - so a learning curve that was sort of justified.

      No way am I going to waste time redoing that filtering to make this new format readable. I don't do things twice for the sake of it.

  8. Laughing Gravy

    Since your last change I view the mobile version of the site on my desktop. For some reason the mobile version of comments no longer works though

  9. GrumpenKraut
    Pint

    I like what I see...

    Looking at the Reg using a lovely big screen: less scrolling and the appearance is somewhat cleaner to my eyes. Could even have five articles in each row, but that may be disliked by others.

  10. Dave 32
    Devil

    If it ain't broke...

    If it ain't broke, then why fix it?

    Well, except for adding more cowbell. You always need more cowbell.

    Dave

  11. John70

    Top Stories

    I'm not quite sure about the background shading on Top Stories when you hover over them especially with the title text also changing to a grayish colour.

    Below top stories, there are 7 stories, 4 per line. However the line with 3 stories, the boxes don't line up with the previous line. The 3 boxes are smaller in width. Does the 4th box area need a dummy box to make it pad out correctly?

  12. Lee D Silver badge

    You've got time to pee about like that, but:

    - No IPv6 still.

    - You still can't link my old posts under previous usernames (but same id!) to the badge/stats

    - I can't search through my own (or another user's) comments to find a particular thing I posted.

  13. Daggerchild Silver badge

    This is a human shop, for human people!

    "our proudly Perl-based homegrown online publishing system"

    Heh - you too huh? :)

    The only improvements I'd want to a UI would be data-based. i.e. make a list of all the things I want to know when I want to look at the main page, and then tick off how many I see straight away, and how much work I need to do to find the others.

    If it was me, I'd tag (and potentially inverse tag) all the articles into categories (as judged by invariant criteria), and then let the user promote or demote these categories so the frontpage is always the data most relevant. And not a huge image, a few ads, and a few promos. Scroll wheel usage is a cost metric.

    No, you don't want me as a beta tester. I care about stuff way too much, and you want to aim at users with money and power. As a general rule, people with money and power don't care.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is a human shop, for human people!

      "our proudly Perl-based homegrown online publishing system"

      One of the advantages of Perl is that you can server-side configure an HTML page to suit the browser. Efficient downloads - and potentially free of Javascript.

      1. Marco Fontani

        Re: This is a human shop, for human people!

        One of the advantages of Perl is that you can server-side configure an HTML page to suit the browser. Efficient downloads - and potentially free of Javascript.

        Sorry, not going to bring back user-agent sniffing for _everything_ unless I really absolutely must, and only for a few things. It's 2018, not 1994.

        We do something like it for our CSS (we serve different CSS to different browsers, to ensure you don't end up downloading too much CSS which is completely useless to your browser), mind you.

        We do some similar tricks for supporting HTML5 for IE8 (so as not to burden most users with loading things like html5shiv) but we've got to draw the line somewhere between "let's fix the rendering for those few silly browsers" and "let's make our HTML templates a huuuuge chunk of IF/ELSE/ELSIF based on which flavour of the year browser they are". Macros can help, sure, but that's not the point.

        Feature detection / progressive enhancement is where things are at, and we can't "just" use HTML+CSS for _everything_. For some things, we require JS. They keep things tidy and sane for us, and they hardly change much for most users.

        Not all users run with ad blockers, noscript, images disabled, etc. etc. There wouldn't be a site at all if that were the case.

  14. A. N. Other 1

    The only feature I don’t like....

    ...is the feint grey box around the article headlines. The lines should be slightly thicker and/or darker. Also, they could be colour coded depending upon the subject.

    (Reading on iPad Pro 9.7)

  15. imanidiot Silver badge

    Not really my kind of design.

    Maybe I'm just slightly autistic, but I LIKE the rigid website design. I don't want the editor to make a giant masthead of breaking news that I find completely unimportant (actually, to be fair, I just dislike giant waste-of-space mastheads in general).

    Most-read sections are also utterly pointless imho. I have my own likes and dislikes. I don't care what others read.

  16. fung0

    Slash 'Week'

    I've been using the /week/ page, which gives me a compact, readable, sequential view of the latest news items. It still seems to work with the new layout. Please don't try to 'improve' it!

    Just remember those words: compact, readable, sequential. Everything else is an impediment, and likely to drive me away.

    1. GrumpenKraut
      Facepalm

      Re: Slash 'Week'

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/Week/

      Uh, oh, ... never noticed! Thanks for pointing me to that one.

      Me ------------>

  17. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Angel

    Hmmm.

    Still no popcorn icon then

  18. J27

    Small Steps

    The max width is still the same as the current fixed-width layout. That might be fine for phones, but on desktops you're still stuck with content that doesn't fill the window. In 2018, that's not really acceptable.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Small Steps

      "[...] but on desktops you're still stuck with content that doesn't fill the window."

      If it filled my close-up 16:9 26" screen I would constantly be moving my head to cover the sides. I like the current fill - except I ignore the right-hand panel***.

      ***there's probably a lot more I don't see - with uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and custom filtering to undo most of the format changes from the last alienation.

      1. eldakka

        Re: Small Steps

        > If it filled my close-up 16:9 26" screen I would constantly be moving my head to cover the sides.

        In which case you can reduce the size of your browser window to a width and height comfortable to you. You don't have to have the window full screen.

        But, unfortunately, the reverse isn't true. There is a certain maximum size to the website, and if you do stretch your window beyond that size, it has no effect other than making empty whitespace around the page in the browser window.

        All websites should expand - or shrink - to fit the width of the browser window. Whether it's 5-point font on a 100" wide window, or 20-point font on a 19" wide window, the website should fill from side-to side. It's why we have resizeable windows and use markup languages that reflow the text to the size of the current viewing area automatically as long as you don't explicitly limit it.

  19. Barry Rueger

    Cool? All ads, all the time!

    Old Reg on LG G4: Reg header + three stories.

    New Reg on LG G4 : Reg header + big honking Microsoft ad, with two words below, at the very bottom of the screen: Top Stories.

    Do I need to explain the problem?

    (Admittedly it seems to be all the rage these days to design mobile sites to showcase advertising at the expense of content.)

  20. Stephen Hurd

    Advertising breaks layout

    Every row with an "---- Advertisement ----" placeholder block gets borked... the remaining headline blocks are narrower and it breaks up the grid fairly badly... makes the adverts stand out (and therefore easier to ignore) while at the same time making the three headlines harder to read.

    I'm also not sure what the difference between a "Top Story" and a "Most Read" one is... maybe "Latest Stories" or "Breaking" or something? If they're called top stories just because they're on the top, I think you need a new name picker outer.

  21. John Crisp

    Horrible

    Nuff said.

    1. John Crisp

      Re: Horrible

      Actually, to be constructive.

      Mainly I read on mobile so.....

      I don't want images. They do nothing but waste screen real estate. A decent article title suffices (and I love the funny ones)

      I do want a simple compact list of headlines that I can scroll through quickly. My time is more precious than yours.

      The new version is far too widely spaced and takes too long to scroll through. Like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

      I don't want your suggestions. I like to make up my own mind what to read thanks. Equal weight to stories. Credit me with some intelligence.

      I just want a simple chronological plain text list of articles. Simples. For you, and me.

      /ends

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