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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

Great write up. Glad to see they're making some changes as the current interface still feels like 2005 with the main feed at 500px wide. And as always, dark mode is welcome.

I really hope this helps performance on the site. In the past year or so I've been noticing that when the page sits in an unfocused tab for a while, clicking back usually takes 20+ seconds to actually load and I'm stuck at a white screen. It actually locks up the tab pretty well too, so navigating to other addresses and such takes a pretty long time.

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About every 3 minutes I went a little mad with the new interface. With the old one, photos open, and you can click almost anywhere to close them.

With the new (desktop) interface, you have to find the X to close the photo. No, no, not the X you find on the top right of every other interface ever. This time it's on the top left!

You mean they didn't just use Fancybox like everyone else? /s

But yeah, that's annoying. We've had lightboxes for like 15 years now and people still can't get it right.

> top right of every other interface ever.

That doesn’t sound right.

Mac OS and at least some Linux desktop environments have buttons at top left.

Still, I agree with your general point: why change away from a tradition for little to negative benefit?

I've been using the new Facebook and the interface is even slower than before. It also feels (may not actually be) less information-dense, forcing me to interact with the page more to see the same information, compounding the problem.

This is on a i7 laptop.

Interesting to hear. I haven't gotten the new interface yet, so time will tell.

I think we need to shift back to 4:3 displays. Widescreen is great for consuming content, but we lose so much vertical space.

> forcing me to interact with the page more to see the same information

Product Lead to Zuck: user engagement up 5% after this update!

Zuck: great, here's your bonus check

This is the only reasonable explanation. The user density is terrible as GP said.

> And as always, dark mode is welcome.

I don't get this infatuation with dark mode, beyond it looking cool. People claim it helps with eye strain, but a brighter background constricts your pupils, improving focus.

Just wanted to point out you might’ve pasted the wrong snippet, which is about eBay’s policies.

Oops! Thanks for the catch.

In my experience light mode will work fine on things like e-paper displays, but when you have an emissive or transmissive display the bright light can be straining.

I also feel like dark mode highlights text more, making it easier to identify the text. If I use light mode in text editors I get completely lost very quickly.

It never occurred to me that this could be the reason for dark mode blurriness, but it makes sense intuitively. (Think you mean "constricts" rather than "dilates" though.)

Yup, you're right; they constrict. I found this Stackexchange post that goes into far better detail than I did: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/15152

The only thing I have to add is you can think of constricted pupils like a pin-hole camera or a higher f-number on a camera aperture. You need brighter light, but the depth of field is wider.

I think people might have different sensitivities to this issue. Before I changed everything to dark mode, I had trouble concentrating on a bright screen especially in a dimly lit room. Dark mode feels like a total game changer for my productivity.

OLED

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