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Comment by psacawa | Hacker News Reader

Good:

- Sidebar for navigation

Bad:

- Wasted screen space

- Other languages are not available as a simple anchor tag anymore. They are hidden behind <button> elements. It's annoying for readers who consult their own language and en.wikipedia.org in the same session. It breaks my bookmarklet to change languages, which depended on something like `document.querySelectorAll('a')`

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> Wasted screen space

Don't fall for that mental trap. White space is not wasted space.

Not always, but it often is. Zoomed to 200% the new design is fine though. Content fills the entire screen and the floating table of contents disappears. Works for me at least.

That suggests to me that you're either not sitting the correct distance away from your display, and/or your display's DPI settings are wrong.

I don't know if there's a "correct" distance, but I do have the monitor set fairly far back. Text is still perfectly readable at 100% it just doesn't fill the screen.

And now the text is huge. Sounds like you either are sitting too far away from your monitor, or need to have your eyes tested if that actually feels comfortable.

The text is huge, but it at least fits with screen. I do have the monitor set back, but not so far that text at 100% is unreadable.

Humans read best when a line is around 10 words long. Longer, and it's easy to lose which line you're on when you go to the next one. The sidebar collapses if you resize to a narrower window, so I wouldn't call it wasted.

Yes, switching languages not being a single click any more is a major usability regression. They should at least allow to configure a set of “favorite” languages that can be directly accessed.

Even in the new design the line length is way too long. I get complaints about wasted screen space, but you really don't want lines of text blasting all the way across the screen either.

Fully agree. I always downsized my window to read a Wikipedia article (I use fairly large desktop monitors, but not a widescreen). The sentences were comically large making it really hard to see what the next line is.

Even in the new design they're still a bit larger than what I'd like.

> - Wasted screen space

Don't worry, it will soon be filled with solicitations for donations.

And if they ever decide to add side banners you could probably permanently disable them in your preferences, just as you can disable the top banner asking for donations.

Also for some reason they made links even brighter blue

it does not only break your bookmarklet, but even vimium [1] is unable to focus the language selection. this is awful.

[1] https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c

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