Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this page is a mess - here's an element based breakdown of the switching elements in their presentation:

MSFT:

- nav 1

- nav 2

- header with what sounds like a call to action, but no button to buy?

- hero image with text overlaid that has terrible contrast nobody will read

- inter-page menus with some insane zooming function that scared my browser

- another hero image

- 3 columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.

- another hero image

- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.

- another hero image

- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.

- 2 columns marketing other products? maybe buttons? yes - those little ">" things mean they're clickable i guess.

- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? ok now they're buttons. but there's no ">"?

- another hero image with a price action, no button to click to follow the action! WTF!

VS vs the iPad Pro http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ which is single column and nav consistent throughout.

As the old quote goes "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter."

Feels rushed.

Page on a full sized browser on a 13" screen with ublock:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gmyi3jjwq25w0d1/surface_book.png?d...

Similarly, on a 13" 1080p chromebook, I get this: http://i.imgur.com/pGhjAwQ.png

Turning uBlock off didn't seem to help at all.

Edit: after letting it load for 3+ minutes, the page does load successfully, giving this: http://i.imgur.com/qnNlvYj.png So maybe it does work! Eventually.

Pretty sure it's just one of their CDN's failing.

How can we trust Microsoft Azure then?! Not even able to serve their own product

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/assets/... is resolving to 2600:1409:a:18c::2768, which is owned by Akamai.

But your point still stands: even Microsoft doesn't trust Azure's CDN offering.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has always relied on Akamai as their CDN. They gave up on rolling out their own CDN a while ago, which makes sense.

Isn't the Azure CDN offering through Akamai?

Isn't everyone's CDN offering through Akamai these days?

Should've used IE6

They are getting pounded with traffic, give it a minute.

didn't find out why but resizing the browser (from fullscreen to something smaller) fixed this issue. Of course you can resize it back to fullscreen afterwards.

Apple isn't exactly who I would point to as a good comparison. They have plenty of overdesigned pages: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

I agree that Apple overdesigns too, but the DIRECT competition of the Surface Book is the Apple page I referenced.

Can't use mouse-scroll on this page, only arrow keys.

I'm able to scroll, but it just move me to the next part of the "keynote," and not down the page.

Disable JS on Apple.com and reload the pages. They should render flawlessly and give you back responsiveness, without the animations.

(I'm talking about their iPad Pro and Mac Pro product pages, not necessarily the whole site.)

You think the above site is acceptable because it works well if you disable JavaScript?

Yes. For me it makes no difference because JS is not enabled. So for my use case, it is acceptable. Visit the Surface Book page without JS. You'll see it renders perfectly fine and all the information is there!

Flash?! Wow, I wasn't expecting that from Apple.

That's not flash, it's just video:

http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac-pro/2013/16C1b6b5-1d91-...

It shows up with a Flash "click to play" icon on my browser (FF under Win7.)

So the Surface Book must be a fantastic device. Given that there's seems nothing else to hate about ...

Since the presentation of information is so broken that we have no clue what it is, hating on the web page is pretty much the only thing to hate about.

it's contradictory to have a premium device such as the Book & then have a basic webpage that doesn't load.

Traffic on launch day should not be a problem. They've been advertising microsoft Azure and the infrastructure for years. If you are web startup and launching, this is a bad sign. Better go with other providers who can scale properly

Took a while to load but looks OK now.

Servers / CDNs probably were hammered.

Microsoft need to add this to their jQuery to fix the layout issues:

$(window).trigger('resize');

You give all this solid critique but didn't consider that maybe some assets (CSS, JavaScript) were not getting properly included/cached/invalidated? That shit happens to even companies at the scale of Microsoft. But rather than waiting a few minutes and see whether it is fixed you immediately scream "IT'S NOT WORKING! LOOKS HORRIBLE! LOL MICROSOFT! APPLE DOES IT BETTER". You are like a stereotype head-of-QA. ;)

When it's all said and done for me the website is over 6MB, that's not acceptable!

Came here to say this, i was testing my work on a smaller window and page is a complete mess !

Blocking microsoft-int.com using NoScript fixes the page for me.

Renders fine in Firefox with uBlock: http://i.imgur.com/G7XeKs9.jpg

ugh yes finding it almost impossible to scroll through this page

I'm pretty sure it's a Safari problem (El capitan update I suppose) but I was actually getting massive lag earlier on that iPad Pro page. Upvoted you though be have you're right and your analysis is spot on.

Nope, I'm seeing messed up pages on chrome too.

EDIT: So the page finally loads properly, I guess for some reason it takes forever to load the images. The biggest file is a 3.5MB mp4 while all other images are under 700KB. And the loading speed doesn't change back to normal even with cache enabled. It could be some problematic static file routing and controls.

Looks like crap on IE also.

(Disclaimer: I don't use IE, I just have it available when I need to check something. I don't want people to get the wrong idea.)

No, the problem is that the pictures take ages to load and until they have loaded, the page is completely garbled. It's the same in Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

When I view the iPad Pro page on Firefox latest with NoScript blocking Apple.com, it is much more responsive than when JS is on.

Respect for detailed analysis and quote.

Turn off JS. Then it works fine. I think their servers are hammered.

Agreed. Adblock totally breaks the rendering as well.

I’m on mobile. More so than usual?

Wow, so that's what's causing that. Even when I disable Adblock, while the page is loading for 20+ seconds on this high-end iMac the formatting is completely botched (in Chrome).

Looks like a doge meme

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