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> Animation makes this even worse, because the user has to sit and wait while the site slowly delivers information in animated word-sized chunks.

This is exactly what pissed me off within the first 3 seconds, that there is no way to see everything they have to say without waiting until the animation goes whole cycle and then waiting some more to make sure I didn't miss anything.

It looks like they took design tips from people optimizing for addictiveness, not usefulness. Hint: you don't need their tips if you are a FOSS project and actually lose money on people spending more time on your site than necessary.

> addictiveness

How so? The forced smooth scrolling thing makes reading the page really annoying, and I strongly feel like closing it and never opening it again.

Maybe addictiveness was a bad word.

I was under impression that rewarding people for patiently watching your animations may be an attempt at exploiting Sunken Cost Fallacy or even just giving them some time to forget about the rest of the world.

The reason I thought that was because this site somehow reminds me of all the sites nagging me to buy something and I suppose there are reasons why those behave the way they do.

Hi! You can move through animations thanks to the slider below it. So you can jump to the animation you want to see again.

On the other hand, a home page is just that...the main page any kind of visitors will arrive, from great IT guys (as you) to no-IT guys at all. If you know about the project already it's pretty obvious the level of the info in the home page has been lowered to ease the understanding of the scope of the project. Tell a non-IT guy we're creating an operating system clone aiming NT architecture and they won't catch what is this about at all. All the tech details are waiting you in the new "Developing" section of the site then ;)

Frankly, those animations are so simple that they could be replaced with static images (the first one would need a split in two). This way I can choose which one to watch simply by moving my eyeballs or maybe scrolling in case of small screens. Two simple, widely know and efficient interfaces.

Maybe I shouldn't be too harsh, after all it was me who as a teenager hacked this panel displaying information about currently selected file in Windows 98 Explorer to slide in/out during navigation like menus in StarCraft, but c'mon - it's one thing to create such stuff and another to actually really use it. Even I couldn't bear those sliding panels for long :)

Please, at least get rid of the scroll hijacking. It is extremely annoying. Also why are you serving 4K lines of CSS, embedded on every page? I also hope you could use a static site generator instead of Drupal (which definitely is an overkill for such a site).

they have removed some animations now.

> providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system.

I actually couldn't find that in the new website. I wondered what they're targeting, and I couldn't find it.

The kernel targets the Windows NT 5.2 (Server 2003 + XP 64-bit) ABI, which is backwards compatible with NT 5.0 (2000) and 5.1 (XP) drivers as well.[1]

The userland API and ABI always targets the current version of Windows, which is presently Windows NT 10.0 (Windows 10 + Server 2016)[2], and should be backwards compatible with applications designed for any previous version of NT (there's some support for DOS, 16-bit Windows, and Windows 9x too. Thanks to borrowing code from Wine, it tends to actually have a higher compatibility with applications from these eras than the current version of Windows does!)

[1] In general, Microsoft Windows x.y versions tend to be backwards compatible with drivers for all previous versions of X. For example, Server 2003 is 5.2, thus backwards compatible with 2000 and XP drivers. Windows 10 is a special case now; unless declared by an application manifest as explicitly Windows 10 aware, it lies to applications by claiming to be Windows 8.1, or NT 6.3. This way, driver installers can see that first component of the Windows version being 6 and assume compatibility; Windows 10 is still compatible with all drivers from Vista, 7, and 8.x, even though they bumped the internal version to 10.0 to match the marketing name.

[2] As of the present, this only applies to the classic Desktop APIs. Support for Metro/Modern/Universal (whatever name they pick this week...) is not planned nor in development. Given the very limited set of apps (pretty much just Google Chrome) for this API outside of the Windows Store, I don't find it likely this will change.

Disclaimer: I am not an authority of ReactOS, I've just followed the project for a long time. I need to figure out where this info has gone in the current web site design...

Thanks for the feedback. Right now in the main page you can see the "Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That's ReactOS. Not just an Open but also a Free operating system." Probably it should link to the FAQs under "Discover More" if anyone is interested in the Technical details. I am noting down to perform the change asap, because it looks as a nice improvement. Thanks!

Hi Pavlov! We hoped also that the tide of the "bloated info" came back during these latest 10 years...and we didn't have any luck :) Otherwise we wouldn't have spent too much work on the new ReactOS website. We've replaced the "Screenshot" to a "Gallery" link, which I personally think it is much better. Try to find the "Gallery" in the older one ;) Legal links are coming, but to mention some we've added a legal link needed by the German Law (that we didn't include in the past). For us sadly asking people to join us is not "gratuitous" but a serious need as we don't have any support of companies. We're the first ones willing to remove the "Help us fundraising", "Join us"...but sadly we're probably one of the biggest open source projects out there without any kind of support but the Community one. Btw, it is planed to create a "hide the slideshow" via button or once registered. On the other hand, the current information quality ranges from newbies to high skilled developers, while the old information one was just focused to (and understandable by) developers. Density is not synonym of quality, and our old site had tons of info and pages duplicated, with some of them just reachable through one link. The new site pretends to ease the contact for newcomers while greatly increase the level of the info as you move deeper. The fact is that the new site links to more Wiki articles, and have more info than the old one. Stats say!Just under its proper category. Thanks for your feedback.

> called PowerPoint presentations "chart junk"

Not quite. "Chartjunk" is Tufte's term for anything in a chart that doesn't communicate information. PowerPoint presentations can be (and often are) bad in ways that have nothing to do with chartjunk, and lots of chartjunk occurs outside PowerPoint presentations.

I definitely like the old site more. The new design feels like yet another generic "me too" startup-ish marketing site, of which I think there are far too many today. To me, the large fonts, animations, and images are like the visual equivalent of screaming --- it certainly catches attention, but quickly tires the viewer. The old site feels far more sedate and pleasant.

I wonder if I'm getting old, or if attention spans are getting shorter, because the new site is quite optimised for the latter.

Similar thoughts I had for a different free software project's site redesign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512772

I spent a good three minutes on the new website without fully understanding what this was about. A Linux distro? Something related to React.js? And why the hell is everything bouncing around every time I click a link?

On the old website I found everything I needed to know in 0.2 seconds. Didn't even have to click on anything.

Maybe the old website catered to developers while the new one to users. The old site didn't have a text to focus on. While the new one moved my eyes directly to "Do you think" animation. Actually made me interested to download the OS.

Years ago there was a project to redo the site, which I even participated in. Why did they abandon that effort and go with this?

"high information density"?

This is why 99% of programmers shouldn't be involved in design.