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Comment by Horatius | Hacker News Reader

Ugh! What a horrible UI revision. Mobile has completely destroyed web design for anything larger than an iPhone. Stupid round pictures? Really? (And thousands of clean square ones now vignetted and made to look stupid against a round background?) Items in the Areas of Interest list chopped off with a ... and so made illegible? More empty white space pushing actual data off the bottom of the screen? The Metrics section used to be extremely interesting, with comparative data from many fields; that looks to be completely gone -- how could something that useful be eliminated? [Wait, the "learn more" page says the subcategories are still there in the left column, but I don't see any left column.] Come on, Google. Don't any of your people use actual computers any more?

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Agreed completely. More insulting is the fact that this is dumbing-down of Google Scholar, and so presumably aimed at a demographic of above-average intelligence and emphasis on content compared to the typical computer user.

"Cite" and "Save" are self-explanatory, icons are not. They're also unusual on a line with plenty of other text (which no doubt they would now decide to "iconify" in the future...)

I've seen enough of this trend that phrases like "cleaner look" make me think of an empty room left behind by someone who decided to throw away everything you need --- bland and useless. It's beyond stupid.

I suppose we should be overjoyed anyway. This update means that Google is not shutting Scholar down - at the very least, not today. Knowing their habit of axing products that do not quite attain civilization-level scale, it's always a grim possibility I keep in mind.

In Google Scholar - just a few days ago - it used to highlight whatever search term you used on the main page. Did this change with the new version? Because when I search "case law" now, when I go into a particular case, the search term is no longer highlighted.

Meh, I just looked at Scholar for the first time in ages (since I am no longer a scholar). The information density looks as high as it always has been -- even if they are claiming to have the dreaded "cleaner design".

I agree that text is better than an icons, especlally the misleading "quote" icon that actually means "cite" -- so thank heavens for tooltips (which presumably work only on desktop).

What is awesome is that there are these complaints to begin with. While I was still in academia, I'd have loved to have access to this sort of thing.

We could search back then. It was a paid service, involved a human who actually did the searches as a service, and took several days to get you your results. You did contact them online, so there's that!

But, today, a gripe is needing to hover over an icon to read the tooltip. That is truly awesome, in every sense of the word.

As an aside, when people say that the Internet was better back before commercialization, they are telling horrible lies. No, no it was not. It was pretty horrible and computers pretty much sucked. The hardware, network, and content are much better today.

In 2017, I don't understand why UIs are not totally configurable by now. It should be clear that people have different tastes. I am a fan of full-text dense interfaces a la Reddit but I know I am in a minority. I wish I could activate a content-only CSS.

Well, I do understand actually. It is about ads revenue. Fuck that. I wish this ecosystem finally dies.

It's not about ad revenue, it's about people almost never taking the time to configure things they can configure, and that if you don't use configuration options, they are distracting/can cause bugs.

It should be configured in the browser: I want to display news items this way, I want my image galleries that way, I want my video player with that llama interface...

Start paying for software then. (Not just directed towards you, but also towards anyone who has these thoughts. That's the only way we get off this model, by showing other models are profitable as well)

So much paid software has awful interfaces as well though

So much free software does as well: see facebook.

Not for software, for content and services. Yes that would be a much saner way of doing things.

I wish I could activate a content-only CSS.

You can use userscripts and CSS in the browser, and/or rewriting MITM proxies (when the browser is not as featureful or easy to control), although personally the combination of usefulness and annoyance has to be quite high before I start trying to restyle a site --- not very many qualify.

CSS completely off also tends to produce good results, but usually not for "app-ish" pages.

Google Scholar isn't the worst case of it, but Material Design is making a lot of the Web very unpleasant. Over-saturated, garish colors, low-contrast text, and too much animation (not accessible to people who have trouble with visual motion). Round profile pictures are also not a good trend -- users' images should never be edited without their permission, because some of them depend on being square. MD could be fixed by toning it down a little. (Ask "how can I minimize the animation and colors as much as possible?" No delays, sudden fast movement, or movement from areas of the page that don't need immediate attention.)

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