Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That site is horrible. First it scrolls horizontally and then it switches to vertical towards the end. Why do "designers" have to reinvent simple things again and again? Is there nothing better to do?

I'd argue while the UX is questionable (panning the page right to left while the user scroll down), the website loads pretty fast, which is a good thing, and the scrolling is smooth. The page also weights less than 14 MB.

Here is an example of horrible UX plus horrible loading time plus janky scrolling brought you by Google. 60 seconds after the page was open the content of the top of the page was still not done loading (72MB before I closed the page).

https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_3

I think it's hardly just a matter of design here.

>less than 14 MB

It's kind of crazy to me that even that's considered low

I remember when Firefox 2.0 came out, it was 6 MB.

Way more impressive, though, was Opera 9 at 5 MB, which, unlike Firefox, also had a built-in email client, IRC client, download manager, BitTorrent client, ad blocker, debugger (Firebug was an extension at the time), sync, and several other impressive features.

Agree. And that people feel the need to say "At least it works without Javascript". Our standards have become really low. I would argue that for product sites like this we have massively regressed over the last 10-15 years. Sites that used be easy to read and find information have become a nightmare of one useful paragraph per page.

Since this is a product page, I wonder how much of that 14MB is binary data vs. how much is HMTL/JS/CSS. Binary stuff tends to inflate sizes by a pretty big amount, and 14MB wouldn't be big if you've got a lot of high-resolution hero shots. 14MB bundle size would be ridiculous, though.

Well, I guess it's a little crazy if all you were expecting was 8-bit graphics. But for content like that, yeah, I'm amazed it fits in 14MB.

It’s mostly high-res images, so I think that might be OK in this case.

Why do they need these monster images?

So it looks nice when people browse the website on high-resolution screens?

I guess this is a good example of what's wrong with today's web designs. There is almost no content on the page,scrolling is f...ed Up, but we get some nice looking high res images.

I get horrible scrolling on the Apple one and smooth as butter on the Google one. This is Chrome on a 2013 MBP OSX Mojave. I will say that the Google one takes way too long to load things for sure.

Less than 14mb is low? I don't see why that page should be more than 1mb or just around that

> Less than 14mb is low? I don't see why that page should be more than 1mb or just around that

If you carefully read my message, nowhere I'm saying 14MB (not mb) is "low".

I agree, but I gotta give it to them that it works great with javascript disabled. Becomes a normal, vertical-scroll website. Better that with javascript in my opinion.

I did that for many years but got fed up of landing on blogs that would display a blank page because you absolutely need javascript to render a few paragraphs of text in a browser.

Maybe it should be a vertical scroll site no matter what? What does horizontal scrolling add?

I couldn't agree more, why is a simple vertically scrolling page something that needs to be "spiced" up? I couldn't find a way to swipe on my ThinkPad non-touch laptop. I ended up using right arrow keys.

Horizontal scrolling...you try it once because you think it might be cool - then you realise somethings are an archetype that shouldn't be played with, like vertical scrolling websites.

The first marketing picture shows a landscape iPad as the main image to help connect you to the fact that it's not a tablet, but a computer. I think the side scrolling is conscious choice which is supposed to connect you to that fact as well. I don't expect the horizontal scrolling decision will carry on longer than this page.

Yup, this is what happens when you have a in-house design department (I don't know if Apple does though to be honest). They always need to be working on something which means they will always be trying out new things, for better or worse. It's how we ended up with the YouTube and reddit redesigns, both universally disliked.

Even worse, agencies will now see side-scrolling websites as "in" again. Expect to see a return of the dreaded side-scrolling corporate website :-P

Why does using two-finger scroll vertically result in the page moving sideways? I think my touchpad driver is messed up, better visit the genius bar.

Hey on IE it just scrolls vertically from start to end. To bad the rest of IE sucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com