A UI/UX expert trying to drive new user engagement has a different definition of "better" than one trying to lengthen the average user-session length of "power users" above some usage threshold, for a random example. Or someone optimizing the new user sign-up flow.
If the goal is information density, then yes, whitespace can often be antithetical to that. If you are trying to make money with a website/app, increasing whitespace can be done for any of a myriad of reasons depending on business goals.
The idea of having one answer to "is whitespace better," and saying "experts say yes but I say no" is just such a myopic view of the world of interface design...
You could say the same thing about the software developers who work on these websites.
I pray they keep around the alternatives like this for a dense display format on desktop.
For some reason i'm noticing this happen on a ton of different platforms and I seriously don't like it. I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space
But devs have unilaterally decided that bigger screens and more powerful hardware is for them to hog and not for you to do efficient/more things in the same time.
I would honestly pay good money for a browser that removed 95% of whitespace on most sites.
If you use Ctrl-+ to make the text larger, both FF and Chrome already remember how large you made it and use that size every time you visit that site from then on. What am I missing?
Edit: I retested it on Firefox and at least there I had a decent comment depth.
It’s so easy to design something for designs sake while ignoring the fundamental reasons people use the site - first and foremost the content, not the site looking visually good or some clever card pattern or other UI concept.
The whole reason Digg got blasted was how it lost information density and jumped on the ‘web 2.0’ bandwagon without improving the user experience.
They formalized power users by giving them outsized control of content, and that is what drove people off the platform, not because the site was less pretty...
But I checked, and the tweet boxes themselves are a bit wider and a bit taller in the redesign. Even so, though, I can see just as many text-heavy tweets on screen with the new UI as with the old one because the UI itself wastes less screen real estate - and that's with the second-smallest, default font option. The same applies to tweets with heavy picture use: I can see a larger portion of a chopped-off tweet with the redesign than I can with the old desktop UI. With the smallest font size option, it's not even a contest and the redesign wins handily.
However, the user-agent spoofing works because it fakes IE11 on Windows 7 and it triggers a server-side override.
rweb_optin=off
dnt=1
and then navigating to https://twitter.com/i/directory then your user profile via the settings dropdown (next to [tweet]) seems to set you back to Legacy Twitter permanently without breaking your user agent.