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Comment by atgm | Hacker News Reader

I liked slashdot more when it was plain, quick-loading HTML. I liked most sites more when they were plain, quick-loading HTML. Ain't It Cool News is the only other one coming to mind at the moment, though.

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Reddit has been pushing it these days, and its performance has been awful for a while now (due mostly to growing pains, I reckon), but their aesthetic is still pretty plain. And of course this site definitely qualifies!

It's not so much the design aesthetic as performance for me. Sometimes browsers just seem to choke or take more time on complicated AJAX for something as simple as making a comment.

Hacker News is great in that respect -- it's all simple and very responsive.

I just visited Ain’t It Cool News for the first time and I don’t really understand what’s plain about it. It’s ugly and was slowly loading for me.

It used to be quicker -- I was saying it was an example of one of those sites that was better before the "Web 2.0 redesign."

Google's Marissa Mayer said it best: The web likes to be square. Rounded corners and other elements slows down a site.

I don't doubt that she said this, but I can't find the quote by Googling, and I would love to see it for myself, in context. Can you provide a link? Thanks!

Huh, why would that be? Drawing a round corner is in fact more complex than drawing a square one, but surely for a few dozen rounded corners the number of additional CPU cycles spent pales in comparison to things like anti-aliased font rendering, calculating CSS box model layouts, decompressing gzipped contents and the myriad of other tasks that a browser has to perform during loading and rendering of a web site nowadays.

For 4 rounded corners you probably need to download 4 images. Thats 4 extra connections to the server to connect to, download, process.

It isn't the processor time that is taking longer its the transfer time.

Not anymore you don't.

Most modern browsers (all but IE I believe) will let you round corners with CSS. An extra line or so of CSS is hardly much of a transfer overhead.

I believe current thinking (on non-enterprise sites anyway) is to let the IE people have their square corners, and those on new browsers get all the curvy goodness.

Yes, that is why I added the probably. The vast majority of rounded corners I see are still done with images however.

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