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Comment by beardedaussie | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is the UX of this page hostile?

I have to scroll my scroll-wheel way too many times just to get to the next section, I couldn't even drag their little scroll indicator to move between them.

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I only clicked because I was hoping the page would be a cool relic from the 90s but instead I was visually assaulted by four full screen autoplay videos and a cookie pop up obstructing 75% of the laggy page. Would not visit again.

Ironically it's the kind of terrible modern UX design that would make me want to use classic Winamp in the first place (if foobar2000 wasn't a thing).

Whoever is Winamp today, what they want to revive is not their old cool audio player, but just ride on the name and sell some modern piece of crap that has nothing to do with classic Winamp.

I imagine that in the age of streaming music it would be a hard sell to produce a new offline music player.

Yeah, and we don't really need one, either. Winamp5 and VLC and others all still work fine for those of us who keep offline collections.

I do both: stream and play offline stuff. For the former, I use YouTube Music, which is incredibly awful, but at least it does work.

The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.

For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.

Let's be serious, you're not the target market. Anyone who is using minimalist software is not the target market for any corporate software. The fact it would drive you away is a feature and not bug.

Pretty pointless to call it "winamp" if they're not targeting that kind of user.

Winamp was never a minimalistic player, it was one of the feature rich players. It allowed for all the UX/UI hacking you could get wayback then. It's just compared to today it was really simple.

You don't have to be minimalist to perform well. Like most other software from the era of 32MB-of-memory Windows desktops with two-digit-Mhz single-core processors, it had to be lean or everyone would hate it. That doesn't mean lacking features.

It wasn't lean in comparison to other MP3 players at the time. This is the thing I think people are forgetting. It was in comparison pretty much what that website is promising.

What MP3 players? Windows Media Player with the MP3 codec installed on your system? I don't recall there being a lot of options for Windows, at the time.

There were a few options. Napster for one. It's just the reason we don't remember is because we all installed Winamp and forgot about the rest. I spent more time looking for skins for Winamp that I did a replacement for it.

https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.

As someone who at the time had a Pentium processor at 100Mhz and 32Mb of RAM, I feel confident enough to say that Winamp was lean as hell.

Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.

Not even at 8000 hz in ZSNES? Also, by setting the frameskip to "2" the games were prefectly playable.

A Pentium 100 with 32 MB was a monster box.

If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.

There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.

The OS got in my way, rather than the player, trying to use 486 machines as mp3 "jukeboxes" back in the day—"the day" being when high-hundreds Mhz single-core machines were the norm, and 486s could be had at garage sales and such practically for free.

MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.

It was featureful but it was also high-performance. It was originally popular because it could play MP3s on systems where other players couldn't keep up.

...and the target audience has probably never even used or heard of Winamp, so if they're trying to ride on the name with that audience, it's going to be another fail.

Lots of people who originally used Winamp way back when are using Spotify, Deezer, etc. The target audience isn't an age group but people who want that style of music app.

For you my friend. https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.winamp.com/

A breath of fresh air. When will they learn...

Everything wrong with the current web has been put into a single page. It should be used as benchmark on how bad you can design.

Perhaps you haven't seen https://userinyerface.com

Yeah one of the bad landing pages.

1) Explains nothing: "something big is happening."

2) Hides the scrollbar

3) Spikes the CPU usage

I closed the tab after this but I'm sure there is more :/

The "new" owner of winamp has been saying they're about to unleash something awesome ever since about 2014 or so.

I would love to join the discussion but it would seem this website exceeds the performance capabilities of my 4k capable gaming rig.

I'm on a 1080 rig. It was bad, it was't that bad. But I also pause animations too.

I had no troubles rendering this on my phone while others are struggling with gaming PCs. Love the hyperbole in the comments sections sometimes.

It isn't hyperbole though. I have a gaming laptop here. Just opening the site in a new tab hanged my browser for nearly a minute.

My comment was tongue in cheek, but the site did lock up my browser and ran at < 5 frames per second when it did load, I couldn't scroll to actually see the full site, so not exactly hyperbole.

To be fair, you get a different experience on mobile than desktop. Turning on responsive mode and I can scroll the site, with it off, I have no idea what it;s doing but it eventually scrolled to the bottom, although Im not sure what that white bar was trying to represent ... just kinda randomly moved

It literally hangs my browser for ~10 seconds when it opens.

My browser full on _freezed_ for a couple of seconds while loading this page. And indeed, I have to scroll multiple times to make anything happen on the page.

Same, I thought it got stuck on a blank blue page so tried to close it and realised my browser is frozen.

It brought my S20+ to it's knees which came as a big surprise.

I see a large box that simply has two buttons: "Accept" and "Decline".

What am I accepting or declining? Does it even matter at this point?

A kind of Kafkaesque webdesign

Not only you and not only this issue: On my Fennec browser on Android it was also impossible to scroll because rendering seemed really slow. So I think they overdid that revamping a bit.

The site brought my S10+ to a screeching halt. I had to force-kill Harmonic, the HN client I use on my phone, just to get out of it. Site preloading via an in-app webview is nice until you happen upon a site like this.

Not only that, but during some sections, the scroll indicator bounces around. I think they're trying to evoke the impression of a volume meter, and doing so incredibly poorly. They also broke keyboard navigation, so I can't even page-up/page-down past it.

No, it is not just you. If this is a harbinger of what this new winamp will look like, ugh.

Doubt it to be honest, if they're rebuilding Winamp from scratch then maybe. Otherwise, I'd expect it to be built on top of the existing Winamp source code which is all C++ and not extremely over designed CSS and Javascript

The webpage gives me exactly zero expectation that this will be in any way based on the original Winamp.

Furthermore, the original Winamp was Windows-only. For anything like this to be successful today it needs to be a webapp and/or a mobile app, which more than likely means starting from scratch.

Good points about needing to launch on multiple platforms, that might indeed mean it'll be rewritten.

We'll see

Bloated, yet overly simplistic? Maybe this is really just the relaunch of the Zune player

It literally freezes my browser when opening it.

Same. I thought Chrome crashed, but it stalled for just 5 seconds.

Wait, there's a scroll wheel, i thought it was a looping video...

Website is unusable on my Pixel 3 so I have no idea how they've butchered Winamp, which is probably something I should be thankful for

The website also has no screenshots and is advertising a private beta, so we have no idea how they've butchered Winamp either.

I'm using Brave with the ad and tracking blockers turned up, and this page won't even load at all. Just a black screen.

If you're on mobile, you may not have waited long enough. On Android Brave it took more than 5 but less than 10 seconds to load on my phone.

What? I had no idea you could scroll.. I can only see the background+heading+paragraph.. nothing happens when I scroll.. Guess Firefox ESR is too outdated for the "new winamp".

Can't wait for the new "app" requiring a few gigs of ram and the latest OS...

I'm very curious to see what this is about, but it doesn't works with my browser.

It easily took 10 seconds to fully load and render on my desktop. I imagine it takes quite a bit more if you're on mobile.

Yeah it's pretty dark. The scrolling appears to be time-based. After you spend x milliseconds on a section, it'll let you move onto the next with any scroll event.

Have you ever visited an Apple product page?

At least Apple's product pages use normal scroll functionality. This one is completely broken.

Why do web pages have to be so… exciting?

A bit of a cross between exceptionalism and the ever increasing feature scope of browsers. We're delivering fully fledged 3D video games and video streaming apps via the web, pretty much anything is possible, and marketing/design/product development teams can see that and want to leverage it.

I much prefer simple text/css websites, but here we are in 2021, where the web browser is the most ubiquitous software delivery platform on the planet.

I cannot open the page, my browser (Chromium) just freezes.

It's a bad landing page, imho.

Works fine with js disabled

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