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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

This site is a good example of what a site should not be. It is the antithesis of what winamp was.

I was also caught off guard by this horror. I was expecting a really lean and to the point website that reflects the qualities of the original Winamp.

This really DOESN'T whip the llamma's ass.

Here's the original website in 1998 for reference.

https://web.archive.org/web/19981205015145/http://winamp.com...

The more I look at it, the more I hate the modern web. It's madness.

I don't love the old site, either.

But the new one is indeed a horror. I cannot wait to hate the way they ruin winamp, one of the all-time great programs.

Unpopular opinion: there are bad examples, just like with any design trend, but the basic layout scheme for most websites for desktop use peaked with the "thin top bar & nav, 2-3 columns, left of which may also be navigation" standard style of the mid to late '00s.

Other designs are more convenient if you want a very easy-to-write responsive layout, and some sites do actually need something different, but that was as good as we've seen, in general, for desktop. You can't do it now because it "looks old" and people will assume your site is defunct, but it's the best.

Every time I get a flashy new modern design pop up, I'll just assume it will be gone in a year or so I just close the tab and try to move on to the next one..

Sometimes I'd get some bootstrappy looking website.. I assume not even half the buttons on that page work, don't even bother trying anymore, and move on..

I assume most modern web is defunct.

Strongly agree and thought I was alone in this thinking. A flashy new web-design makes me immediately think "VC, smoke and mirrors salesy BS, here today gone tomorrow". If I don't see links to "Screenshots" "Docs" and "News" immediately in my view on the landing page, I peel out.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

The new one sucks, but the old one sucks too imo. I know you don't say old websites were great but I've seen alot of people saying that and yet their examples are bad too, usually they look simple and efficient but they're horrible, like spanning the whole page or not enough empty spaces or bad use of colors.

Hey if empty spaces and bad use of colors are all you can complain about, then that's a win IMO. At least it still works, which only time will tell for current websites. But I have this sneaky feeling that time wont be so friendly.

The current winamp.com works perfectly fine. Everyone's complaints about it are 100% cosmetic, just like these complaints about the 1998 website

Incorrect, though. The page does not work on my phone running latest Firefox. Page goes in a refresh loop.

I have a decent spec PC with 32 GB of RAM and a 500 Mbps connection and that site just straight up seemed to have "hung" for a long time before loading that ugliness.

It might "work", but it's almost entirely content-free. It might as well be a blank page with the old "Under Construction" gif everyone used in the early 90s for all the information it gives.

In fact, the first time I looked at it, I didn't even realize there was anything there, because it was just some random graphic that filled the whole window with no indication that I could scroll down for more non-content. If you ask me that website fails in pretty much every way it can fail.

Yeah, that newer site loads slower, messes up my scroll, and is makes it harder to find the content you are looking for. It is the kind of site that makes me navigate away quickly because I don't want to waste my time working around their bad UX.

If I saw a page like the old one I'd probably assume whatever is being promoted has been long since abandoned.

I believe the website IS the llama's ass.

What I really like about the original (not perfect) website is they understood WHY you would go to the website: to download winamp, or see what was new and download an update. Those are the top reasons, all other things like "news" are secondary and down the page.

Froze my browser for a good 10 seconds haha. What a disaster this is going to be

I have a 32 core machine, with 128GB of ram and an 3970x GPU, and the page actually stalls for 5 seconds. That is utterly incredible.

I have an M1 macbook pro with 16GB of RAM and that website is not stalling, but it's horrible nevertheless.

16 GB M1 Air here and it's stuttery (stalls for 1-2 seconds). And yes, overall horrible.

Was hoping for something like this: https://winxp.vercel.app/

You want https://webamp.org/ .

There's also https://skins.webamp.org/, which, while looking at first glance like an image gallery, actually loads each skin into the fully-interactive WebAmp client as a way of previewing the skin.

Six cores and a 0.3 gigabit connection and it feels like a Flash page on a Pentium and dialup. Very nostalgic.

I think we are conditioned for everything so instant and forget flash pages on dial up took minutes to load.

Form over function. So, yep not what Winamp is about.

I wonder how much of this is nostalgia. Winamp was awesome, but given that skinning was part of its popularity, form was definitely a big deal.

If the form impeded function, it was easy to change. Some skins even made sure to cover all of Winamp's sections properly. The Invader Zim skin appealed to my 15-year-old tastes and still offered visible, functional controls with a readable playlist. Some skins looked cool, but if they removed options, they weren't used other than to show off to friends on occasion

Winamp skins were surprisingly restrictive, though; you couldn't really skin Winamp in a way that impeded its functionality / created mystery-meat navigation. Every Winamp skin was fundamentally just a set of textures applied to the same standard controls layout: https://skins.webamp.org/

Windows Media Player, meanwhile... https://www.theskinsfactory.com/wmpdesign

That was true for "classic" skins, but starting with Winamp 3, Winamp supported free form "modern" skins that were defined in XML and had a custom scripting language so that the author could define their own behavior.

True; though I'm pretty sure the WinAmp anyone here actually has any level of nostalgia for, is WinAmp 2. WinAmp 3 was so lacklustre that they brought back a lot of WinAmp 2 stuff and called the result WinAmp 5. (And then everyone continued to use the Classic skins, which WinAmp 5 supported.)

The form could be changed, but the substance remained the same: an incredibly well-design app that just worked.

Yeah you weren't kidding. "Heavy", to say the least

This site probably requires more resources then the original Winamp required.

Probably? The original Winamp ran on hardware much slower than anything you can buy new these days. This website, not a chance.

This website doesn't even run smoothly on my overpowered gaming desktop. Back in 2000 I'd have never thought we'd be at the point where I can run games in 4K happily but not scroll through a website without it lagging up.

Dude, this site almost certainly requires orders of magnitude more resources than Win95 + Winamp.

It froze firefox while it was initially loading and scrolling down barely works...

We've moved on from flash to.. flash.

Much that was "obviously" bad in the mid '00s is good now. Mixing markup and style, heavy reliance on vector graphics and drawing things with CSS at runtime. Flash reborn as this sort of thing, but with much shittier creation tools and higher memory use.

2advanced would be proud.

Holy crap, you weren't kidding. This is an unusable abomination.

It's not really that bad and nobody is going to be interested in a project whose Web site looks like it was last updated 20 years ago.

And yet I run foobar2000 daily and it looks exactly like this. Why do people want to put a bunch of distraction between their music and their ears?

Well, like most people, I've found streaming music is much more convenient than maintaining my own library and that's the way I listen to music most of the time. The discovery features those platforms offer are also welcome.

Those discovery features are quite useful in keeping my library up to date

The print design people have really taken over web site designs these days. This would have been a very slick and expensive brochure in paper form, and we don't see that many of those in paper form because of the printing cost.

It reminds me of Apple product pages where the scroll is hijacked.

Oooh, my fans are a-spinnin'!

Works normal on iOS

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