Changing Wikipedia's theme back to the old one with a browser extension | Hacker News Reader

Changing Wikipedia's theme back to the old one with a browser extension

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25 pointstrynewideas60 comments

It feels like every redesign of every major website I've ever seen has been accompanied by an outcry from users who hate the changes -- Reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow, now Wikipedia...

Sometimes this is because the new design is missing features or capabilities compared to the previous version (reddit for example [EDIT: I have been re-educated on this point; I should have chosen a different example here]), or because it introduced changes that are contrary to how the product used to work (such as when Facebook switched from a chronological feed to The Algorithm). But just as often it feels like users just dislike change. The new thing feels wrong because it's unfamiliar, not because it's objectively worse. The Stack Overflow redesign a couple years back drew so much outrage at the time! I hated it too! But now that we're all used to it, if you go back in the archives and look at the previous design... it was worse. The new design was better, it just took some getting used to.

Maybe it's just because I don't habitually run with my browser set full-screen, so I'm not seeing all the "wasted space" people are complaining about, but I gotta say the new design looks a lot better to me aesthetically, and I like having the sticky sidebar available as I'm reading, updating as I scroll to give context to where I am in the doc. (And I also like how it goes away when I reduce the window size, just as it should.)

Not that I'm saying you shouldn't like what you like. I don't envy what designers are up against, I guess is my point.

The problem with the Reddit redesign has nothing to do with missing features or capabilities. Even on an insanely powerful computer with a gigabit fiber optic connection, it is unbelievably slow compared to the old one. It also implements a bunch of antipatterns like "view more comments" and relentless prompts to switch to their mobile app.

I also can't remember a single actual improvement that "New Reddit" has received in the years since it launched. "Unfamiliar" is not the problem there. We've had "New Reddit" for years and it is still confusingly bad.

You can still use old reddit versions:

http://old.reddit.com. http://old.reddit.com./.compact

Also, you can use the Redirector extension (as exhibited in the article) to match any Reddit URLs and redirect you to the old.reddit.com version. I do this.

Fair enough, based on this and sibling comments, Reddit was a poor example for me to have chosen.

I didn't start using that site until after the redesign, and am not a heavy user now -- possibly I was misinformed, but I had the impression that the "new" design was launched with a lot missing and took a while to get back to feature parity.

Personally for aesthetics and usability I greatly prefer the new design -- the old one looks unreadably cramped to me --but the one test I was able to run before they throttled me as a suspected bot showed the new design weighing about nine times as many kb as the old for a given page. That's objectively not good.

> The new design was better, it just took some getting used to.

I often don't find that to be the case.

While I don't use it much these days, any time I do end up on Reddit with its newer design, I find it painful to even just read the content there. I've tried to give the new design a chance, but the user experience is just so atrocious. To use that site, I have to switch the "www" in the URL to "old" to get the earlier design that's at least mostly usable.

That isn't the only example of "improvements" leaving me worse off. It happened with Slashdot, with Firefox's UI, with GNOME 3 (and later), with Windows 8 (and later), and with pgAdmin 4, among numerous other pieces of software that I use.

About a month ago, I booted up an old laptop running Windows 2000 and an ancient version of Firefox. It's been many years since I'd used them, but I was shocked at how pleasant the experience was. It made their current user interface and user experience regressions far more blatant.

Unfortunately, based on what I've seen of it so far, Wikipedia will likely be added to that list of mine, too.

Okay, but sometimes the new one is objectively worse; Reddit's new design massively reduced information density and was also the deployment point for a lot of user-hostile behaviors.

Having to click to see all the posts on a page that's heavier and slower than the original ought to be regarded as an outright error. If you're going to show less stuff, it should at least be faster.

That's still subjective, even if it's shared by many. I prefer new reddit.

Okay, then everything is subjective and the new design can't claim to be superior (since it's only subjective) and we're left with the cost of switching to a new design for no good reason.

Is there a thing about the new Reddit that's good? (Other than it being good for the shareholders that it aggressively it pushes people into their crummy popup- and tracking-infested app)

> But just as often it feels like users just dislike change. The new thing feels wrong because it's unfamiliar, not because it's objectively worse.

Avoiding change is an entirely valid concern, which you also share. I say this assuming that you would be upset if I moved your steering wheel to the opposite side of your car overnight, or switched your gas and brake pedals.

Being not "objectively worse" is not nearly enough. A change, at the very least, has to be a significant improvement to make up for retraining time/effort.

I wasn't trying to suggest that "not objectively worse" was the baseline, of course!

What I was trying to express was that in many cases, it seems that users interpret a new design as worse simply because it's different and unfamiliar, rather than based on its objective merits.

> It feels like every redesign of every major website I've ever seen has been accompanied by an outcry from users who hate the changes -- Reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow, now Wikipedia...

This isn't because most people don't like the changes, it's because outrage and anger go viral. Whether its about tech or about politics, no one engages with content about people who are happy. They engage with content that demonstrates anger or controversy.

One day we will build some media products that aren't supported by advertising, and we'll start to optimize products for something other than "number of eyeballs". At that point we will see content that actually informs the reader. Until then, get used to every molehill being portrayed as a mountain.

> This isn't because most people don't like the changes, it's because outrage and anger go viral

That is a very good point I hadn't considered at all! How many people are going to be motivated to go online and rant about how much they love the new ${foo}? They're mostly just going to quietly go use ${foo} some more.

Wikipedia is an example of good website redesign: overall I think the new site is better and has some added benefits (TOC sidebar, fixed-width page layout) and doesn’t unnecessarily change or remove things.

But Wikipedia also allows people to resort to the old style. Which I think is even better because it satisfies those who simply dislike change no matter what. And it also helps in case the new redesign is not so good…

Overall I think customizability is the best, but it’s also the hardest because you must now support multiple styles and layouts instead of one. For a simple site like Wikipedia it is reasonable though

The Stack Overflow redesign a couple years back drew so much outrage at the time! I hated it too! But now that we're all used to it, if you go back in the archives and look at the previous design... it was worse. The new design was better, it just took some getting used to.

Let me suggest another hypothesis: both designs are equivalent^ and you just hated the feeling of unfamiliarity twice. That feeling passes with time like everything does.

Users don’t like change, that’s the correct part. New is better - that part may be incorrect by exactly the same argument. Users don’t like change-back too, and you are a user.

Btw, the first thing I’ve added to stylebot on SO was a bigger width for the content column, so that most of regular code snippets wouldn’t have an h-scroll.

Btw2, I almost screwed up my comment twice because someone decided to redesign the text selection popup menu on latest ios 16.x. They now AI/ML/whatever cut-copy-paste button positions, so my muscle memory hits the wrong one constantly. Thankfully, HN rules don’t allow me to explain what I think of this “new design”.

With years I understood one thing: you won’t be heard and the only reasonable action to take is to ignore. I believe 90% of users do just that - say f it and ignore, because the alternative is to shout into the void.

^ ignoring new functionality (if any) which could have been added without redesigning.

> Let me suggest another hypothesis: both designs are equivalent^ and you just hated the feeling of unfamiliarity twice

Nah. I've been talked out of the Reddit one, but this one I'll stand by; the old design SO still feels familiar, but the typography was crap.

No it wasnt. With the new design i have to constantly tweak it in inspector to be readable.

Out of those redesigns, the worst was Reddit and I still use the old version. It’s so much more info dense, much less forced engagement, easier to look at and browse etc.

I love the new Wikipedia but the Reddit redesign is an attrocity. I still use the old site with RES.

I'm still only using old.reddit and i.reddit.com years after their re-design. The moment they get rid of those I'll probably stop using reddit completely.

If the cost of adjusting to the new thing is greater than the "objective" benefit it provides, then it is better not to change.

The cost of adjusting is a one time expense, whereas the objective benefits offered by a good redesign continue to provide new value for as long as the new design is in use.

I see your argument as one against frequent redesigns, not one against redesigns in general. If you change up your UI every 12 months, even if each iteration is technically better, you are causing problems for your users. Wikipedia's last redesign happened 12 years ago.

I don't agree, on a couple of different axes.

If we take as given, for the sake of argument, that the new thing is objectively better than the old thing, never changing means never getting those benefits. Stagnate permanently, rather than pay the temporary price of adjusting to change?

Also, userbases are not static. New users would don't need to pay the "cost" of adjusting, because they have nothing to adjust from; and if the new thing is objectively better than the old design, then it will attract more new users than the inferior old thing.

(Note I am not trying to make the case that the new wikipedia design is objectively better or worse than the previous one; that's an argument nobody will win.)

This is a tale as old as software itself.

Some of the hyperbole in yesterday's thread decrying the redesign was laughable.

I think the Reddit redesign deserves criticism. The redesign did nothing to improve or unify the UX between desktop and mobile while introducing a bunch of obnoxious dark patterns.

But Wikipedia is better for it's redesign. I think change is just difficult for some to accept.

Oh thank god, the new theme makes me so angry. I did the math, and 41.6% of my monitor's width is just blank padding. I don't want to make another account on a website just to have it be usable again.

Note that there is a button in the bottom right of the window that expands the article's width to take up much more of the page.

There's also a feature request and proof-of-concept patch to implement persistent preferences for viewers who aren't logged in. The proof-of-concept already remembers whether the max width toggle is enabled: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321498

There needs to be a way to persist this setting. It is maddening to have to click it on every new page I visit.

They made the preference for article previews persist, why did they not do the same for this?

Is there a way to make it sticky? I have to repress the button on every new article I open.

There's a feature request for that: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321498

What button are you referring to?

If your viewport is >1600px wide you should see a small square gray button resembling a full-screen toggle in the bottom-right corner of the browser. Click it and the max-width limit on content is reverted and fills the viewport width.

Images: https://imgur.com/a/UMxtP61

I had zoom on at 150% and it doesn't show that button. Thanks.

Perhaps it hasn't rolled out to everyone, but if I go to any Wikipedia article, there is a rectangular button in the lower right with the alt text "Toggle limited content width". Clicking it removes most of the margins on either side of the article.

It's tied to page zoom and viewport so it wouldn't show for me.

Seems to make articles more readable to me.

I did simpler mathematics than you, and I count three hamburger menus on one page...

People who love to talk about how it's objectively better to have tons of whitespace should research how often people ever use (or even notice) hamburger menus.

I'd ban those. Gimme normal menus back!

For me, it seems that just making the general tables wide makes a huge difference.

    .wikitable {
        width: 100%;
    }

Hah I came to type exactly "Oh thank god" -seriously was hoping something like this would come out.

I haven't had to have an account to use wikipedia for the last 20 years and there's no good reason at all to begin using one now.

I find it ludicrous, at least for my personal use. 99% of the time, I read the table of contents just once, to find the specific information I'm looking for. I rarely read an article in its entirety, and when I do, I do it continuously. I never go back and forth between sections, as in terms of length wikipedia articles are not reference books.

I'm genuinely surprised that apparently many other users have a different method for reading Wikipedia articles, given the number of people who defend this layout choice.

For my part, I'm really annoyed by this floating menu, in particular when it replaced links to other languages -links that I use much more often than the table of contents. But OK, let's agree to disagree, I can perfectly imagine that this layout may work for other people, it's just not the case for me.

To solve the issue I installed some browser extension rather than creating an account of wikipedia (as I have a severe case of account creation fatigue), so no harm no foul, but it is a shame that they did not plan to make it an easily accessible option.

If you have an account you don't need an extension, you can choose the theme you prefer in the prefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

I kinda like it. It’s easier to read margined text.

Anyone know how this redesign impacts clients that reference Wikipedia? A lot of times I access it via the Dictionary app on MacOS. I currently see the old design, but can't tell if they're still rolling out the new design slowly.

Clients that use the API won't see a difference. They get raw content output and don't rely on skin features at all.

You can simulate that kind of response with the render query parameter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/59th_Academy_Awards?action=ren...

but clients probably use more specific API endpoints, like fetching the HTML:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&...

or plain text:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&...

AFAIK the redesign only affected the page chrome, navigation, etc. It didn't affect the HTML content of the actual articles because that's controlled by the Wikipedia editor community, not the Wikimedia Foundation (who maintains the MediaWiki software and was responsible for the redesign).

So clients like the Dictionary app that only pull the article content are unaffected. For now...

I like the new Wikipedia design, find it much easier to read. However, it seems to be very similar to the new (and controversial) Arch Linux wiki redesign so maybe I'm just already used to it.

I also very rarely maximise a browser window and much prefer clean designs where I can make the window as narrow as possible as I tend to open three windows for a desktop.

Hopefully the analytics showing how many people are doing this will be enough of a signal to wikipedia to revert back the default.

It won't. In a couple of months everyone will have forgotten the old design ever existed and the next time they redesign it people will make extensions to bring back the new "old" design.

It won’t because this is a decent redesign. Love the contents on the left. Maybe a bit to much padding but it does aid readability. If anything I might increase the max width on the text a bit.

That's a drop in the ocean. Even power users might not be aware of browser extensions that do that. Look at the number of people who use adblockers: it's a minority, even though advertisement is a major annoyance to absolutely every single one internet user.

Most people won't bother to figure out how they can change it, if it occurs to them that it'd be possible at all.

Most of Wikipedia's users don't know anything about how to use the MediaWiki software (aside from searching and browsing articles) nor are they tech nerds. They won't change it even if they do prefer the old one.

Is this a change that's local to Wikipedia or to the entire MediaWiki open source frontend that powers it?

It's a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation that they're applying to their own projects. So Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.[1]

MediaWiki 1.38 and later bundles Vector 2022, the prior 2011 version of Vector, the pre-2011 default MonoBook, the responsive alternative Timeless, and the mobile-only skin Minerva.[2] MediaWiki admins can still set whatever skin they want to use in LocalSettings.php. $wgDefaultSkin is still vector, the 2011 version, as it has been since 1.18.[3]

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/

2: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bundled_extensions_and_skins

3: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultSkin

Make an account and pick the old theme in your preferences

Installing a browser extension is way easier though, even if the trade-off is that you have to rely on third-party developers for the maintenance.

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