Does anyone else wish for a return to a simpler, less bloated Engadget? This is one of my top ten favorite sites. I check it everyday, and sometimes if I’m really slacking, way more than I should. You could even say I’m a Peter Rojas fanboy (which sounds way creepier than it really is, I promise). But they did a redesign recently that I have been trying to come to grips with since it happened. I’ve been trying really hard, but every time I open the site I know it’s going to be work. I know that everything on my computer is going to screech to a halt, and that it’s like I’m surfing on one of those analog modems from War Games.
The major changes were in the way comments are handled and the overall layout. The comments thing is great. Just dandy. But the new layout is set to scale to your browser window. So instead of getting a nice, neat column in the middle of the screen, everything scales to the edges. Besides making it harder to read at a glance, it makes images BIG! And for the pleasure of big pictures it means my browser window won’t scroll properly. Using the scroll wheel on my mouse returns a stuttering screen. The scroll bar in the browser itself takes a while to adjust to the scaling screen and changes sizes a bit until the whole page is loaded, which takes a LONG time. Do I have to wait for the page to load before touching any buttons? Am I upsetting it?
For some reason the site works slightly better in Internet Explorer than Firefox, but I haven’t installed Firefox 2.0 yet so may that will fix some stuff.
I tried the site on my wife’s Thinkpad, and it was readable but still EXTREMELY slow to load. And the scrolling thing was only marginally better.
Is there something I don’t get? Is it possible that a blog is actually taxing my system so much that I can’t render a website properly?! I know I have an old computer but it’s still running a P4 with a gig of RAM and a 128MB graphics card… for reading a website I would think that should be plenty. Did they just forget about me? :(
UPDATE! 12/18/06
Engadget is again running smoothly now that I’m using a Quad Core Mac Pro with 4 gigs of RAM. Fair enough. It was totally worth it.
Posted by Patrick 
Posted by Patrick 
Posted by Patrick 
