I love the Windows Central Community, but the website is TERRIBLE!

[Gamely Lounges]

Hi all,

Before I begin, let me first say that I love the Windows Central Community and all that it does for us. It is wonderful to have such a great resource for news, help, support, etc. Truly a great job by all involved. I have been coming here since the Palm Pre days and have been a big beneficiary of all the hard work from this community and writers.

Now to the point of this thread.
I wanted to let the site developers and staff know that I find the website bordering on unusable. There is too much clutter and pages take too long to load. Today I was trying to post a thread about the Surface 3 and the site caused my computer to BLUE SCREEN. That has happened to me in years. Because of the performance issues loading this site I will do almost anything I can to avoid coming here via browser and that is a terrible shame. Surely, the browser experience should be a much better and richer experience than the WP8 app, and you should want to encourage users to get that full browser experience when possible.

Please please please consider a design that trims out all of the clutter, ads, and junk in favor of a clean and fast experience.

Thanks for considering this idea.

Sam

 

[Nichifor Bogdan]

Agree!

 

[Laura Knotek]

I'm sorry to hear you had so many issues with the site. Which browser were you using on your Surface 3? Does this happen if you try a different browser?

Sent from my Moto X using Tapatalk

 

[srcpt]

I use the full site daily on my iPad2 with either chrome or safari with no problems. For the discussions, though, I use Tapatalk on the IPad or Lumia635.


Sent using Tapatalk HD

 

[Gamely Lounges]

Laura, I was using Firefox on Windows 7 on a powerful Lenovo T430. I experienced slightly better performance from my IE on W8 on DellE6330. Finally, I just counted til 25 seconds loading the site on my Surface 2. I'm sorry but I'm not waiting for that.

 

[michail71]

I will not visit this site in IE, which is kind of ironic. Chrome seems to run it smoother.

 

[tgp]

I will not visit this site in IE, which is kind of ironic. Chrome seems to run it smoother.

James Falconer commented on a thread awhile ago how they struggle with making the site work properly on Internet Explorer. It also explains why WC users complain about the website more than the users of the other MN forums; most here use IE, but the users of other forums tend to use other browsers.

 

[michail71]

I no longer have a touch system but when I did IE ran smoother and faster than any other browser. As soon as mouse drivers came into play is when it slowed way down. I think this issue is somehow related to IE's use of mouse drivers.

I confirmed it on my touch system as it had a track pad. The same page that was smooth for touch scrolling would bog down when using the track pad.

Not sure if any Surface users could confirm this is still the case.

 

[michail71]

I'm not sure if it's my imagination but I switched over to use software rendering instead of GPU in IE's settings and I think it made windowscentral more responsive. I figured I give that a try as GPU rendering sometimes causes other issues.

 

[tbsteph]

Interesting. I find site state stable but somewhat slow using IE11. On Microsoft Edge (Spartan) the site seems perfectly OK. The only time I've had the site crash or freeze was on my iMac using Safari 8.0*. I share the OP's opinion on the quality and usability of Windows Central - excellent!

 

[DCTF]

I agree. It's alright on my desktop machine with a mouse, but on my L620, L920 and my new L930, the site is horribly laid out. It's extremely crowded which is a bad thing from an aesthetic point of view, but it means that even on a 1080p mobile screen you don't see much useful info in your first screen-full of the page. There's very little blank space you can touch to scroll, which causes you to click articles and ads that you never intended to open. This is exacerbated by the loading times of the site, because touch-and-drag will be registered as a click if the site is still busy loading.

The app solves some of these problems, but because the app lacks so much functionality of the site, it remains necessary to hop back and forth between the two to get a full experience in any case.