MDN Redesign

Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash, but one thing I think is a step backwards is the <i>Browser Compatibility</i> table at the bottom. Previously, it had the browser <i>version</i> inline for the cell, now it is just a check mark. To see what version, you need to click on the cell to expand some &quot;more info&quot; section at the bottom.<p>Knowing if a feature was very recently supported or has been supported for a while is useful; now I&#x27;ll need to drill down to see the information, and comparing that info across the browsers will be more difficult.

Comparing the old version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210302090607&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Element&#x2F;dialog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210302090607&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer...</a><p>to the new version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Element&#x2F;dialog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Element&#x2F;di...</a><p>I notice that they:<p>- Reduced horizontal space allocated to content<p>- Reduced contrast (eg. code blocks have lighter gray background, compatibility table is no longer color coded)<p>- Increased the amount of things that don&#x27;t render if you disable javascript<p>I&#x27;d reverse all three of those if I could.<p>On the good side they added a dark mode (which I don&#x27;t care about but lots of people love dark mode), and they seem to have avoided the common aesthetics-over-effectiveness pitfall of adding tons of vertical whitespace.<p>(As an aside, I find it weird that they mention the home page in the article. In fact it&#x27;s the first thing they mention. I would expect the home page to be effectively irrelevant? I only ever land on MDN via google searches and direct links to articles via stackoverflow answers. It&#x27;s random-access reference material. How would someone end up on the homepage? Maybe they have analytics justifying that.)

What&#x27;s up with the huge amount of whitespace? This is supposed to be an information dense website, most of the screen is empty white. Not liking this, who designs this stuff? How to revert back, or I just need to add custom styles?<p>Update: I added custom styles to remove 95% of the extra margins, padding, spacing, line-height, updated h1&#x2F;h2&#x2F;h3&#x2F;h4 header styling, code highlight styling, and it looks 10 times better, I can actually read the information. Unfortunately I still prefer the previous version<p>Question: Why do these important sites never get actual user feedback before forcing out a major update as a big &quot;surprise&quot; ?

I actually dislike the change to the Compatibility Chart. The checkmark serves the same purpose as green vs red boxes did (and is frankly <i>less</i> readable at a glance, not more) and being able to quickly see relative times features were added at a glance made it easy to evaluate whether to use a feature or not. Guess I&#x27;ll have to revert to using Can I Use? for this again. I had mostly replaced that with MDN.

I hate it, but that is just utterly subjective. I haven&#x27;t had the time to formulate and ask myself why yet (just saw it 10 minutes ago), but I just feel hatred towards the new design. Could possibly change.<p>The reduction of colors used that gave me visual hints feels like it&#x27;s giving me less cognitive offloading - and I have to feel the new structure of the page. Maybe my hatred is just because of new(tm) - but yeah, others have given better reasons for their distaste, and more directed feedback.

I use MDN heavily every day and this is really depressing. When I first landed on a fresh page today I thought I&#x27;d clicked on the wrong link and got some low-rent MDN knockoff by accident. It instantly looked cheap and jarring on a squint test.<p>Also, why is everything error-toned? Red is a danger color and invokes negative emotion almost universally. Red MDN!? Really?<p>I&#x27;m a browser extension developer and I&#x27;m strongly considering burning a week to write an extension to fix this.

Too much white that&#x27;s made too many of the visual cues I&#x27;d use to navigate blend in with the rest of the page. In the past, I could immediately scroll to polyfills, browser compat charts, etc without having to pay attention while scrolling because those sections were so distinct. I&#x27;ve missed them three times already today and had to start over, scrolling slowly. For me, this update decreases usability.<p>If anyone from MDN is reading these replies, could you make the old stylesheets open so that we can use extensions like Stylus to put things back?

I really dislike this (and I tend to love great design and obsess over UX and small details): reduced legibility (small and thin fonts, lower contrast in e.g. inline code, alert boxes all blend in), and reduced information (compatibility table is near useless, missing details in specifications).<p>Overall this seems like straight out of 2003. The inconsistent border contrasts and weird burgundy red accent only strengthens the feeling of student side project and lack of taste (red does not convey trust).<p>Also that logo is ugly. It looks frail and awkwardly narrow without being harmonious (see e.g. the tiny gap between &#x2F;|).<p>Edit: I just realized every category has a different accent color (compare e.g. HTML and CSS sections). What an absurd joke from Mozilla.

I thought I was on a different website for a moment haha.<p>First impression is good though! Looks clean.<p>One minor annoyance: The sidebar scroll behaves weird. I&#x27;m also not a huge fan of the big in your face custom scrollbars. I usually have them hidden, and the custom ones do not respect that, but that&#x27;s preference.<p>Dark mode is absolutely great!<p>Much respect for taking on a big redesign like this. Especially considering the target audience, that takes guts haha.

I tried it out for a bit and I think it&#x27;s generally pleasant.<p>Some thoughts:<p>- The cleanliness and whitespace make it feel like information&#x27;s been lost compared to the previous version. Probably just psychological and I&#x27;ll get used to it.<p>- I wish the header search button was a search bar instead. While it looks cleaner, I actually had a moment where I thought they removed search completely. My preference would be to have a large, highly visible search bar in the header. Increasing the click&#x2F;tap area would help as well, as I misclicked on the dark mode toggle.

Does nobody remember these announcements from the past 5 years? Why would MDN need a subscription service? Why are Google, MicroSoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. not hosting MDN for free on their cloud platforms? Heck, why are they not fighting over the privilege to host it and put a big “Hosted on Azure” link at the bottom of every page? Why are these multi billion dollar companies not funding MDN when they claim in press releases to be sponsors? Funding MDN would be less than pocket change to any of these companies, much less all of them that claim to be sponsors.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;mozilla-brings-microsoft...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;developers-rejoice-microsoft-google-mozilla-are-putting-all-their-web-api-docs-in-one-place&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;open-web-docs&#x2F;updates&#x2F;introducing-open-web-docs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;open-web-docs&#x2F;updates&#x2F;introducing...</a>

&gt; In mid-2021 we started to think about modernizing MDN’s design [..] with an emphasis on improved navigability and a universal look and feel across all our pages. &gt; &gt; A new logo, chosen by our community [..] We worked closely with branding specialist Luc Doucedame<p>Wait, this sounds like redesign for redesign&#x27;s sake?<p>&gt; Coming soon: MDN Plus [..] In the coming months, we’ll be expanding MDN to include a premium subscription service based on the feedback we received from web developers &gt; Support MDN and <i>make it your own</i>. For just $5 a month.<p>Ah, this makes sense now. It looks like MDN is trying to rebrand and reposition itself as a subscription service going forward.<p>I remain optimistic, it&#x27;s been a great resource over the years.

I&#x27;ll miss the old MDN and never had any issues browsing the docs there. The content is what matters at the end of the day, and kudos to the team for the redesign. I do have a couple of complaints though.<p>1. Font weight (especially with headings) feels far too thin. 2. Seems like there are some color contrast issues when running in dark mode (my system theme)

Is there anything positive about this?<p>How will setting all of the type close and closer to the same size, removing any any contrast for visual hierarchy, adding muddy zeros, removing any unique character, removing any syntax highlighting differentiation, removing any visual anchors, removing underlines on inline code with links, having nothing to visually reign in rags, adding more space around just - everything, smaller button areas, and a hidden search bar... help anyone? But there&#x27;s dark mode.<p>I know that we&#x27;re going to be weirded out by any* changes... because we look at this daily - but all of these changes are exactly what the books say to &quot;not do.&quot; I&#x27;m just totally blown away at what has happened here. I&#x27;m sorry to anyone who was on the team at this time. I mean, I&#x27;m sure you mean well. And I know that most of the docs team was let go recently. But this thing feels white labeled. Didn&#x27;t they show it to anyone as they were building it? This is about &quot;changing it&quot; - instead of improving it. Well, it&#x27;s changed! But - now it&#x27;s worse. I&#x27;m pretty sure that&#x27;s an objective truth. If not, please explain it to me. I&#x27;m happy to evolve. Are the jump-to links new? I like jumping to examples...

I liked the old logo because it had the iconic Mozilla in it.<p>The new one looks sterile, lifeless and has no character to it. I think the community didn&#x27;t choose well.<p>There was also no option to keep the current logo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.mozilla.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;mdn-new-logo-poll-add-option-to-leave-unchanged&#x2F;90622" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.mozilla.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;mdn-new-logo-poll-add-option...</a>

Finally! A way to directly support MDN and the great things Mozilla does. I remember emailing them over a year ago about their broken previous $5 subscription and getting 0 response back which was perfectly Mozilla.<p>I&#x27;m not optimistic at all about a subscription service for &quot;web developers who want to customize their MDN experience&quot; as an actual value add, as this seems negligible, but I am overall as 1. it&#x27;s a step in the right direction for new ways to monetize Mozilla and 2. it sounds like they&#x27;re listening to feedback and willing to iterate on it.

I hate it. It is way less readable than previous one. It feels like another good thing bitten by &quot;modern designers&quot; who favour minimalism over usability.<p>Old design has more contrast, headings, links, warnings e.g. all distinct elements have a distinct visual style. Now, every element on the page looks same or as much similar as possible. They couldn&#x27;t find anything better to do.

MDN is the single most useful and impactful site in my webdev&#x2F;design career. Above all things, I want this site to stick around and exist.<p>Some comments seem to be critical of any change. And while I don&#x27;t like some of the visual changes, overall I think it&#x27;s going in the right direction.<p>Most importantly, I want MDN to stay online and whatever they need to do (within reason of course) to keep it free, open, searchable and existing, I am on board with.

What is this ?<p>Why advertise a service without any details about what it actually is ?<p>On one hand 5$ is a nominal monthly amount to support MDN. But seriously, just ask for money. I&#x27;d be more inclined to help if they just wrote a post saying &#x27; servers ain&#x27;t free, give us money before this turns into w3schools &#x27;.

When the content is static, adding so much JS and CSS weaken the website for no good reason. There will be more bugs and annoyances after this redesign.<p>Now, scrolling MDN is sluggish with Vivaldi (YMMV). This is so annoying that I had to disable JS on MDN. I hope they&#x27;ll fix this, but the amount of CSS and JS is probably too high to fix performance regressions.<p>From my browser console:<p><pre><code> [Violation] &#x27;scroll&#x27; handler took 561ms [Violation] Forced reflow while executing JavaScript took 565ms </code></pre> With Firefox, the scrolling is generally quicker, though irregularly. But jumping to the top of the page leaves some elements of the page completely white for half a second.<p>Disabling JS fixes most of those annoyances, but I&#x27;ll have to enable it for some documentation examples.

&gt; In the coming months, we’ll be expanding MDN to include a premium subscription service based on the feedback we received from web developers who want to customize their MDN experience. Stay tuned for more information on MDN Plus.<p>It’s hard not to feel pessimistic about this one.

I saw these comments and thought people were being grumpy about change for no reason, as usual. Then I opened MDN and... yeah no. Any way to get the old design back?

Wow, it&#x27;s fast. I searched something, and as soon as I selected one of the quick result, the page displayed!

Looking at the MD source files is enlightening. Every markdown documentation system eventually approaches an underspecced, less powerful, and domain-specific version of reStructuredText&#x2F;Sphinx.

&gt; Last year we surveyed users and asked them what they wanted out of their MDN experience… The overall theme we saw was that users wanted to be able to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them.<p>Really? I just wanna google for what I need and find it. I guess I&#x27;m not representative?

Is there a way to select the old design? There is too much<p>space in the new design<p>for my taste.<p>Update: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mdn&#x2F;yari&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5364" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mdn&#x2F;yari&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5364</a>

Not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, the information does seem more accessible. On the other, all the personality of MDN has been completely wiped out and it feels like an autogenerated github page.<p>Sadly par for the course with modern web design.

Of all the sort of needless website redesigns I&#x27;ve seen, this one is actually pretty decent. Having gone through this sort of thing a few times myself, I want to give kudos to those who worked on this.<p>In case they are reading this, here&#x27;s what I liked and what I think can be approved upon:<p>LIKED:<p>- Besides the interactive examples, it looks like you stuck to using standard web fonts instead of loading some bullspit Typekit or Google Font Loader thing. Thumbs up!<p>- Thanks for dark mode!<p>- Overall the design is minimalistic. Thanks for not trying to impress everyone with &quot;modern&quot; design or l33t JavaScript skillz.<p>- Thanks for keeping MDN alive!<p>THINGS THAT CAN BE IMPROVED:<p>- The branding is less distinctive than it was before. It&#x27;s definitely not <i>bad</i>, but the bold monospace &quot;MDN&quot; was more distinctive and made me feel like I wasn&#x27;t on some rando site. (In fact, that logo still is visible at the footer of the page.)<p>- I&#x27;m not the biggest fan of the 3-column layout. Again, it&#x27;s not bad, but I think I could totally do without the right-hand column and give the main content more horizontal space. Remember that your site is for developers, and I think most developers are fairly pragmatic about how much content they want to see on-screen at a time.<p>- The left-hand column is a bit weird. I&#x27;m not sure how much of a benefit the scrollbar provides and it also seems to jump when you get to the bottom of the page, which is distracting.<p>- As others have mentioned, the compatibility table seems nerfed. Definitely don&#x27;t get rid of it, but I think making it more useful would have gotten more people a positive view of the new page design. If that feature provided a little more info so that I only resorted to caniuse.com 1&#x2F;3 of the time as opposed to 2&#x2F;3 of the time, that&#x27;d be a good win.<p>- Remove the hover effects for the top menu items in favor of revealing details on hover&#x2F;click. Hover is the devil even on desktop; I hate it when I casually drag my cursor from the URL bar down to the page and suddenly some page element appears and covers up what I&#x27;m trying to look at.

Change is always hard, but this design is way too narrow on desktop where I suspect most users are reading it. The main content is taking up perhaps 25% of available width of a fairly ordinary 27in monitor.<p>It looks like max-width of the main content is hardcoded to 1440px so everything (sidebars included) has to squeeze into that. As a result there are huge white bars of emptiness on either side, but a lot of vertical scrolling.<p>Otherwise though I am indifferent to the style changed. It&#x27;s kinda lost its character and looks really bland but I can live with that.

Love the update. The color-coded pages are also very useful. Though I wish they had an option to hide deprecated methods and properties, or at least put them in a different group.

Oh my, it looks ... bad and hard to read. Any way to spin off the previous UI?

I found a bug. If you visit a page with a REPL, the REPL will always use the dark mode style on a subsequent visit regardless of the saved theme value in localStorage. To see this in action visit this page[0], toggle the theme to light (or dark and back again), and then do a refresh. When you toggle the theme to light, the REPL will update accordingly, but this doesn&#x27;t persist after the refresh. Anyone know who I should tell about this?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;JavaScript&#x2F;Reference&#x2F;Global_Objects&#x2F;Map" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;JavaScript&#x2F;Refe...</a><p>Correction: it only stays dark for me because my initial visit used dark mode. If your initial visit uses light mode, it will stay light even if you later choose dark mode.

I was looking around to get a feel for the changes when I noticed that the colour scheme is different on some pages, I&#x27;m not sure why?<p>Red and black (darkmode) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Element&#x2F;body" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Element&#x2F;bo...</a><p>Blue and black (darkmode) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Content_categories" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;Cont...</a><p>Both pages are under the &quot;References&quot; section.

The new site has readability issues, devs you can use the css to fix the font size and line height issues. .homepage .article-tile p { font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.4; }<p>.recent-contributions .request-title { font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.4; }

I don&#x27;t like it. I dislike it badly enough that the first time I ran into it, I was moved to find this thread and leave a complaint here. Main things:<p>* Code samples that were free of soft line wrapping now have lots of it, because the code blocks are narrower, and the wrapped lines are misindented and confusing.<p>* The line-height (2x the font height) is too large; this makes it hard to pick out paragraphs, because the whitespace between lines in a paragraph is too close to the whitespace between paragraphs, headings, etc.<p>* Using red as a link-color is bad<p>I do like the sticky table of contents and the inclusion of a dark mode, though.

I feel that new website loads much faster that old one, especially navigating between pages. Nice. One annoying thing is that top bar probably is added a bit later, so all content jumps after load.

&gt; Warning: The tabindex attribute must not be used on the &lt;dialog&gt; element.<p>... Why? I don&#x27;t use MDN often, mostly just as reference material. I have enjoyed their documentation before, it&#x27;s always been short and to the point with a few examples and it felt very complete. With this the first article I click on raises an odd question which I feel is either too much detail for reference or too little details for experts.

I&#x27;ll just use zeal from now on and never update it. It was fine earlier today, but now it&#x27;s awful. There was nothing wrong with the old design.

Oh darn! This is going to take a while to get used to...

They didn&#x27;t solve the code license issue[0] a year after the transaction completed.<p>For now, one has no way to tell whether a given code snippet in MDN is licensed under CC0 or MIT.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mdn&#x2F;content&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;5901" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mdn&#x2F;content&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;5901</a>

It looked okay until I scrolled down to the browser compatibility table and had to tilt my head to read the vertical text

When will Mozilla ever stop wasting their (and their users) time and money on redesigns? (Sorry, had to get that out.)

I believe I commented on hacker news that I’d pay $5 for something like this (rather than the proposed $10+). I guess I should follow through, haha.<p>Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27307059" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27307059</a>

Is there a way to collapse the table of contents sidebar like in the old version? I read documentation pages like this on a vertical monitor (which is usually great!), and the sidebar on the new site takes up a full third of horizontal space.

Not a huge fan of it, before everything was well delimited and had nice contrast cues, now everything feels mushy and hard to skim through. Also, using different primary colors for each category is really confusing.

Where has the ability to press the ‘&#x2F;‘ key for instant search gone?????

Nope, I don&#x27;t like it. Is there any way to get the old version back?

two feedbacks:<p>the landing page is mostly useless to me, I need an extra click to get to reference and guides. It&#x27;s like a status page used for home page, the search can be on the top-right corner of each reference|guide page instead. Yes just go directly to reference|guide, why not?<p>on reference and guide pages, I hope there is a left and right arrow at both sides of each content page so I don&#x27;t need scroll all the way down to the bottom then click on that small prev and next button to turn pages.

Astonishingly, this article contains 32 non-title mentions of MDN, but not a single link to MDN. What a silly oversight.<p>MDN is not mdn.mozilla.org, nor www.mdn.org.<p>MDN is developer.mozilla.org, of course.

Gotta say. I&#x27;m not a big fan of the new design. Now it looks like every other half-done website. I miss the old headline font. It was so legible.

To me it&#x27;s a yes. I never used mdn super deep, but on a first microsecond feel, I felt &quot;nice&quot;, which is rare with redesigns these days.<p>Good luck

Has the look and feel of Microsoft docs (docs.microsoft.com), which isn&#x27;t a complaint.<p>And maybe it always did in some way.

Where&#x27;d the dinosaur go? :&#x27;(

Hell Mozilla, I feed so sad every time one of that awesome Godzilla-like monsters with communist-inspired imagery is replaced by a generic bland corporate-friendly logo. :(

Maybe it&#x27;s time to finally completely switch to embedded...

what HN thinks about that custom scrollbar design?

I really like it.

This looks way better than before! Font sizes and layout have improved a lot.