Yeah, I'd been doing the Slashdot whore thing for longer than I can remember. They kept making obnoxious changes to the UI that made it superficially a bit slicker but in practical terms made the site difficult. Old habits die hard. I continued reading the thing, each time acclimating to, but never really accepting, the new annoyances. This last time, I thought it would be the same thing, but it hasn't been. I find myself going there less and less often. Due to the nature of the thing, I don't get to see all of the back news, only the front page. So I leave with more and more disappointment. And this has been snowballing. Now I almost never go there.
It was the old days and the sites that Slashdot made fun of for not working in Netscape, then later Mozilla, then more recently, Firefox. But now things have come full circle. Slashdot doesn't work worth a damn in the latest version of Firefox. Pulling the initial page up, it takes forever, and I have to click through repeated "a script on this page is causing your browser to run slow" messages. I'm not sure why vast amounts of computing power are required to render what looks like (but probably isn't) a table formatted website. Denying Slashdot JavaScript with NoScript, the "yesterday", "monday", etc links do nothing. I get the same page again. I suppose technically Slashdot might work if I left JavaScript on, but my best efforts haven't established that. Maybe if I upgraded to a 4ghz quad core machine I could view Slashdot. The only other site I've run across on the 'net that does the endless procession of script timeouts is another techie site, so all I can think is techies have more ideas for wasting your CPU than normal programmers working for an employer. Even the super obnoxious fuck-the-user-and-monitize-and-datamine-to-hell portal I worked for with waaaaaaay too much crap on the page doesn't perform this badly.
Oh, and use.perl.org sucks too and should be shot in favor of some open opt-in blog aggregation software that lets Perl programmers republish their existing blogs, be it on perlmonks, avogato, github, blogspot, or whatever. Or even some combination. Forcing users to cross-post to use.perl.org to be seen here or decide between two blogs or to accept this klunky old beast as their primary blog is a bitter pill to swallow. I guess use.perl.org could continue to offer blogging and should archive old blogs, but allowing people to mix in an RSS feed or two as if it were content they posted here would rule.
-scott
Strangely, I have no problems with Slashdot and Firefox 2 and 3. Computer is Pentium 4 1.8 GHz + 768 MB RAM. Adblock is on, so maybe it helps.
When I was using the index2/beta/whatever-newness if firefox 3.? on ubuntu I couldn't yesterday's news either.
I just switched back to non-beta/whatever-newness.
Slashdot is one of the few sites I don't read via RSS because I guess I like to go to a web page everyone now and then.
I suppose I could email
I'm not gonna bitch too much about use.perl.org because I don't blog anywhere else and I haven't done much to help fix the problem.
I'll let Alias chop down the ugly tree.
