Steve Jobs used to say the problem with Microsoft is they don’t have taste.
The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it.
(FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)
The design is fun and gave me a lot of nostalgia, but I admit they overdid it. They could have made that piece feel the same without so much distraction. And please people, support reader mode. It's not hard and it shouldn't be optional.
EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that solos over everyone else's solos.
On top of the poor readability, my 2-year-old laptop can't even navigate through the page without CPU and GPU going insane, and my fans blasting at max speed. It's the poorest, choppiest web performance I can recall, all for what should be a simple blog post.
That's the fault of modern websites being massive JavaScript ad-playing behemoths instead of sub-1kB served HTML as god intended.
Funny cause just today this made it to the front page of HN
It has way fancier animations and scrolls like butter
That's likely because it offloads most of the job to GPU. On a potato it's also very choppy, but CPU fans stays quiet indeed. Gate's notes seems to put the most strain on CPU instead.
Seriously next level. I am on an old potato, and its smooth as silk, forward and backward. Backward. My potato is a ThinkPad i7 which slips into low speed at every single moment it can.
Tim Berners-Lee has been elevated to many things, but an ascension to deity must be a new reach.
But it does distract from the insufferable self-aggrandizing slime he's shitting out.
Yes, I was shocked that Bill Gates's personal blog seems to have that "500 WordPress plugins" kinda vibe. Kinda reminds me of my old MySpace profile.
FWIW the spinning scrolling effects of Apple release announcements are nearly as bad.
Yeah, some of the Apple pages are pretty bad too, and I feel Jobs would've kept it more minimal. But to me, this blog is worse because it's supposed to showcase a whole article, and it's hard to read (and not even compatible with browser reader-mode).
Makes me wonder: did Bill write all of this text? Did he decide this effect is cool and must go in? Did he even know about that text effect?
Yeah totally, the fact that it has all this extra design makes me imagine a mid sized paid team behind it, with ghost writers.
The voice of this blog post does sound a little corporate, tbh
I think it’s important to remember how he got to where he is and what kind of person it takes - Behind the Bastards is a fairly good reality check for most people we give kudos to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-the-ballad-of...
Also, the text font on that page has an incredibly irritating lowercase "f".
“All he’s done for the world” by copyrighting Covid vaccine, eh?
I do tend to agree with your sentiment — his business practices have not been ethically stellar. Despite, if you wish to bring forward criticism and be taken seriously, you’d do well to first familiarize yourself with the basic difference between copyright and patents.