So called "new" interface completely unusable

Thanks for your feedback we will take it to heart. We suggest you work with the new UI for a bit. We are confident you will get used to it and our research indicates that you will be much more productive when using it. Also, even though many still use it, Internet Explorer 9 is essentially an aged web browser. We highly recommend using one out of Chrome and Firefox.

Siebrand13:36, 3 April 2013

Thanks for the nice answer. I was a bit upset. Sorry for that. In the meantime I found the &tux=0 hack in the other thread.

Your suggestion to "work with the new UI for a bit" is nice but does not help. Even if I want I can't. It does not work. It's slow, cluttered and confusing. There are many features missing or hidden. I don't believe I can be more productive with a tool that has less features and hides major parts of what I need behind tiny little scrollbar iframes.

I'm not a regular Internet Explorer user. I'm an Opera user. But the browser is not my point. I don't have a problem if you consider certain browsers outdated. But you need to provide an easy to use fallback for these users. The old tool still works. There is no need to force all users to use the new tool. Especially if it does not work with the browser of the user. It's stupid to kick the users of such browsers in the face without an easy to use fallback. Make the tool an opt-in gadget for now. Fix the bugs. Make it a default gadget later.

Both tools do exactly the same but currently the old tool is way faster, a lot simpler, less cluttered and therefor much easier to use. You still have a long way to go to make this a good replacement.

TMg (talk)19:41, 3 April 2013

We have tested a bit (*blush* we really hadn't tested on Internet Explorer and users hadn't reported issues before the launch, even though we invited time and again to use the new features and report them).

Here's a little overview:

High priority open:

Other open:

Closed:

We made good progress. At some point, we just have to launch software, otherwise it will be a promise forever. The old editor actually isn't great. It is really bad. You just got used to something bad, and now we are hurting you in two ways: By forcing to change away from the bad tool you worked with to a tool that works a lot better, but that has bugs. Because of that you get annoyed. Sorry for that.

Please keep on reporting bugs. if possible, in our bug tracker and with enough detail for it to be actionable. See above for examples of bug report that I mostly personally made, that are very actionable for developers.

Siebrand13:58, 9 April 2013
Search finds everything twice (screenshot #8)
Still broken (screenshot #9)
Confusion, confusion, confusion (screenshot #10)

I said that before: I'm not your beta tester. It's not my job to report bugs. There is a single major bug that can be summarized as "the new interface is a pain".

This is not just me. Multiple users in the German Wikipedia said exactly the same. Also multiple users here in the discussion threads say the same.

Listen to the users. Please. I'm begging you.

All we want to do is to provide a few better translations for the MediaWiki and various extensions. We want to do something productive. We were able to do this with the previous editor. There was nothing wrong. No bug we were aware of. We were able to click "edit", to edit a translation and to save it. We were able to edit many translations very fast because loading the tool was very fast, scrolling was fast and there was a lot of information on a single screen (approx. 36 lines on one screen, see the screenshots). And we were able to edit multiple items the same time.

Not a single of these use cases is possible with the so called "new interface". It loads very slow. Scrolling is slow as hell. Even on very fast computers (this is a 2.5 GHz quad core, 4 GB). It forces us to scroll a lot. We need to scroll at least two times more, sometimes six times more (only 16 lines on a screen, sometimes only 6, see the screenshots). The same time important informations are hidden in tiny little scroll windows. All this does is wasting our time. We can't edit multiple translations any more. The design is broken. Buttons do nothing. And everything is so insanely slow. It's not fun to use the interface because of this. It's frustrating. It's a pain.

You are not only wasting your time, you are wasting the time of your users.

Turn that broken stuff off and let us continue to do the work we want to do here in the Translatewiki. This work is not "help the WMF to fix major bugs in an interface nobody ever wanted". This work is translation.

Thank you for listening.

TMg (talk)15:18, 18 April 2013