Perhaps, but then there must be some obfuscation elements or something else going on if that is the case, because it isn't a straight translation ... lots of additional crap is added in.

And you would have to say it taxes our browser and thus PC, certainly by how long it takes to load a web page on my low powered PC. So it is definitely a form of abuse.

When necessary I scrape web pages to get the data I want, and it is very clear that the markup etc is way over the top in many of them.

And if a web page has some kind of issue, it might be translation related, so you really can't get away from having to deal with the crap in the final product.

P.S. I have built a few web pages in my time, mostly manually, because of all the unwanted and unnecessary crap added in by WYSIWYG helper programs.

Second Reply.

I seriously doubt that, going by all the issues we've seen over the years. They try to fix or add something and usually end up screwing up something else.

The perfect current example of that is the few issues I talk about at the following.

That was a worry, it was showing as all gone

It seems to me that they find it hard to manage.

Sorry to hear that you have all these problems. For a while there used to be a brief pause when I loaded the main page. I was also annoyed by the purple dot, inability to search the forum by more than one word, and fastly CDN download was slow. But it seems to be fixed now for me.

That's interesting. I don't recall anyone saying their speed had been fixed in recent times with Fastly, after it having been real slow. I presume you are talking Offline Installers and not via Galaxy?

Offline installer. Mine kept alternating between fast 12 MB/s and slow 38 KB/s every few minutes.

But is that via Galaxy's Extras menu? So downloading with Galaxy?

I dream of getting better than 1.3 Megabytes a second now, and I only get that on a good day and or time. On a bad day it often hovers around 204 Kilobytes a second. Just ridiculous when I have a 100 Megabit connection.

So to improve the situation I have had to use a third party multi-thread program. I'd even use Galaxy if it were a better program, especially if it had command-line support. I am well and truly married to the benefits of my GUI for gogcli.exe now, which leave the basics etc of Galaxy for dead.

I mean ... the front page is the only part of the website that ever gets updated, right?

Web designers have to justify their jobs somehow. "Of course! Things can always be improved ..."

Nope. It is the page that gets modified the most, but many other pages get modified in big or small ways, certainly sales pages.

Yeah well, I won't comment on that other than to say, that some seem to suffer from Ego trips, and its all about showing off, how clever they think they are. So clever in fact, that ultimately they are dumb ... but then it's not about impressing us, just their peers, who work with a similar mindset.

No worries.

I tried that web page, which is basically a form that gets filled in with data gleaned from your connection and or PC.

Many many minutes later I am still waiting for it to finish.
I even decided, like you said, to turn off uBlock Origin, even though it didn't appear to be blocking anything on that page.
So I reloaded the page and same story, still hasn't finished.

That said, I am not really expecting much anyway, but I might try the Help option.

EDIT
And a waste of time that Help option is. It too is stuck. I am guessing the original process has to complete first.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up.

After further consideration, I am guessing that my main problem with GOG's front (main) page (and others sometimes), is a timing and PC power issue. It could also be OS and or browser related.

Maybe GOG have changed the order in which one or more scripts run or any wait period between.

Anyway, the upshot for me right now, is that I cannot use the Front page properly.
Without seeing the IN LIBRARY labels, I cannot make informed decisions, and I refuse to have to check out each game, just because I cannot remember what I own or which version or not.

I suspect GOG have already lost sales to me due to this issue.

I'll upgrade to a newer OS and PC for web browsing when I am ready. But until then ......

Seems like the huge search bar is back, and this time the rest of the page no longer vanishes when it's clicked... But once that bar loads, which happens after the rest of the page does, despite being at the top, the search icon on the top bar vanishes, so you need to use the new bar to search from the front page, meaning that searching if you scroll lower, say if you notice something that reminds you of something else or want to see sequels / prequels / series of mentioned games, you need to scroll back up to do so.
I just really hope they won't do away with the top bar search elsewhere on the site too...

So the whole delete cookies, get back old website solution doesn't work anymore, and it looks like that the new clusterfuck excuse for a website design is here to stay. It was bad after 10th anniversary but this is horrific! And a clear evidence of the new dumb waste of space trend.

The whole trusted partners thing must be doing well, because whoever vandalized this place so badly must be straight from google!


Not to mention the absolutely atrocious game description pages! Huge banner picture followed by the idiotic "how long to beat" fake info followed by flashing images in some game description, that make the description itself almost impossible to read followed by irrelevant "opencritic" followed by "You may like these products" (two rows now! it used to be just one) and now with additional two rows of even dumber "Users also bought"(like who cares what other users bought, presuming it's even accurate). Yes you have to scroll through all of that to reach the review section that is full of unverified owners with no way of telling who refunded the game or who got it for free.

At least the bad design (in relation with some other factors) is making it easy for me to not purchase anything.

Well, as they say - Necessity is the mother of invention.

The IN LIBRARY label rarely shows up for me now on GOG's main (front) page, and it's too painful to browse to every game page I am not sure of, and obviously I have too many games at GOG. And sometimes this issue happens on other GOG web pages too.

So anyway, because I do have sufficient purchase records, it occurred to me to leverage them by building a helpful dropbox, and it works well .. with only a few seconds delay for each URL I check.

Checkout the screenshots.

I am pretty sure now, that this is the case, as clearly obvious when loading the following page with filter options in the URL.

https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=0,0&hideDLCs=true&hideOwned=true

That GOG web page loads, and even though you can see the checkbox for 'Hide owned games' is selected, they are not hidden.

To get them to hide, I have to deselect and then re-select that checkbox.

You see the browser URL change as I do that, but it results in exactly the same URL values as when I first loaded the page, where the filter settings did not work or not completely.

That surely means the relevant GOG scripts are running out-of-order compared to how they used to run.

I also noted earlier on (in this thread I think), that GOG web pages appear to load much faster for me now. No doubt that has a bearing and the price is startup script issues.