INTRODUCING: Updated IMDb.com Title page experience

The title page says this is In Development, and no Release date has been provided to IMDb. That can be confirmed by using the 

All Topics > Release Dates 

links to arrive here:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3749962/releaseinfo

@fred  Please see https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60ca795a256e9b7a007cc602&replyId=60cb48a496d975337b037115 

@achingimdb 

I don't see a Trivia link in All Topics either, but notice that Trivia is on the line left of the All Topics link, peeking out behind the pop on the right here:

Awards is a link in All Topics, and the summary is under the Stars, IMDbPro links: 

@bderoes @Brandenburg3rd Well that was weird. For a few hours I was back to seeing the Pre-May18Disaster version of IMDB Title pages, but after I posted my first comment here, and then saw your response, I messed around a bit and now when I refresh the Title page I was using to test things, I see the New Disaster version again :(

It may have something to do with the fact I was using the Brave Browser to test things? And I then used a User-Agent spoofer to simulate an IPhone6 since you seemed to not be seeing the old version like I was. After that I could no longer see the old version even when I reset the user-agent to its normal accurate setting.

So IMDB is apparently able to easily make users see the OLD version when they want to (even if accidentally)? They just haven't made it obvious how to do that? Or is the answer buried in one of the 260+ comments in this thread???

The only thing I can think of is that for some reason, for part of today, IMDB didn't recognize my Brave browser's default user-agent string ("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.106 Safari/537.36") so decided to just send it the old version of the Title page. And then for some reason they then later decided they did like that user-agent and started sending the new version? I also noticed that Chrome updated itself today from "Version 91.0.4472.106 (Official Build) (64-bit)" (same as what my Brave browser is using) to "Version 91.0.4472.114 (Official Build) (64-bit)" around same time I noticed this happening.

In any case, I tried setting my Brave browser user-agent temporarily to a bogus future Chrome version and extremely old IE6 user-agent to no avail. I also even tried the CSS Feature Toggles extension to turn off CSS Grid support but that also didn't work.

Has anyone else noticed a brief, temporary reversion to the old Title page format? It's hard to tell with so many comments.

Eventually the previous design will not render anymore, not even intermittently.

"Has anyone else noticed a brief, temporary reversion to the old Title page format?" Of course! At least a dozen people have pointed that out, and yes, it is hard to tell with the thread being packed with remarks.

@achingimdb The new design is split 50/50 between new browser sessions so this explains why some customers have it and others do not; if you switch browsers / clear your cookies / open an incognito window, you will have a 50% chance of seeing the new version (and a 50% chance of seeing the old one).  Once the test period is over it will be 100/0 in terms of new vs. old. 

Hope this helps. 

@bderoes  The Trivia link in "All Topics" is in the "Popular" section at the top, red highlight added to your image here:

Hope this helps. 

@bderoes  Thanks, we do include such a link with > 1 location, but we see your point that even a single location can still have more information than is displayed on then main page.  Noted for the team, thanks. 

@Kirorhyl Hey bro If you Got your answer then please let me know the answer or procedure.

@amirkhan562345 I just found this "advanced view" which is kind of like the old style. Unfortunately, this will list all cast and crew, but for what it's worth, it's soooo much better than the new design. It is almost what I was looking for. Go to your settings, content settings and there turn on "Show reference view with full cast and crew (advanced view)"

@Kirorhyl Oh, that must only be available to premium members, which I cannot afford. Sad. 

@ApplePie Reference (Advanced view) is available to all IMDb users for free.

As mentioned by Kirorhyl - to enable this, visit your Content Settings page and enable "Show reference view with full cast and crew (advanced view)"

@AxDeath Could not agree MORE!! They basically wrecked the page and now that they've paid the programmers so much money they don't want to go back to the old version. The only people that like it are the ones that needed the (only) slightly larger photographs because they were too lazy to click through to the actor's page. LOL

Unfortunately, someone thought it was a good idea to change how it looks and works. Several features are buggy now and it looks like garbage. If you find a petition to change it back, let us know.

Well, those twenty-seven pages of complaints stand almost zero change of translating into twenty-seven months of complaints, and that's exactly what the IMDb site authorities have predicted.

I've already switched to TMDb and I use the advanced view of IMDb when I have to come over there. The problem is that people give up and stop complaining too soon. If we can get Sega to change Sonic, we can fix this mess.

I don't think it was too hard for the studio to figure out that Sonic the Hedgehog's quills are definitely supposed to be divided/grouped into locks, especially seeing how he is an anthropomorphic animal, a cartoon, not shaped like a normal hedgehog. Anyway, good luck with trying to get Sega to produce and release the third episode of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, or to reinstate Michael Jackson's uncredited musical score present in the original releases of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, e.g. the Ice Cap Zone beat.

@jtmacha  Thanks for the feedback; there’s more information earlier in this post, please see:

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60abb5553258dd21c738c969

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60ae3aea1ab2ba106b0106c3&replyId=60b01b0d06d61711351c9b7c

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60af6b6f62e27a6596f9b1af&replyId=60b3d09306d61711351cf052

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60b8e0f8a4586b59556af969&replyId=60c4ec9500ea110e3983c69d

Hope this helps.

So you've been told to go back for years, and yet you keep making changes. I've seen some of these old designs. They're fine. The new one is so bulky and so spaced out. Everything is huge. Why is there so much dead air around the cast photos? Why not a list of actors in a carousel? Why do tech companies keep insisting on making everything so infantile? I want a database of movies, not a social media knock off.

The cast photos, for example, are huge, and circles for some reason. They have these giant margins around them that just waste space. I get making a scalable UI to use the free space on the sides, but it makes it harder to see things. There's more space being used up and more scrolling to get to the information I need. And because the cast photos are cropped, I'm actually seeing LESS information than before. Then there's the ads for other articles I have no interest in. It's like the clumsy UI of a schlock top ten listicle site.

@mgrish  Thanks for the feedback. The new pages have the same information as the old ones so we are not sure what you mean about needing to go to a new page for the actors — please can you provide more details with examples?

In terms of the previous version being perfect, as we have written elsewhere on this thread:

The reactions we are seeing to the 2021 redesign are identical, sometimes almost word-for-word, to the reactions we saw to the 1995, 1998, 1999, 2005, 2007 and 2010 major redesigns. Yet without those redesigns IMDb would not be what it is today (as I noted in my earlier reply we prefer to avoid major redesigns, so as you can see from that sequence of years, we have been improving).  Yes, the very design which people on this thread are now saying was perfect was once derided as the worst thing in the history of the web.  Was it the worst thing or was it just that people generally need time to appreciate change?

Hope this helps.

You've mentioned this before, but that also means you're lumping everyone and every design into the same group. This is a very different re-design due to the fact that the technology of mobile, smartphone, tablet is much more of a factor this time so other elements are factoring in. And obvious "we are clearly trying to monetize this once useful space to jam some crappy sitcom down our users' throats."

The previous re-designs were updates on the site. This is a complete overhaul into a different site all together. Looking at just about any title, you see nothing but an ad taking up the entire screen and you still have to scroll to get to the bottom of the ad before even seeing the title of the movie.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Even after collapsing the ad, it's so big that you still only get the title and some small details and the very tip of Jack;s head.

The most recent design before this you do actually get some info, which is of course the point of actually using this site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190204220839if_/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/

A little further back and it's also better looking, less clutter and nothing overpowering:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140330221829/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/

Now this one I'm surprised at the difference - you're right this one, while useful, is outdated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060615112505/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/

What you can see from all of these is the size creep of ads and things unrelated to the particular movie itself. The earlier versions still do show what this site was my understanding of what it was/is supposed to be though - somewhere to look up info on your favorite movies, go down the rabbithole of cast and crew connections, trivia, etc. Modernizing, updating, fine. Taking a giant ad-dump on the site is not. Make it pretty AND useful, not neither.

Even Facebook and Amazon don't have this much bs on their pages and that's saying A LOT. Even with Prime Day tomorrow Amazon is not this busy and cluttered. Is this really what you envisioned when you created this site? Didn't you want it to be the ultimate movie reference site where you could find out about the movies you like and don't like?

I know this is falling on stubborn deaf ears but this truly sucks. 1st world problem but still, it's really taking the fun out of trying to use it. There are PLENTY of people who hate it that aren't taking the time to complain, not just happy people who don't write positive reviews. Many just move on to something else. Or begrudgingly use it but still hate it. Don't assume all of those who aren't speaking up are the positive ones. I speak for 10-15 people here myself who have audibly said wtf when they see it.

The new design is much more tolerable with an ad blocker. Frankly, so is most of the internet.

True. Apparently when I got a new laptop I didn't reinstall a good one and was relying on the basic one duckduckgo has which works in some areas but not all. Thanks for reminding me, this site looks a little more tolerable now that I installed a better one. Still looks like a cell phone company marketing exec and a millennial "designer" had a gaudy code baby, but at least I can see the basic pertinent info on the landing page now.

The thing about ad placement (and ad functionality) on IMDb is that it has been annoying implemented for the past decade. Some ads simply consume too many computing resources as well. I'm glad that none of them are Flash embeds anymore, though. A lot can be accomplished with simple GIF files.

I noticed that the underlying platform for the new design (which applies to the home page and the title pages) doesn't load in the version of Firefox that I use either. I just assumed that a contributing factor was my theme settings, thus that nobody else was experiencing this, but apparently the way the image styling is done in the Cascading Style Sheet definitions of the new IMDb design is written causes images not to be visible in some people's web browsers.

@killerlad You can try to clear browsing history a few times, it helped some other users, including myself until yesterday, now I'm stuck with a new layout which I can't use and IMDb is currently, unfortunately, useless to me.

Already tried that bro, but sadly no help, still stuck with the new layout. Initially when they came out with this, they provided an option to change back to the old layout but looks like they have removed the option sadly.