Wasn't expecting so much candid feedback today. There was a Launch HN yesterday that had a 3D rubik's cube on their home page. It was literally pointless. But kind of neat. But you probably hated that as well, if I could assume. But I say that to point out that lots of companies do it, sometimes simply because we can (just look at Stripe and GitHub).

I think the lava lamp effect is cool. The perf issues can and will be fixed.

I appreciate you engaging with commenters on this, it’s nice to see.

From my perspective I agree with a lot of the other commenters - it’s just design for design’s sake. It’s an expensive way to add minor visual flair that heavily degraded the experience for a sizeable number of users. In terms of value provided to the user: it’s basically zero, or often worse than zero.

Personally, it feels over-designed, which the stretched font for the headings really reinforces. I’d drop the shader, re-evaluate your font choice for the headings, and focus on layout and readability a little more - using the site on my iPhone feels really cramped and like the whole page is getting cut off on the right-hand side constantly. I can’t scroll horizontally to see the rest of the code, for example.

I spent weeks on the typography and on choosing a font. Went through so many different styles. I ended up on Owners by MCKL [^0] because I personally like the ultra-wide font trend, and I liked its Text variant as well. Bummed to hear that others aren't a fan of it. Oh well, design is pretty subjective.

And it may be over-designed. It was my first foray back into design since switching careers to programming about 10 years ago. Maybe I took it a bit too far? Felt good to stretch those muscles, though. :)

[^0]: https://mckltype.com/owners/

That wide font is on purpose?! No offense, but I was sure something went wrong with rendering the page.

It didn't quite register as a "display" font variant usually does for me either -- the only feature is the width (it's a nonfancy sans-serif, what do you expect) so it somehow just feels like it's been squished. Intellectually I know it's definitely not a simple scale-transformation and must have involved some curve work to make it look less off, but I just can't shake the feeling of having seen text getting run over by a truck.

I went and found that Launch HN, and yeah, that rubik's cube is horrendous on my computer. They did not do as much effort as you did to make it work on low end machines. I don't have a GPU at all; your site disables the background effect but their site shows the cube anyway. Their site drags once that rubik's cube appears, and the cube itself animates at 1-2 fps. It's a very poor experience and I don't really see what the cube adds, but I do see what the cube subtracts.

(Your site works fine on my computer. The effect is disabled and it's not a problem.)

I'm sorry, but what should just. be a _progressive enhancement_ in this case completely ruins the user experience for me. However, I'm probably not your target audience, I'm just commenting on this trend in general.

It literally is a progressive enhancement, so I'm not sure what your point is.

There's clearly bugs where it's enabled where it shouldn't be, and that's certainly an issue, but the comments here make it clear that it gets disabled automatically on lower-end devices.

Yes other companies have animations but they make sure it performs well across browsers and OSs.

Mac+Firefox users are probably in your customer base. Listen to the feedback.

Looks good on the 4090 here, ship it

Not sure why people are hating so hard on your site, but I liked the effect, and it didn't cause any problems for me.

Speaking as someone that blocks javascript by default, the page doesn't look too bad!

That’s just your opinion, man. I checked the site on iPhone and would say that it’s better than 80% of the sites I see. No performance issues at all. The extra wide font I don’t like however.

So I took a look at the actual shader, and it really should not require anything powerful (decade old, worst-you-can-get hardware might struggle). A much more likely explanation (that the gp is alluding to but didn't explicitly say) is that the issue is related to your GPU drivers or related software. These are often buggy and/or hit a slow path for whatever reason. This is almost guaranteed to happen for some browser/os/hardware/driver combo (of which there are _many_) and you seem to have drawn today's short stick.

The animation itself looks fine, its slow enough that it doesn't feel distracting. Just a bit of flavor.

Its mostly just a few calls to a cheap noise function and no footguns I can see. Also hurrah for dev tools and open text formats! If you're looking for better performance, it looks like the noise could be precomputed (the same blob always gets the same noise)". Might be faster, might just hit more bugs.