User:Seeaver/Website redesigns

Some people might like a redesign, some do not. Some websites let users manually opt out of a redesign. For example, MediaWiki allows registered users to choose a theme. Unregistered users can use the  URL parameter, but it is not retained.

Until circa 2020, Forums.XDA-Developers.com had a style chooser at the page bottom that supported every style since the forum existed. Also unregistered users could access it, since the  was stored as browser cookie.

Also, there might be some technical differences, e.g. YouTube's Polymer design is a progressive web application, which can have benefits such as mini player, but disadvantages such as longer initial loading time and especially Wayback Machine incompatibility, but thankfully, Archive.Today's Chromium-based crawling engine since 2019-11-29 supports progressive web applications.

Since 2020,  (or  ) can no longer deactivate the polymer design, making YouTube another limbo to the Wayback Machine, but like I said, thankfully not Archive.Today, though it appears that the Wayback Machine has somehow figured out JS-based pages by rendering in a headless browser and converting HTTP POST requests to HTTP GET linked through the same time stamp.