STRIP FOR Apr 28, 2008

The new Flash delivery has, for me, significantly degraded my experience of the site. I find the home page too slow to load and visually cluttered. When I load the page the current strip comes up first and is then removed and replaced by the Flash embedded form. Also, since I'm often away from my desktop for days at a time, accessing past strips is now much more difficult than it used to be - indeed, I always found the old need to go to a separate page to access the lovely calendar format for Dilbert rather than having it on the home page (as in the Comics.com Monty page) a bit annoying. The current mechanism, as far as I can tell from limited exploration, require me to step back through the strips until I find the first one that I haven't seen, instead of picking from the calendar and stepping forward. With the best will in the world, given how slowly the pages load, it's hard not to spoil the sequence by getting at least a vague idea of what happens in the later strips.

The inability properly to display the Sunday two line strips is a disaster - oddly, it's more frustrating knowing that the second line is there, because I see a small version of it briefly before the black Flash screen comes up, otherwise it would have a certain Zen like quality.

The new mash-up/most popular features I can see being attractive to many readers, but it's messy to have the "best of" clutter up the home page. As for having three large colourful adverts and two separate panes of sponsored links - well, the visual impact, slow loading, and the need to scroll horizontally and vertically to access everything is making me consider reluctantly deleting my bookmark for this page. For comparison, I'd look at Google for successfully adding powerful features (via a discreet menu bar arrangement) with a easy to read main page.

I imagine it all looks and works great on the heavy silicon big screen machine with the high bandwidth connection that the designer hopefully used to develop the new facilities. Could it be a cunning plan for the talented Scott Adams to garner new themes?