The design is fun and gave me a lot of nostalgia, but I admit they overdid it. They could have made that piece feel the same without so much distraction. And please people, support reader mode. It's not hard and it shouldn't be optional.
EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that solos over everyone else's solos.
On top of the poor readability, my 2-year-old laptop can't even navigate through the page without CPU and GPU going insane, and my fans blasting at max speed. It's the poorest, choppiest web performance I can recall, all for what should be a simple blog post.
That's likely because it offloads most of the job to GPU. On a potato it's also very choppy, but CPU fans stays quiet indeed.
Gate's notes seems to put the most strain on CPU instead.
Seriously next level. I am on an old potato, and its smooth as silk, forward and backward. Backward. My potato is a ThinkPad i7 which slips into low speed at every single moment it can.
Yeah, some of the Apple pages are pretty bad too, and I feel Jobs would've kept it more minimal. But to me, this blog is worse because it's supposed to showcase a whole article, and it's hard to read (and not even compatible with browser reader-mode).
I do tend to agree with your sentiment — his business practices have not been ethically stellar. Despite, if you wish to bring forward criticism and be taken seriously, you’d do well to first familiarize yourself with the basic difference between copyright and patents.
The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it.
(FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)