It is way less efficient to consume HN with this design, so I won't use it.
I agree, it's a lot harder to logically/visually move through comments. The grey-black-black-with-underlines is a lot easier to read then the bold-black/black/thin-hl. It's kind of why I hate the new reddit style too.
I also don't like having to hover to see the icons for reply. Why are you hiding the parent/context buttons for navigation in a dot-dot-dot menu when you drill into a comment chain? Where's prev/next? Upvote/Downvote/hover UI covers stuff, and no alt tags anywhere to be seen.
Also why does it need perms to firebase and extensionpay again?
It just feels clunky even as a redesign.
- Parent / context are in the menu just to keep the design clean. But I understand that's not what everyone wants, so I will add a setting to show these with the other icons, instead of in the menu.
- Prev / next are moved to the "control pad" (pro feature), but my intention is for the free version to support all current HN features, so I will add those back in the next update.
- The permission to firebase is to access the HN API [1] to grab user profile info etc. The other is for the pro upgrade using ExtPay [2]