[leeches]

I prefer the higher information density of earlier designs. The surface-level styles make them seem old, but structurally, these sites provided a lot more utility.

When I hit your homepage, I don't care about the fullscreen photo and bland headline. I'm blind to it, these things don't even register. Please give me a list of news headlines, a full product lineup, top support articles, etc.

[Dalewyn]

Information density is inversely proportional to screen resolution advancements.

[wildrhythms]

I think it has more to do with adapting to touchscreens where the touch targets need to be much larger, so you end up with lots of white space.

[jeroenhd]

I think many of the old designs would scale quite well. The elements on screen were absolutely huge when 20 inch monitors had resolutions like 800x600. Websites would've needed to redesign their CSS for wide/tall screens, but old designs could work.

I think it's just part of the evolution of the web. When CSS2 and CSS3 became widely supported and screens went beyond CRTs, their layout changed. The era of early mobile screens had websites that were very difficult to scale and adapt, so special mobile web pages were created (that often had a kind of slimmed-down look, later replaced by fake-iOS CSS and then more experiments). That then developed into responsive design because maintaining two websites was a pain; at that point, designs also happened to become flatter and less distinguishable, eventually leading to the bland sea of whitespace we see today.

[marginalia_nu]

I think a lot of this is the result of attempting to build a hybrid design for both desktop and mobile. Ends up sort of doing neither all that well.