[qwerty456127]

Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful. Nevertheless I just switched to foobar2000 on Windows and DeaDBeeF on Linux because their UIs just are perfectly bullshit-free practical pragmatic tools and I came to feel I want a tool rather than a show.

[themerone]

WinAmp 3 was bloated, slow, and unstable. It was bad enough that they threw out the code and released WinAmp 5 which was based on the code from WinAmp 2.

[donatj]

Yep, Wasabi, the XML driven UI toolkit was just too slow for PC's of the time.

[a0123]

People got used to a fairly simple and efficient UI. Version 3 was a bit of an abrupt change. A bit like today when your favourite social network completely revamps its UI for no apparent reason and makes it look fancier without adding any interesting functionality (and usually removes a couple).

It's hard to come back from that.

[rchaud]

Winamp 3 with its default "Modern" skin was very sluggish, even on decently specced computers in 2003. If you replaced the default with a Winamp classic skin, it immediately sped up, but defaults are powerful, so most users probably left it as is.

[serf]

>Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful

variety of reasons.

mine: it broke a huge amount of visualizers/dsps/skins.

[rightbyte]

I guess you might wonder the same thing if installing Windows Vista on a recentish computer.