Hm, close to it, but they don't require you to install "certain browser", but "one of certain browsers", and all of them are $0 price tag, and they are robust industry-standard ones, so it's more like "you need optic drive to play CD", more a technology nuisance than DRM.

The funny part is, that it simply doesn't make sense (to me), seems like GOG completely forgot what they are (e-shop), and they are instead pushing for something completely else, not focusing to serve customers first, but toying around with some "pixel perfect" designs, etc... Makes me wonder if their designers have ever seen setups of few ordinary people, to get idea how broken the site may look outside of their controlled environment (if nothing major like screen size/font size is off from original vision, then colours are always the safe bet, all the graphicians are always in agony when you show them what ordinary people see on their LCDs, it's almost funny kind of torture, I used to do that to our gfx guys back when I was in game development, if they were discussing some colour details too long... :D ).

While there's quite some technical challenge to write e-shop which works on majority of browsers, it's nowhere near that impossible like GOG makes it to sound. But it starts with having reasonable design and vision, current GOG seems like designed by somebody who has no idea about how web works, just wants something "nice" on screen. :/ Some horrible things still remain even from previous redesign try, like those scroll-in-scroll when I'm trying to read changelog on the game page in library, etc... been annoying me for so many years, that I *almost* got used to those. And then *this* happened... I don't want to defend IE, it's atrocity and shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if the eshop can't support IE, you shouldn't blame MS for that, that's purely the eshop's fault.

Here, it works slow, is beautiful but usability is bad, sales aren´t clear. I don´t like it.

I know a bit about programming and I can definitely say that this feature is not rocket science. This is as standard and easy a task as they get.

On the other hand, I have no experience with projects on larger scales like this one. You have to be much more careful to not break anything and to think about corner cases and so on. Therefore my initial estimation that it basically takes a day to implement if one is actually working on it, might be wrong. It might take a week instead (or even more?).

Is this an excuse not to work on it? Probably not. GOG does like the auto-play of the videos and does not care about customers not liking it (otherwise they would make it optional). It's probably as simple as that.
I agree, they could at least serve a basic site that runs on older browsers too. However, what looked convincing to me was their argument that IE11 is not used anymore by a significant fraction of users. Why spending money for a extreme niche audience (uses old browser, doesn't want to install another one)? That seems like a waste of money.

But then I looked up the stats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) and on desktop computers (the target group of GOG) in November 2018 the distribution is like:

Chrome 63%-72%
Firefox 6%-9%
IE 4%-9%
Edge 2%-4%
Safari 3%-14%
Opera 1%-3%
Others 2%-6%

That rather looks like IE is still used by a significant amount of people.

That would be akin to admitting defeat. We gamers know that you cannot win them all and sometimes have to face that the challenge was too big and face the inevitable mockery of others, but still this is not something that people like to do every day.

On the other hand they just might not yet be convinced that they made things worse with this one. They might still think that they are actually winning the game. And whatever you do, there is always somebody that criticizes you and thinks things should be different. That's as universal a law as gravity. No reason not to do something though.

This is true too, that's why I said "in the meantime" because while you wait for them to change the feature it's better to resort to 3rd party functionalities. So while it's good to be heard by GOG staff about stuff you hate, you unfortunately have to wait and wait and wait until it is/ isnt implemented, this is why there's threads and extensions like: Adalia Fundamentals - Fixing GoG so you don't have to! plus other tools to make browsing this maze easier.

Still, is fascinating the amount of hate GOG can self generate :D

Absolutely agree with this. I find that games forums in their current conditions are sadly underutilized, but with a wealth of potential for tech support, patch/update tracking, and general games discussions. In fact, I'd prefer these forums to be utilized rather than having mixes reintegrated because I think it's a hassle to have useful information about one game spread across different sections of a website.

I also think it would be awesome if GOG added a mandatory "category" drop-down menu whenever one starts a new thread in a games forum, where each category would be each stand-alone game (plus expansions) in a series. It would be easier to find threads discussing the technical issue you have with i.e. Broken Sword 1 without having to sift through the 15 other threads about the same issue, but pertaining to BS 2, 3, 4 or 5. (Which game the thread is about isn't always clear from the title either.)

However, seeing how much of an uphill battle it is to get GOG to turn off a universally hated feature (video auto-play) even though it's incredibly easy to do, I'm not exactly holding my breath here. Expanding and simplifying accessibility and user friendliness is clearly not a priority.

guessing from the sheer incompetence within GOG, I'd say, that the problem here is, that GOG does not know or even have "that older version" anywhere. Or maybe when creating the new site, they changed things on the backend and reverting to the old version would completely break this pile of shit ... sorry, I'm meant "webpage" forever.
But I'm still in favor of "they didn't back up that running version".

True, and that's what I do, but blocking ytimg causes problems elsewhere.

It's also a less than ideal solution and not a valid excuse for bad web designing.

Ouch. Holy shit. I don't use Galaxy 'cause I don't want launchers clogging my PC, but this is one of the main reasons I boycott steam.

If I click the X you get the fuck out, as it's expected from you.
Honestly, I'm convinced that GOG web designers need to have an excuse to keep their job and don't look useless, so they redesign something that wasn't broken just to look busy and important.

Because they want everyone to use Galaxy, and if you won't or can't use Galaxy they will just make the website as useless as possible.

Did that ever happen? I mean not with GOG, but any website ever? From what I've seen websites often get redisigned for no other apparent reason than "we need to make changes so it doesn't look like it's too old", even if everything works perfectly, and the new design is obviously worse. And never, ever, ahve I seen any site roll back. "The only way is forward" seems to the dogma.

Sadly, yeah, that seems to be the rule. Change for the sake of change, make it worse when you change, don't go back after a change.

I have seen it on one web page already, can't recall company precisely. Took them about week or two to realize the shitstorm is real, then reverted to almost old version with few new changes (which were not criticized that much), and then slowly redesigned per-section over next year, also incorporating major rational points from feedback, so they basically did push "redesign" on users after like a year, but the end result was reasonably different from first try (I think it was endomondo (running tracker), but I'm not sure). Anyway, it took them less than 14 days to get some PR face up for slapping... I was back then somewhat surprised it took them "so long". Boy, was I naive, here we are, breaking world records with GOG... :D

I honestly think I've given the new website design a good chance, but I've reached the point where browsing the site these days feels like too much of a chore.

Searching through countless pages, usually filled with multiple editions of the same game, myriad DLC and OST offerings for one game... I just can't be bothered.

Well I browsed the deals with the list view, added everything I am interested in to my wishlist to not have to engange with the main page again.