Welcome! Today we launched preview.glitch.com — an early look at a new version of the Glitch site, which we’re rebuilding from the ground up in collaboration with you, our community. We wanted to get back to our roots of building in public, and also use this developer preview to show off cool new features across the Glitch platform, starting with things like our starter apps, updated versions of the containers that run your apps, lots of new ideas in user interface and discovery, and lots more so we can get as much feedback from you as possible.
We’re really, really excited, and grateful to all of you who join in on helping us shape the future of Glitch. We’re doing this work because it’s obviously been a while since Glitch first started, and there are lots of new things we want to make it easy to do on the platform, as well as lots of dusty corners of the platform that could use some refreshing or updating (yes, we hear you about updating Node!). And honestly, Glitch is a lot more fun for everyone when we build it together.
Right now this preview Glitch site is showing off the very first big steps we’ve taken:
Moving our front-end to a modern framework (Remix) so we can iterate faster
Massively improving lighthouse scores, accessibility, and overall performance to offer a better experience for every user
Improved support for theming so we can iterate on design (and yep…. dark mode!)
You’ll also see the very first hints at our new design system being implemented — to make things easy, we started by making the new site resemble the familiar classic Glitch experience as much as possible, but that’ll change soon!
We’re so excited to build a new Glitch together as a community. We’ve set up this thread so you can tell us what you think. We want to hear from you so please don’t be shy!
What to look for
This is an early preview, so there’s a lot that’s not in place yet. You’ll see lots of placeholder UI as we build and iterate.
To log in you’ll need to use your email and password or our magic link feature — we haven’t implemented OAuth on the preview site. But once you log in you’ll see the start of an all-new dashboard!
You’ll see plenty of 404s as you navigate. We’ve focused so far on the bones of the site and will fill out pages with future updates.
User pages, team pages, and project pages have been our main focus; specifically around performance, data fetching, and laying groundwork for customization. Check out a few examples and you’ll notice how fast everything loads:
It’s not building in public if you can’t file bugs! And we’ll get to a public bug tracker soon, but for this stage just jump into this thread and let us know what you see.
BUG: A few elements on the dashboard page need dark mode love too (sortable headings, action buttons, info glyphs next to “Boosted Projects” and “Project Hours”) and the pager at the bottom (not pictured).
BUG: If you click the “Download” button for a project the progress bar and spinner at the top of the page never stop progressing/spinning.
BUG: On a page load, in dark mode, there’s a flash of unstyled content (the page flashes white and then switches to dark mode). (I repro’d this one on safari on ios as well)
BUG: The “LET’S GO” button on the home page could be more readable.
BUG: While logged in, just refreshing the home page a few times (I repro’d in fewer than 10 refreshes) can result in an Error page with no stack trace…
So exciting We’ve been hard at work on this new version of Glitch for some time now and appreciate the reports as we start opening it up. The focus has been on speed and accessibility, with a huge bump in our lighthouse scores. Now that we’re opening it up to all of you, we’ll be building in public and taking your feedback into each of our iteration cycles.
What I’m working on now is the error states, so if you do end up in a bad place it’s easy to understand why, and navigate away from it.
Keep these coming!! We’ve been paying attention to dark mode (and just added the little toggle at the bottom so you can get out of dark mode if you’d like – it defaults to your system setting) but primarily laying things out in light mode. We’ll tackle these ASAP!
Ok so I did a bit of a brainfart, and just click the send magic link button without typing in my email or doing the captcha and got an error page. Should probably add some validation there.
Hmm login with the magic code redirected me to Glitch which then errored. Clicking login redirected me back to the dashboard, but clicking home redirected me to the root, which then showed I was logged in. Dashboard is still erroring though.
If you take a look at the underpinnings of the profile page, you’ll see how we’ve defined each section with CSS properties, hopefully to give you a sense of customization coming
Specifically Careers and Help Center are external links but don’t get the icon. The social media links don’t either but I think its fine because its assumed that they should be external.
Also I’ve noticed that user profile URL’s have changed from /@example to /user/example, so there should be some kind of redirect, so that when this replaces the old website, old links still work.
There were also broken playlist URL’s on a user’s profile before, but it looks like they were removed so that seems fine then.
The user dropdown is a tad buggy. For instance, clicking it will make it show up and vanish instantly. It seems that you’re supposed to hover but I’m so used to clicking lol
Yeah I realized today that I instinctively typed the old URL structure. We’ll definitely set up some redirects — both for the sake of folks using Glitch but also for the sake of avoiding link rot. Connecting users and projects to the open web is more important than ever.
Thanks for this! We’re using the icon for pages that open up in a new tab, but maybe these other external pages should as well. Keep the feedback coming!
The preview page looks great! As mentioned before, the default nprogress.js loader could certainly be customized and improved. The dark/light theme widget could move (maybe) to the top and be just a button instead of a select menu.
Some more small stuff:
Profile pictures with transparent backgrounds just show a black background
The buttons on the project page (Save * Share * Say thanks) look just like normal text
I’m not a big fan of the new decoration that shows on the profile icon (profile page)
The profile page looks like it’s missing a lot
(not important) Maybe improving the error pages?
I don’t know if it’s just me, but the logo at the top left corner looks a bit weird
The user dropdown doesn’t close when anything is clicked
The “Try something new” link at the footer isn’t very recognizable, maybe add an underline or/and a different color?
A “skip to main content” button when using tab seems missing, is this intentional?
Tapping the login button when already logged in shouldn’t work and seems to mess things up a bit.
But overall I really like the new website!
Some problems I’ve got:
I got this error after tapping the login button when logged in lol. It also shows in incognito mode (let’s hope I didn’t crash the whole server - for everyone - by accident )
Edit 1: oh it’s back online again Edit 2: Now I’m getting this when I refresh the dashboard:
@jenn That’s great to hear! The final draft is due in September, which means we will be able to incorporate any updated interface screenshots or instructions.
Hi @jenn We are about to send our first draft in for review. We use Glitch almost exclusively in the last two chapters. What’s the best way to contact you or someone who can answer some questions about Glitch and the new interface?
this preview is the community website. there’s a separate set of work they’re doing to update the project containers. another thread on something from that subject:
Out of 10 stars, I would rate 8.
If images get fixed, will bring to 9.
If usability on mobile gets fixed where copy-paste works better, will bring to 10.
i like the vibe of the new website, it reminds me of the old Glitch.
very unlikely. Glitch hasn’t made their website open-source and they probably won’t soon. It’s a bit ironic since they require us to open-source our projects unless we pay, but keep their own website closed-source
yeah it’s still a preview after all
Yeah, I agree, 5 boosted projects is nowhere near enough.
Even with more boosted projects:
Hetzner Cloud gives you double the RAM, 40GB storage, full root access for ~$4.70/month. You can even increase your storage for $0.05/GB per month
Glitch Pro only gives you 2GB ram and 400MB of storage for $8/month . Both of the options above offer much more storage and more ram for much cheaper prices.
(per boosted project, although combining multiple boosted project’s size and ram is basically impossible)
You even have more access to the projects themselves, since getting anything like Bun on Glitch is a hassle without relying on community projects, and a bunch of stuff is banned.
That being said, the free Glitch plan is amazing and I highly recommend it for anyone starting with programming. Glitch is easy to use, and deploying projects is fast, you just don’t get the control you would with a VPS.
I’m not saying not to buy Glitch Pro, since it also helps keep the great free version of Glitch alive. I am just suggesting improving some stuff to make it look more appealing.
What if we did? Curious what folks think would be the potential there if this new version of the community-facing site were open sourced and took pull requests.
I think it would be cool to have bits of the website having a mark by someone. If the staff likes one of the changes, they can merge it and boom. Now the website is not JUST made by the staff but it is also by the community. I was thinking about a catch-phrase (not that it would be used of course):
the community could then continue to look at how it makes API calls. current community site makes this possible, because Glitch API requests come from the client. preview site does API requests from the server.
but going back to the concept of taking pull requests, that would be a neat way to open up some of the “email support” kind of workflows for maintaining the current site, e.g. submitting app of the week nominations. imagine doing that by opening a PR that adds it to a file full of submissions or something. people have discussed having community submitted starter projects displayed too etc
Back in the days (2019), it was open-source! The homepage back then had a small section at the end linking to the Glitch project with the source of the website, and if you were lucky enough you could see the Glitch devs online and messing around with the files.
The project used to exist at ~community, but if you’re curious, the old source still exists on GitHub. I tried setting it up for fun, but I couldn’t get the pages to render content, probably due to how I had to use Node v16 because v8 (its that old!) simply refuses to run on Windows 11 or the fact that I don’t know how CoffeeScript works.
Sorry I didn’t reply immediately. Had issues signing in via GitHub bc of my two-step verification being outdated.
On mobile, if I try to program a website through Glitch on my phone, if code is already there, I cannot delete it, even if it is my project. If it’s empty, I cannot copy and paste code there as it will delete immediately. And if I try to save the modified version, it will only save if I turn on Desktop Mode on my phone.
I would send a screenshot but it wouldn’t show the issue, and I can’t send videos either as the site I used to compress the videos is acting up rn.
You should add a leather switch on the top where the account and the “new project” button is to where the user can just press that switch and it will switch from light and dark mode, also a setting in the account settings under a section called “display” which they can in there choose a color palette or a background for that user.
We’ve been hard at work on this new version of Glitch for some time now and appreciate the reports as we start opening it up. The focus has been on 
speed and accessibility, with a huge bump in our lighthouse scores. Now that we’re opening it up to all of you, we’ll be building in public and taking your feedback into each of our iteration cycles.
Thanks for the feedback!
