DataTables

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2010–2024), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with DataTables, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Loses their place scanning across wide table rows; hard to track the row2024-07-27
Virtualized tables can't be searched with Ctrl-F for rows not currently rendered2021-11-27
Paging through results is slow when the user already knows the search term2021-11-25
Huge config object forces constant documentation lookups to make any tweak2020-06-21
Wide tables exceed phone screen width, forcing awkward two-direction scrolling2020-06-05
Quick view sheet slides in from the right, forcing a long mouse trip to close it2019-11-06
Too many columns and filters force users to click repeatedly to do their job2017-03-06
Pagination controls shift up and down between pages with variable-height rows2016-02-02
Each country switch re-downloads 5MB and waits about 30 seconds2016-01-21
Documentation is not up to scratch, hard to use for learning the library2013-09-17
API is atrocious: odd function invocation, error-prone argument and parameter handling2013-09-17
Can't find a list of initialization options; examples too few and assume prior knowledge2013-09-17
Dumping 10,000 rows to the screen is unreadable, so users cannot make sense of the data2010-09-17