If you rely on your web browser to carefully scour Netflix’s vast catalog, you may have noticed a disappointing change this week. In a quiet, unannounced update, Netflix has removed the ability to sort movies and TV shows by alphabetical order (A-Z) and other options on its desktop website.
For years, power users have circumvented Netflix’s algorithmic recommendations by clicking the “Movies” or “TV Shows” tab, switching to grid view, and using the drop-down menu on the far right. This menu allowed you to sort by “Suggestions for You,” “Year Released,” “A-Z,” and “ZA.”
Now, that drop-down menu has disappeared, along with some other changes that were revealed over the past months, including a small visual overhaul of the player and the inability to click on genre rows to bring up the full list of titles now in a grid format (although navigating directly to the category code still worked for the time being). Netflix’s New and Popular tab has also become harder to use in recent months, especially with many titles listed in the Worth the Wait section no longer showing exact release dates for when those titles are scheduled to drop.
It’s unclear if this is the beginning of testing for a major overhaul of Netflix’s web interface. We reached out to Netflix with questions about the Netflix UI on the web earlier this week, but they have yet to respond.
As is common with unannounced UI changes rolling out across devices over the past year, customers quickly took to social media and Reddit to find out if they were losing their minds or if Netflix was actively hiding the features.
In the r/Netflix subreddit, several threads have emerged over the past few days questioning the removal. One thread, titled “Whatever happened to sorting by date in Netflix?”, is full of frustrated users who used the feature to keep track of new additions that the algorithm neglected to send to their homepage.
Another formula, “alphabetical option gone,” highlights how difficult it is to browse specific genres now. “Sometimes I want to scroll through a straight list of all the horror movies that exist without the algorithm hiding titles older than me,” complained one Redditor. “No point in removing basic AZ sorting.”
Part of a much larger UI overhaul
While the sudden removal of web sorting seems like a random downgrade, it’s actually part of a huge, sweeping initiative by Netflix to overhaul its user interface across all platforms — often at the expense of manual browsing.
If you’ve been following our coverage here on What’s on Netflix, you’ll know that the streaming giant is currently redesigning how we discover content from the ground up:
Why remove original sorting?
So, why would Netflix remove something as fundamental as alphabetical sorting? There are different ways to look at this.
One could argue that these features were quite niche and meant primarily for a few power users and were not widely used by people searching for content on Netflix. This also plays into the loss of engagement, with the Netflix algo filtering out titles it doesn’t think you’ll be interested in. The more time you spend scrolling through a huge, static AZ list, the more likely you are to crash your app.
These AZ options haven’t been available on mobile or TV apps for some time, so it may be a matter of bringing the experience in line with those devices and/or cleaning up and reducing the tech stack. We’ve seen this before, when Netflix stopped producing interactive content. This ultimately resulted in the removal of all previously interactive titles and the removal of its player functionality across all devices.
Another option could be to remove the features since the web does not play as big a role in Netflix’s viewing consumption. some data Will be released in 2022 It has been suggested that TV viewing accounts for 58% of all viewing on Netflix, smartphone viewing accounts for about 20%, and computer viewing accounts for 17%. Presumably, computer numbers have only declined since then.
Some will undoubtedly also speculate that hiding the raw AZ lists obscures the true size of Netflix’s catalog. A straightforward alphabetical list makes it very easy to see where a specific genre is lacking volume. Algorithmic rows, which often repeat the same titles across multiple categories, create the illusion of infinite content.
Have you noticed the missing sorting options on the web version of Netflix? Are you disappointed by the change, or are you completely dependent on the homepage algorithm anyway? Let us know in the comments below!
