James F.

BEFORE: Rooms could be open OR private, easily selectable. When my friends and I wanted to watch something together, it didn't matter if someone we knew hadn't friended us yet, or we wanted to add an unexpected guest or someone one new on the fly. We could easily gather in one of our rooms set Open, and then change it to Private after we were all on, or just add someone to the room when they requested access.

NOW: You CAN'T HAVE a private room. At all. Unless you set up an explicit group for all of the usernames you want to be in it. It's OK if you have an established group of friends that meets regularly that you can make a group for, but setting it up is a pain in the butt, and for a non-established ad hoc bunch of people, it's too much trouble to even bother. (And if you just leave your room open, you're likely to get invaded or trolled.)

BEFORE: When you put Rabbit into full-screen mode, the content being watched filled most of the left-side of the screen, with the chat area next to it. This was wonderful for shared watching of movies, since the movie would take up most of your TV and look nice, and the chat didn't get in the way.

NOW: When you go into full-screen mode, the chat area goes semi-transparent and overlays about a quarter of the video on the right. It's UGLY. It totally ruins trying to watch a movie or any other kind of immersive video content.

BEFORE: In your own room, you could control who used the remote. If you wanted to give someone else control, you could, by manually freeing the remote.

NOW: Any random person in the room can grab the remote and take over the controls, anytime.

== ALSO==

The new control layout is UGLY and wastes a lot of the screen space. The new chat colors are UGLY. When this update first came out, the chat text used to just run off the right side of the screen, but this has now been "fixed" by breaking up words wherever they happen to hit the edge. (Guys, that's not how word wrap is supposed to work.) THE CHAT AREA DOESN'T AUTO-SCROLL PROPERLY.

And I'm not even mentioning the problems people are having getting Rabbit to even connect to important sites like Netflix.

IN SHORT, this update:

* lacks expected functionality
* is hard to use
* is buggy
* has poorly designed (I would even say UGLY) visuals, and a poor page layout.

As Rabbit currently exists, I would not recommend it even as a chew toy for your dog. If the company wants to add new features or make the site more social, that might be an OK idea, but really, they MUST roll back to the previous version, and start adding the new features to that established base. Trying to FIX the features of the Frankensteinian mess that is the new version appears hopeless.

However, Rabbit has stated on Twitter that they have NO intention of doing a roll-back. So, until something changes in a major way, I for one won't be using Rabbit -- and I USED to be on the site nearly every day.