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Increase max number of packages to compare #2289
Description
On the compare page, the max number of packages to compare was initially set to 4, to avoid layout issues.
Recent improvements allow us to increase this number:
- data table now has fixed first column, and horizontal scrolling
- bar charts will grow vertically
- line chart has an alternative view (sparklines) that can become the default view above n number of compared packages (feat: compare download charts with sparklines #2273)
To be discussed:
- Do we set a higher limit, or no limit at all ?
- If we set a limit: 10? 25? 42?
My personal take is we need a limit, not too high, to avoid flooding the dom, probably 20-30 would be fine.
Activity
MatteoGabriele commentedon Mar 26, 2026
Yes! I'm more for the no-limits side. Is better because there won't be any disable states to handle and no configurations to share between things like the compare page and the action bar in the search page.
RYGRIT commentedon Mar 27, 2026
I agree 4 is probably too low now.
The layout constraints are much better than before, so increasing the limit makes sense. But I would still keep a limit for now instead of going fully unbounded, mostly because of request volume, chart readability, and overall page weight as the number of packages grows.
My vote would be to:
We can always increase it again later if that still feels too restrictive.
graphieros commentedon Mar 27, 2026
I think we'll need to force the downloads chart to sparklines above 8 or 10, because the combined chart would make no sense. For example: 10 series:
This is unreadable, whereas the split view is better:
MatteoGabriele commentedon Mar 27, 2026
Why do you say that? This looks good to me. At the end of the day, that's what the user wants, right? If they need to see 10 graphs, they can do it. What doesn't make sense to you? Just curious, maybe I'm missing something.
graphieros commentedon Mar 27, 2026
My point was that a standard line chart (the combined view, not the sparkline view) does not make sense above a certain number of series. The screenshot I provided above with 10 series is still ok-ish, but give it 5 or 10 more and the tooltip becomes an i-pad. Of course, users can still unselect series from the legend, but I think it makes the whole chart look unprofessional (basically the combined line chart is no longer the fitting presentation for the dataset).
I think I'm with @RYGRIT in regards to the limit. 10 is probably enough, in which case we can keep both views available without looking like fools.
MatteoGabriele commentedon Mar 27, 2026
let's go with the 10 so we unlock this one ✨