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If you rely on your web browser to meticulously comb through Netflix’s massive catalog, you might have noticed a frustrating 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 bypassed Netflix’s algorithmic recommendations by clicking into the “Movies” or “TV Shows” tabs, switching to the 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 “Z-A.”
Now, that drop-down menu has simply vanished alongside some other changes which have rolled out in prior months, including a small visual overhaul of the player and the inability to now click on genre rows to bring up the full list of titles in a grid format (although navigating to category codes directly still works for the time being). Netflix’s New & Popular tab has also become harder to use in recent months, with many titles listed in the Worth the Wait section in particular no longer showing exact release dates for when those titles are due to drop.
Whether this is the start of testing for a major overhaul of Netflix’s web interface is unclear. We reached out to Netflix with questions about the Netflix UI on the web earlier this week, but they haven’t responded yet.
As is typical with unannounced UI changes that have been rolling out across devices over the past year or so, subscribers quickly took to social media and Reddit to figure out whether they were losing their minds or if Netflix was actively hiding features.
In the r/Netflix subreddit, multiple threads have popped up over the last few days questioning the removal. One thread, titled “What happened to sorting by date in Netflix?”, is filled with frustrated users who used the feature to keep track of new additions that the algorithm neglected to push to their homepage.
Another thread, “Alphabetical option gone,” highlights how difficult it is to browse specific genres now. “Sometimes I just want to scroll through a straight list of all the horror movies they have without the algorithm hiding older titles from me,” one Redditor complained. “Taking away basic A-Z sorting makes zero sense.”
Part of a Much Larger UI Overhaul
While the sudden removal of web sorting feels like a random downgrade, it’s actually part of a massive, 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 at What’s on Netflix, you’ll know that the streaming giant is currently redesigning how we discover content from the ground up:
Why Remove Basic Sorting?
So, why would Netflix remove something as fundamental as alphabetical sorting? There are different ways of looking at it.
One could argue that these features were fairly niche and mainly for a few power users and not widely used by people discovering content on Netflix. That also plays into a loss of engagement, sifting through titles the Netflix algo doesn’t think you’d be interested in. Ie. the longer you spend scrolling through a massive, static A-Z list, the more likely you are to close the app.
These A-Z options have not been available on mobile or in the TV app for a while, so it could be a case of bringing the experience more 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. That eventually led to the removal of all prior interactive titles and the functionality from its players across devices being written out.
Another option could be that the features are retired as the web doesn’t play quite as big a role in Netflix’s viewing consumption. Some data released in 2022 suggested that TV viewing accounts for 58% of all viewing on Netflix, smartphones account for nearly 20%, and computers account for 17%. Presumably, that computer number has only declined since then.
Some will also no doubt speculate that hiding raw A-Z lists obscures the actual size of Netflix’s catalog. A straight alphabetical list makes it very easy to see when a specific genre is lacking in 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 Netflix’s web version? Are you frustrated by the change, or do you rely entirely on the homepage algorithm anyway? Let us know in the comments below!
