Netflix Just Removed One of the Last Features to Make its UI Even Slightly Usable

Netflix—or any of the other major streaming services for that matter—is not in the business of helping its user watch what they want. Netflix is in the business of channeling user eyes toward whatever content they want you to be viewing. This was the case since long before the loss of the treasured Netflix DVD library in 2023, a compendium of physical media the likes of which will never be assembled again–I would know, having been a user right up to the bitter end. The gradual enshittification of how the Netflix user is able to access the streaming side of the service, meanwhile, has progressed at a pace that is slow enough to obscure how much worse it has also become over the years … until something happens like this past week’s changes that brings it all into perspective. Most of the streamer’s casual users will never even notice when these types of changes are made, but for the true power users, it’s a devastating and utterly pointless robbery of functionality: Making the service demonstrably worse for no other reason than to continue pushing users toward a smaller and smaller array of fake choices. Because as of this week, you can’t even sort movies in any way via the Netflix app or web-based user interface. All the options to do so have finally been removed.

You’ll have to humor me on this, as I am considerably more sensitive to this type of UI meddling than almost anyone else would be. Consider it the aftereffect of spending years upon years carefully keeping lists of genre movies on streaming services up to date, as I watched pretty much every one of those streaming services continuously make it more difficult for paying customers to determine what films were actually in their libraries. It was more than eight years ago at this point that I wrote a piece on the absolute clusterfuck that the Amazon Prime UI had devolved into, when it came to the ability to browse its then-massive library of content, a problem that only continued to grow worse with time. Years later, I would be told by an Amazon whistleblower employee that my initial piece had become borderline legendary within the halls of Prime HQ, an infamous testament to the inability of a company that spends $22 billion per year on content to design a system that allowed people to freely browse that content in a logical way.

Per @whatsonnetflix.bsky.social, Netflix just removed the ability to sort titles alphabetically from their web interface. Thanks for making it harder for me to find things I know I want to watch, Netflix. www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix…

[image or embed]

— Kathy Gibson (@kathyfgibson.bsky.social) May 6, 2026 at 2:29 PM

Now it’s Netflix’s turn to reach those same levels of inaccessibility for its most dedicated users. Last week, industry sites covering the streamer noticed that an unannounced update had removed some of the core functionality that had always existed in the web-based Netflix UI in particular: The ability to sort movies as you browsed them, or to load the entirety of a genre in a grid view. In other words, before last week, it was always possible to call up a genre of movie via the web-based UI, such as “comedy,” “action” or “horror,” and then see a grid view that included every single movie streaming on the service that included that tag. It was the easiest way to see the full breadth of a genre on Netlix, and pretty much the only way to fully browse a genre, to see beyond the auto-generated suggested content that Netflix wants to push on you. This means that literally none of us can now authoritatively answer “how many action movies are streaming on Netflix?”, because there’s no way to look up a full list.

Removing the entire drop-down menu that also contained the grid view option likewise removed the ability to sort films in other ways, such as from A-Z or by release year, which were both previously options in that menu. You can see what that menu looked like before last week right here. Now it simply doesn’t exist.

Instead, when you navigate the web-based Netflix UI to a genre such as horror, what you’re now met with are a bunch of smaller, “personalized” subgenres and categories, but no ability to see every film in the entire Netflix library that meets that criteria. Because sure, I didn’t want to be able to see what was on the service I’m paying $20 per month for; what I clearly wanted was two different categories called “Today’s Picks for You” and “We Think You’ll Love These,” which I’m sure have very different criteria. Ah, and “Gems For You” as a category as well! These certainly look like useful suggestions, given that most of them are movies I’ve already watched on Netflix. What’s that; half of the categories also contain the same films in the first half dozen suggestions? Splendid!

Four extremely distinct concepts, courtesy of the Netflix UI.

This kind of UI change is a conscious act, in which Netflix is choosing to spurn an admittedly small group within its paying clientele who nevertheless represented some of its most ardent users. There’s no reason whatsoever to remove this kind of functionality, which has always existed within the web-based UI of the service, unless you specifically don’t want users to be able to explore the breadth of your library because you’re:

A. Shrinking that library, and

B. Trying to direct them to a very specific, smaller group of titles that you want to promote, by throttling organic exploration and instead shunting the user in the most shameless way imaginable.

It’s just one step further into the death of genuine choice in the streaming world, part of a process that has already seen Netflix redesign its smart TV and mobile apps to make them steadily more manipulative as well. Users mourned the loss of the “New & Popular” and “Categories” tabs from the left-side menu of the smart TV Netflix app UI last year, which robbed them one of the only ways you could even attempt to “browse” the library on a TV screen, while the mobile app has long since descended into a functionless, TikTok-adjacent endless scroll.

For a while, that left the web-based Netflix UI as something of a last bastion of usability for the user who actually wanted to know what the fuck was on the streaming service without individually searching film titles, but now that era has officially come to a close as well. Rest assured that despite some loud online complaints and squawking reddit threads, once these kinds of features disappear, they don’t tend to be given back to you. Not when the companies have financial incentives to focus your eyeballs only on a small slice of the overall content library they boast of providing.

As one reddit user put it: “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. Taking away basic A-Z sorting makes zero sense.”

But unfortunately it makes all the sense in the world, if you have nothing but contempt for your user.