Yep! It's gotten worse and worse to browse as a map over the years. The earliest AJAXy versions were probably the best for that. I think they intend Earth for t

Yep! It's gotten worse and worse to browse as a map over the years. The earliest AJAXy versions were probably the best for that. I think they intend Earth for that purpose (they moved the great geo photo feature from Maps to there, for instance) but it's really heavy for that purpose, and the interface is clunkier. It seems like another victim of Google's optimizing their products for one common use case and neglecting others. See also: search.