10 ms·

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it see

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago. Two examples: - maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting. - gmail: Previous/Next-message buttons flake out constantly (grayed out - clicking does nothing). New formatting options are hard to use and obnoxious. And an old one that I ran in to again today: - there is no (intuitive) way to copy a URL from google search results without all of the google redirect garbage. This fundamentally degrades the world-wide web. For example, I want to email a link to a pdf. If an in-browser pdf reader is not available, then the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link. I clicked the "share" button in hopes that this might give me the link; but no, it wanted me to share on G+.

rajivtiru 13y ago
I just figured out that last point about google URLs today. I wanted to copy/paste a link in a chat window but the google redirect url is so long it takes up the whole chat window and more! Instead of the domain.com/word I wanted.
- cheapsteak 13y ago
  If you're using chrome, you might want to check out this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redirects/ccenmflbeofaceccfhhggbagkblihpoh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redi...
  - rajivtiru 13y ago
    Thank you. Installed. Exactly what I wanted.
  - fdej 13y ago
    For Firefox, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-no-tracking-url/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-no-tra...
sjbach 13y ago
Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.
- notok22 13y ago
  I tried this, but it keeps forgeting the choice to use the classic maps and I always have to go to the options and pick it again. It's not such a big deal, but yeah, it's annoying.
  - WayneDB 13y ago
    Web apps and me are constantly at odds because I run all sorts of privacy extensions, I disabled Local Storage (via folder permissions) and I don't let cookies persist. So, I just stopped using web apps wherever possible in favor of native ones. It pisses me off too because the web (and the Internet) could be so much better than this. Anyway, for the longest time - even with a bare browser (no extensions) - YouTube wouldn't save certain settings (annotations disabled, video quality), even while I was logged in.
    - randallu 13y ago
      Aren't you more uniquely identifiable on a native app, though?
      - WayneDB 13y ago
        Most of the native apps that I use don't serve ads and they don't pull in third-party resources from the web.
  - toupeira 13y ago
    When you get back to the classic interface there's a yellow message at the top asking if you want to make the change permanent.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  For now.
nobodysfool 13y ago
adding to this: - google voice: selecting 'all' only selects displayed items (calls, missed calls, voicemails, etc) so to delete items, you have to click 'all', then 'delete' then 'all' again. If you have 1000 items in your history, it takes 100 clicks to delete them all. Compare that to gmail - you can select every single message not just those displayed.
siddboots 13y ago
Youtube: * Buffering was nerfed/broken some time ago. I can no longer watch 720p+ videos on youtube at all. * Changing video quality now has a long and unavoidable delay, and often fails outright. * Google are evidently uneasy about the profile name that I signed up with, and have been repeatedly nudging me to change it. I don't know how to reassure them about my choice. * Advertising. Everywhere.
- iopq 13y ago
  There's ads on youtube? I wouldn't know, I'm using adblock
- vmarsy 13y ago
  A trick I use when I change quality is immediately clicking on the time bar, it enforce the change right away. I agree with all the annoying points above!
- colmvp 13y ago
  I can watch 720p+ videos but I have definitely noticed recently that loading is slower and sometimes more inconsistent. The subscription feed is a mess. Before it was a grid and now it's in a list. The only reason why I know there are more videos uploaded than what's in my feed is because video authors title their videos in parts. So if I see "Part 3" I know that Part 2 and Part 1 are somewhere, just not in my feed.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  YouTube keeps insisting I merge my legacy YouTube account with Google+. Then YouTube insisted I use two-factor authentication (to watch cat videos) and made me choose between giving them my phone number so they could send me a text message or giving them my phone number so they could robo-call me.
  - conradfr 13y ago
    I think the last time they bugged me about it there was no choice to opt out (because I have some uploaded videos on it IIRC). I clicked around and somehow I now have a new G+ account which is different than the one linked to my Google account which is linked to my Youtube account. Brillant.
dredmorbius 13y ago
I wrote a pair of shell scripts to deal with the URL encoding. I've also switched to DuckDuckGo for virtually all my search. Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this. http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u
- eru 13y ago
  > Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this. Try indenting by four spaces. Like this: Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I had. For whatever reason, code with linebreaks was getting wrapped ... Oh. Duh. That's my CSS stylesheet. I'd gotten sick of seeing unwrapped long lines requiring horizontal scroll, I've got: pre { white-space: normal; } ... set in my Stylebot stylesheet.
plorkyeran 13y ago
Everything about the new Google Maps besides the maps themselves is so mindbogglingly bad that I have no idea how they thought it was ready for public consumption. It seems to be missing most of the features of the classic Google Maps, and those that are present are far harder to use. The UI for the public transit schedules is pretty much the only thing that seems like it could be an improvement once I get used to it (but for now it's mostly just really awkward).
- xur17 13y ago
  I've especially been missing the ability to make directions with multiple stops (I used to use that feature about 50% of the time). Also, the interface is a lot slower - it's tolerable on my 1 year old computer, but it's close to unusable on my 5 year old laptop.
  - tene 13y ago
    It works just fine for me in chrome on my six-year-old laptop. What browser are you using?
    - graeme 13y ago
      I'm not op, but I used chrome on a fully upgraded 2011 13 inch MacBook air. New maps was so slow it was unusable. I used chrome.
      - hoverbear 13y ago
        Also not OP, but on my 2012 Macbook Air I had to turn off the maps preview because it was making my machine very warm, reached over 98C before I switched it off. Only took a minute. I was very disappointed.
    - xur17 13y ago
      Chrome on a 4 year old desktop. And chrome on a low end 1 year old desktop. Slow for both, not to the point of being unusable, but slow enough to be annoying. Even on my new i5 laptop, it's not quite as snappy as the old version.
gbog 13y ago
- in Google plus, scroll down the steam, then decide you want to use j k to navigate, pof! you are back on top. - in Google plus, you need to play maze to avoid the pop ups. - contacts takes ages to load, when I usually use it only for a little tweak that should take 3 sec.
pg 13y ago
There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution. Steve Jobs could probably have forced consistency on Google's products without breaking them, but few CEOs have the taste Steve had.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The new Maps interface isn't driven by the idea of making it "consistent" with GMail, it's driven by the same idea that Google Search's homepage used to represent -- simplicity. The Map is the UI. A single search box. You type in POIs, the Map is constructed around the search results. The old Google Maps (the tile based one) was based on the idea of a multi-pane map with gadgets and a side panel of 10 ranked search results, but the map was the same no matter the search (pre-rendered tiles). Search results had to be clicked on the map to get a popup to see what it was. The new Maps is based on the idea that the Map itself is the search result The POIs are rendered directly into the map, just like a specialized paper map. It is based on spatial based exploration and relevancy. There's a difference between a design disaster and "I don't like this because it is different than what I was used to and I don't want to change" IMHO, the new maps is what Maps should have been all along.
  - studentrob 13y ago
    It was always a single search box. And it always centered around results. Removing the side panel makes it so I now can't use a browser text search to find the results I want faster. So, I disagree, and I think the old way was both easier (because I knew it) AND simpler (less complex). What now? And here is the difference between Google employees and their users. Google believes, and has told their employees, that when they change something, users will always hate it because it's different, and that there is a gestation period during which the majority will "get used to it." That "gestation period" now seems infinite, and any change is allowed to remain because real user feedback is ignored.
dncrane 13y ago
> the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link If you go to your downloads list you can right click and do "copy link address" (at least on chrome and firefox)
- lutusp 13y ago
  Or use "wget" for the download, which lists all the intermediate address steps as it resolves them.
cromwellian 13y ago
The "new" Google Maps is essentially an opt-in beta. The "replacement" is to continue to use classic Maps until it is done. It is obvious that most of the old features like multi-stop directions will return, but Google needed external testers because WebGL is very dependent on machine performance and GPU, and they indicated as much when they limited the initial users to an explicit signup form. I find the new Maps interface incredibly better than the old one. Search results appear directly on the map so you can see spatial relationships, easily highlighted and clickable. It invites exploration. No separate Google Earth plugin needed, seamlessly move from 2D to 3D, no separate Flash plugin for Street View. The way the map spotlights important roads and related places when you click on a particular POI helps with planning. The only downside is it is slow, because it is a very complex web app, probably the most complex one ever written, but I'm sure they'll optimize it by the time it is ready for public consumption.
- michaelt 13y ago
  It is obvious that most of the old features like multi-stop directions will return IMHO that is far from obvious.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I'm not sure they will optimize enough to make it as fast as the 'old' on an old machine. They won't put that much effort and just require machines supporting accelerated css/webgl and fast enough to run complex javascript such as this. I hope they manage to keep the "old" maps accessible after switching to the new, since the responsiveness is so low it negates all the new features.
test001only 13y ago
Exactly, lot of UI features in GMail, Maps and Google plus are starting to piss of me. The UI used to be nice and comfortable to work with before, but now it is plain horrible. I read somewhere that Marissa Mayer used to control the UI of GMail and Maps(she apparently used to depend on metrics to get things right). Does this have to do something with she leaving?
Semaphor 13y ago
maps: I love the new interface. The only thing missing is re-adding rightclicks for additional options. For what I use maps nearly everything is easier than it was before. But as you want a replacement, what about OSM [1]? It's becoming better every day and a lot of areas have better data than google. gmail: It became slower and more bloated all the time, the interface changes looked nice but were, as many said, horrible UX. I know the lack of tags is a dealbreaker for many but as I can live without them, fastmail.fm [2] is a replacement that does pretty much everything else better and faster. search: Yeah, the lack of easy linking is extremely annoying and has been for quite some time now. My problem is still that I need the bubble to get relevant results for me. Every time I try to use DDG [3] or other replacements, searches result in way too much noise over signal. And with those boxes on the right side google now has what was one of the best features of DDG. At least calendar is still useable for now as I haven't found a replacement I really liked. [1]: http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [2]: http://fastmail.fm http://fastmail.fm [3]: http://duckduckgo.com http://duckduckgo.com
znowi 13y ago
The new Google Maps on Android is disappointing. I can appreciate the clean, minimal interface, but with it are gone: 1. Zoom buttons. Now I have to hold the phone in one hand while pinch in and out with another, instead of a tap with one finger. 2. Offline maps. I suppose it's part of the "cloud strategy". 3. Secondary streets at common zoom level. Now I have to really zoom in to see them. A tad out and they're gone. Sometimes it shows them just fine, though. Perhaps, it's a bug.
- coldpie 13y ago
  It's not intuitive at all, but for zooming, you can double-tap-and-hold, then move your finger up and down to zoom in and out (or is it out and in?). That way you don't need two hands to zoom.
aestra 13y ago
>- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting. I can't for the life of me figure out how to show street view on android's google maps. I know it used to exist, but did they really take it out?

rajivtiru 13y ago

I just figured out that last point about google URLs today. I wanted to copy/paste a link in a chat window but the google redirect url is so long it takes up the whole chat window and more! Instead of the domain.com/word I wanted.

cheapsteak 13y ago
If you're using chrome, you might want to check out this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redirects/ccenmflbeofaceccfhhggbagkblihpoh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redi...
- rajivtiru 13y ago
  Thank you. Installed. Exactly what I wanted.
- fdej 13y ago
  For Firefox, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-no-tracking-url/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-no-tra...

sjbach 13y ago

Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.

notok22 13y ago
I tried this, but it keeps forgeting the choice to use the classic maps and I always have to go to the options and pick it again. It's not such a big deal, but yeah, it's annoying.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  Web apps and me are constantly at odds because I run all sorts of privacy extensions, I disabled Local Storage (via folder permissions) and I don't let cookies persist. So, I just stopped using web apps wherever possible in favor of native ones. It pisses me off too because the web (and the Internet) could be so much better than this. Anyway, for the longest time - even with a bare browser (no extensions) - YouTube wouldn't save certain settings (annotations disabled, video quality), even while I was logged in.
  - randallu 13y ago
    Aren't you more uniquely identifiable on a native app, though?
    - WayneDB 13y ago
      Most of the native apps that I use don't serve ads and they don't pull in third-party resources from the web.
- toupeira 13y ago
  When you get back to the classic interface there's a yellow message at the top asking if you want to make the change permanent.
ceejayoz 13y ago
For now.

nobodysfool 13y ago

adding to this: - google voice: selecting 'all' only selects displayed items (calls, missed calls, voicemails, etc) so to delete items, you have to click 'all', then 'delete' then 'all' again. If you have 1000 items in your history, it takes 100 clicks to delete them all. Compare that to gmail - you can select every single message not just those displayed.

siddboots 13y ago

Youtube: * Buffering was nerfed/broken some time ago. I can no longer watch 720p+ videos on youtube at all. * Changing video quality now has a long and unavoidable delay, and often fails outright. * Google are evidently uneasy about the profile name that I signed up with, and have been repeatedly nudging me to change it. I don't know how to reassure them about my choice. * Advertising. Everywhere.

iopq 13y ago
There's ads on youtube? I wouldn't know, I'm using adblock
vmarsy 13y ago
A trick I use when I change quality is immediately clicking on the time bar, it enforce the change right away. I agree with all the annoying points above!
colmvp 13y ago
I can watch 720p+ videos but I have definitely noticed recently that loading is slower and sometimes more inconsistent. The subscription feed is a mess. Before it was a grid and now it's in a list. The only reason why I know there are more videos uploaded than what's in my feed is because video authors title their videos in parts. So if I see "Part 3" I know that Part 2 and Part 1 are somewhere, just not in my feed.
cpeterso 13y ago
YouTube keeps insisting I merge my legacy YouTube account with Google+. Then YouTube insisted I use two-factor authentication (to watch cat videos) and made me choose between giving them my phone number so they could send me a text message or giving them my phone number so they could robo-call me.
- conradfr 13y ago
  I think the last time they bugged me about it there was no choice to opt out (because I have some uploaded videos on it IIRC). I clicked around and somehow I now have a new G+ account which is different than the one linked to my Google account which is linked to my Youtube account. Brillant.

dredmorbius 13y ago

I wrote a pair of shell scripts to deal with the URL encoding. I've also switched to DuckDuckGo for virtually all my search. Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this. http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u

eru 13y ago
> Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this. Try indenting by four spaces. Like this: Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I had. For whatever reason, code with linebreaks was getting wrapped ... Oh. Duh. That's my CSS stylesheet. I'd gotten sick of seeing unwrapped long lines requiring horizontal scroll, I've got: pre { white-space: normal; } ... set in my Stylebot stylesheet.

plorkyeran 13y ago

Everything about the new Google Maps besides the maps themselves is so mindbogglingly bad that I have no idea how they thought it was ready for public consumption. It seems to be missing most of the features of the classic Google Maps, and those that are present are far harder to use. The UI for the public transit schedules is pretty much the only thing that seems like it could be an improvement once I get used to it (but for now it's mostly just really awkward).

xur17 13y ago
I've especially been missing the ability to make directions with multiple stops (I used to use that feature about 50% of the time). Also, the interface is a lot slower - it's tolerable on my 1 year old computer, but it's close to unusable on my 5 year old laptop.
- tene 13y ago
  It works just fine for me in chrome on my six-year-old laptop. What browser are you using?
  - graeme 13y ago
    I'm not op, but I used chrome on a fully upgraded 2011 13 inch MacBook air. New maps was so slow it was unusable. I used chrome.
    - hoverbear 13y ago
      Also not OP, but on my 2012 Macbook Air I had to turn off the maps preview because it was making my machine very warm, reached over 98C before I switched it off. Only took a minute. I was very disappointed.
  - xur17 13y ago
    Chrome on a 4 year old desktop. And chrome on a low end 1 year old desktop. Slow for both, not to the point of being unusable, but slow enough to be annoying. Even on my new i5 laptop, it's not quite as snappy as the old version.

gbog 13y ago

- in Google plus, scroll down the steam, then decide you want to use j k to navigate, pof! you are back on top. - in Google plus, you need to play maze to avoid the pop ups. - contacts takes ages to load, when I usually use it only for a little tweak that should take 3 sec.

pg 13y ago

There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution. Steve Jobs could probably have forced consistency on Google's products without breaking them, but few CEOs have the taste Steve had.

cromwellian 13y ago
The new Maps interface isn't driven by the idea of making it "consistent" with GMail, it's driven by the same idea that Google Search's homepage used to represent -- simplicity. The Map is the UI. A single search box. You type in POIs, the Map is constructed around the search results. The old Google Maps (the tile based one) was based on the idea of a multi-pane map with gadgets and a side panel of 10 ranked search results, but the map was the same no matter the search (pre-rendered tiles). Search results had to be clicked on the map to get a popup to see what it was. The new Maps is based on the idea that the Map itself is the search result The POIs are rendered directly into the map, just like a specialized paper map. It is based on spatial based exploration and relevancy. There's a difference between a design disaster and "I don't like this because it is different than what I was used to and I don't want to change" IMHO, the new maps is what Maps should have been all along.
- studentrob 13y ago
  It was always a single search box. And it always centered around results. Removing the side panel makes it so I now can't use a browser text search to find the results I want faster. So, I disagree, and I think the old way was both easier (because I knew it) AND simpler (less complex). What now? And here is the difference between Google employees and their users. Google believes, and has told their employees, that when they change something, users will always hate it because it's different, and that there is a gestation period during which the majority will "get used to it." That "gestation period" now seems infinite, and any change is allowed to remain because real user feedback is ignored.

dncrane 13y ago

> the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link If you go to your downloads list you can right click and do "copy link address" (at least on chrome and firefox)

lutusp 13y ago
Or use "wget" for the download, which lists all the intermediate address steps as it resolves them.

cromwellian 13y ago

The "new" Google Maps is essentially an opt-in beta. The "replacement" is to continue to use classic Maps until it is done. It is obvious that most of the old features like multi-stop directions will return, but Google needed external testers because WebGL is very dependent on machine performance and GPU, and they indicated as much when they limited the initial users to an explicit signup form. I find the new Maps interface incredibly better than the old one. Search results appear directly on the map so you can see spatial relationships, easily highlighted and clickable. It invites exploration. No separate Google Earth plugin needed, seamlessly move from 2D to 3D, no separate Flash plugin for Street View. The way the map spotlights important roads and related places when you click on a particular POI helps with planning. The only downside is it is slow, because it is a very complex web app, probably the most complex one ever written, but I'm sure they'll optimize it by the time it is ready for public consumption.

michaelt 13y ago
It is obvious that most of the old features like multi-stop directions will return IMHO that is far from obvious.
agumonkey 13y ago
I'm not sure they will optimize enough to make it as fast as the 'old' on an old machine. They won't put that much effort and just require machines supporting accelerated css/webgl and fast enough to run complex javascript such as this. I hope they manage to keep the "old" maps accessible after switching to the new, since the responsiveness is so low it negates all the new features.

test001only 13y ago

Exactly, lot of UI features in GMail, Maps and Google plus are starting to piss of me. The UI used to be nice and comfortable to work with before, but now it is plain horrible. I read somewhere that Marissa Mayer used to control the UI of GMail and Maps(she apparently used to depend on metrics to get things right). Does this have to do something with she leaving?

Semaphor 13y ago

maps: I love the new interface. The only thing missing is re-adding rightclicks for additional options. For what I use maps nearly everything is easier than it was before. But as you want a replacement, what about OSM [1]? It's becoming better every day and a lot of areas have better data than google. gmail: It became slower and more bloated all the time, the interface changes looked nice but were, as many said, horrible UX. I know the lack of tags is a dealbreaker for many but as I can live without them, fastmail.fm [2] is a replacement that does pretty much everything else better and faster. search: Yeah, the lack of easy linking is extremely annoying and has been for quite some time now. My problem is still that I need the bubble to get relevant results for me. Every time I try to use DDG [3] or other replacements, searches result in way too much noise over signal. And with those boxes on the right side google now has what was one of the best features of DDG. At least calendar is still useable for now as I haven't found a replacement I really liked. [1]: http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [2]: http://fastmail.fm http://fastmail.fm [3]: http://duckduckgo.com http://duckduckgo.com

znowi 13y ago

The new Google Maps on Android is disappointing. I can appreciate the clean, minimal interface, but with it are gone: 1. Zoom buttons. Now I have to hold the phone in one hand while pinch in and out with another, instead of a tap with one finger. 2. Offline maps. I suppose it's part of the "cloud strategy". 3. Secondary streets at common zoom level. Now I have to really zoom in to see them. A tad out and they're gone. Sometimes it shows them just fine, though. Perhaps, it's a bug.

coldpie 13y ago
It's not intuitive at all, but for zooming, you can double-tap-and-hold, then move your finger up and down to zoom in and out (or is it out and in?). That way you don't need two hands to zoom.

aestra 13y ago

>- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting. I can't for the life of me figure out how to show street view on android's google maps. I know it used to exist, but did they really take it out?