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Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

techzim.co.zw

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

#41
post #25

It's not just Google+, by the way. All of Google's services are noticeably slower after they switched to the new look that Google's changing everything to. Bad move in my opinion. We don't care if the pages are very pretty, Google. We just want what we want.

The new instant search does some strange things stashing js assets in hidden form fields, and it seems to have a performance impact at several levels (including the IO cost of serialising the session for restoring it after a crash). There's also some weird non-responsiveness with partially loaded pages.

Re: Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

#42
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching. The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.

I'm referring to my web proxy cache, not the browser's cache. I use polipo to cache, it does a number of things that makes dialup web browsing pretty fast. http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/

Have you considered using Squid to cache everything (even over SSL)? You will have to install certs, but I think that may be the best route (especially if your OS is *nix). I am planning on doing this at my friend's cabin this summer where satellite internet is all they have.

Re: Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

#43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clearly you don't have timeline yet...

You could argue that core UX for Facebook is news feed, rather then profile pages.

I agree (I don't spend much time looking at my own Timeline after all), but hopefully Timeline isn't a sign of things to come.

Re: Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

#44
post #36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely, south Africa is quite an outlier in Africa. Southern Africa is usually taken to include it an lots of other countries (eg. Tanzania). That as a group, is jot an outlier within Africa.

Tanzania is actually part of Eastern Africa and not Southern Africa. But you are right, Southern Africa constitutes a group of a countries while South Africa is a single country.

Tanzania can be in both Southern and Eastern Africa. It's in the SADC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_African_Development_Co... ).

These terms are just descriptions, there are no hard, objective, definitive rules about it.

Re: Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa

#45
post #30

i'm currently in bolivia, and well, lets say, the internet isn't always very fast or reliable. not only is the G+ website unusable (takes ages to load, breaks in between), but also the (right hand side top) widget thingy on search and gmail does not work. it shows (again and again) some red/urgent numbers displaying that something important has happened -> click -> nothings turns up. (and if it for once works, it's n…

The scrollbars are just styled using CSS, it's not exactly a huge payload.
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