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Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

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Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#161

Post by danoprey »

sanderjd wrote: post #70
Pacabel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on who you are, and how you use the browser. Maybe the Chrome UI is good for somebody with a tiny screen and a near-complete lack of technical ability. But for people with large monitors and the need to push a web browser hard, they've merely managed to strip out or hide a lot of very useful functionality, with essentially no benefit. What's left over is non-standard and awkward to use (like Chrome's menu)…

I have a large monitor, but I have no idea what you mean by "push a web browser hard". Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. I have no concept of what you could possibly be doing with the menu so often that it bugs you. A little more on topic: one person's "crappy hipster redesign" is another person's "wow this is so much bette…

Completely agree. Hide as much as possible that isn't annoying on a regular basis then learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything else if you're such a power user.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#162

Post by Nullabillity »

Silhouette wrote: post #138
sanderjd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a large monitor, but I have no idea what you mean by "push a web browser hard". Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. I have no concept of what you could possibly be doing with the menu so often that it bugs you. A little more on topic: one person's "crappy hipster redesign" is another person's "wow this is so much bette…

Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. Sure it is, as long as you only want to look at one page above the fold. But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed. Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup ins…

> But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed.

Ctrl+Shift+B.

> Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup instead of some almost invisible, almost unclickable little rectangle at the edge of the window.

Seems to use normal system scrollbars for me on KDE. Windows looks custom, but only wrt textures, sizes still seem to match.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#163

Post by jhoechtl »

Frankly, I would not even stop at Maps. Since a year or so Google makes so intensely use of all sort of metadata (my browsing interests in the future, the places if have visited, my contacts on G+) that the internet has become a small world for me. I find myself increasingly using duckduckgo just because of this. Heck, as I use the public DNS servers of google, even deleting Cookies or using browser porn mode doesn't help much.

It's an example that overly smartness actually degrades the experience for me rather than being and improvement.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#165

Post by magicalist »

davidw wrote: post #86

Some other things: * Start in San Francisco by typing San Francisco. It still manages to find that city. Do 'directions' and type in Eugene, OR, USA - my home town, which is a fairly straightforward drive north. It can't find it and gives you bad results. * THEY KILLED TERRAIN MODE! This was a super-useful feature that I still use on my computer, but can no longer access on my mobile devices.

Are you talking web or mobile? The web one found Eugene, OR just fine for me...

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#166

Post by Mithaldu »

Interesting thing here: Reading the article i was wondering what's the fuss, because Google Maps looked and acted like it ever did. Turned out that, because i was using Opera 12, it was still giving me the old Google Maps. So if you really want the old one on the desktop, that's one workaround. :)

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#167

Post by andybak »

Silhouette wrote: post #138
sanderjd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a large monitor, but I have no idea what you mean by "push a web browser hard". Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. I have no concept of what you could possibly be doing with the menu so often that it bugs you. A little more on topic: one person's "crappy hipster redesign" is another person's "wow this is so much bette…

Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. Sure it is, as long as you only want to look at one page above the fold. But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed. Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup ins…

> But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed.

'Always show bookmark bar' is the top item on my View menu. Is it there for you?

> at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup

I can't comment on this I've not used a scroll bar since I got trackpad scrolling. Just compared Chrome with Safari and the scrollbars seem identical to me.

> Sometimes I want to use developer tool

I'm not clear what your complaint is here. Dev tools is too crowded? I often need it to share space with content whilst I'm debugging. If you have dual monitors then I can understand you might prefer a less compact display. I work entirely on my laptop so I'm grateful for it's compactness.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#168

Post by flatline »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google.…

The quality of their directions has gone downhill as well. I keep getting routes that take me needlessly onto a frontage road and back to the main road; that say there's a hard right when there's a slight jog in the road; that have me take take a right and three lefts instead of just going straight and turning left, when there is an abundantly clear left-turn lane; the list goes on and on. When it first started it wasn't so great at directions, and they improved it dramatically over the next few years. Now it's back to sucking pretty badly.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#170

Post by pjscott »

SeanDav wrote: post #31
buro9 wrote: post #15

In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem. "Sambisa" would have found it. "Sambisa Reserve" would have found it. "Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it. But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserv…

or it could, I don't know, maybe search on closest matches to locations containing the words "Sambisa" and "forest" with priority to those areas containing the words in the correct order - like maybe "Sambisa Forest Reserve". Oooh maybe they can take out a patent on that idea first... (Sorry OP, not having a go at you - just getting incredibly frustrated with companies I used to love and respect - like Google and Ama…

That sounds way too obvious for them not to have tried on a large corpus of (search string, correct result) pairs. If it actually gave better results, do you really think they wouldn't do it? I understand wanting to vent about the magic not being magical enough, but just how stupid do you think they are?
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