Webapps Suck
Holy cow. My POP3 connection to Yahoo! mail is being flaky today, so I am trying to use the web interface. It is terrible! It makes me so angry! Amongst other things, my computer freezes up when I am trying to TYPE TEXT.
Email is not complicated for the end user. It does not require giant Javascript infrastructure to send and receive emails. We do not need links to Youtube videos being munged so the videos play in my email. We do not need URLs being converted to hyperlinks. We do not need cutesy icons for users (pulled from who knows where). Have we learned NOTHING from tracking images? The UX designers of these garbage products think they are improving the user experience. PLEASE STOP.
This is not just about grumpy Unixy greybeards. I know people who are very anxious about technology. Every time a webapp changes its interface, they freak out and think the site is being hacked. Is that good user experience? Every time icons change shape or are moved to different locations, these anxious users get confused. Is that a favourable outcome?
I have 2GB of RAM on my computer. Go on. Tell me my computer is slow. Tell me that it is acceptable that a WEBMAIL PROGRAM use up all my RAM and computing power to display EMAIL. Tell me that Javascript (which is supposed to make website more responsive) cause my computer to slow down to the point where I CANNOT TYPE and where I do not know whether pressing the "Send" button actually sends the email or not. Go right ahead.
Every website on the Internet is going in this direction. Websites are becoming slower and slower and more and more unusable, even if they should be simple. The CBC redesign is another example of this: you can't even use the website in a text-based browser, and you can barely use the site in Firefox? They keep pushing their "new, improved" interfaces on me and I have no choice to refuse them.
I had better stop now, because I am starting to yell and swear. The unusability of the modern internet makes me so angry.