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The problem with developers is they fly off onto wild tangents without any consideration for usability.
I appreciate AJAX. I really do. The reason websites like YouTube are required to use this technique is to save on bandwidth costs.
The problem is that a site is totally unusable. Nomatter how pretty developers make their site, if it uses AJAX it will suck.
Why? Well, we have these new fancy computers which can *gasp* do more than one thing at a time. So we have crazy things like multiple programs running. Well, browsers caught up some time ago, and tabbed browsing is “the in thing”. The problem is that an AJAX website is completely disrespectful to this use case.
Take a website like YouTube. A common user story is:
- Load a video page.
- Begin the video.
- Pause the video mid-play.
- Open the author’s user link in a new tab.
- View the author’s list of videos.
- Queue multiple other videos.
-
Return to the original video, and continue playing it.
This kind of thing is possible. But how about this?
- View a user page.
- View their list of videos.
- Open multiple videos in multiple tabs.
-
(rely on a flashblock or auto-stop add-on to halt the videos)
This used to be possible. Now it’s not. For some dumbass reason, YouTube is removing as much functionality as possible, shifting it into AJAX and making it impossible to even view a video with its own URL. Gah that sucks.
There may eventually be a solution.
-
55696 “Open a JavaScript link in a new window” (or new tab)
- But knowing how these long-standing issues never get solved until it’s way way past due, it could be years before this is addressed.
- 2014-07-26 – Yep, it’s still not resolved.
- 2015-06-21 – Still not resolved.
- 2023-03-19 – STILL.
But the problem isn’t with the browser. The problem is with inconsiderate developers. But I suppose they can’t be blamed for wanting to save money and make things feel faster for the average potato-brained user who somehow doesn’t use tabs.
It just pisses me off to see more and more websites become more crippled by fancy new technology.
Seriously, most of the crap out there would be well-serviced by Gopher. The rest should be rethought completely..
.. and don’t get me started on Flash websites.
