First it was Yahoo! Mail that swallowed the AJAX pill only to become unusably slow and now it looks like Yahoo! TV is another casualty of this annoying trend.
Dave Winer writes
Yahoo
says they improved Yahoo TV, but imho, they broke it. The listings
page, which until today was the only page I knew or cared about (they just
added a bunch of community features) took a few seconds to load, now it's an
Ajax thing, and it loads as you scroll. Great. There's a delay every time I hit
Page Down. Now instead of finding out if there's anything on in seconds it takes
minutes. That's an improvement?
In his post entitled Yahoo TV Goes 2.0. Argh.Paul Kedrosky writes
Well, Yahoo in its wisdom has launched a 2.0-ified version of its TV listings
tonight, complete with an Ajax-y interface, cool blue colors, social rating of
programs, etc. That's all swell, and frankly I wouldn't care one way or the
other (other than they broke my URL for full listings), but the darn thing is
sooooo much slower than the old listings. Tables have to get populated,
drop-downs have to ... drop, and sliders have to slide while data creakily
loads.
It's really irritating -- so irritating, in fact, that rather
then wade back in to find out what time tonight the new Frontline episode is out
about credit cards, I think I'll just watch it on the
Frontline site.
Seriously, who's making these decisions at Yahoo? Don't they realize that slower websites cost them money regardless of how buzzword compliant it now makes them?