my yahoo upgrade? Google home page, thanks.
I have been a my.yahoo.com user for a long long time (a decade maybe?? Not sure — a very long time). It gave me a nicely configurable portal through which I could monitor weather, market status, business events, and a bit of entertainment all in one page.
My original layout was 2 columns; a narrow column on left with a list of stocks I care about followed by a bit of weather and some of the photo feeds. The right hand, wider, column contained a set of headline summaries.
With this layout, I could make the window as narrow as I wanted with the only lost information being the right hand, least useful, bits of the headline.
With the “upgraded” layout, the WIDE headlines are on the left and the stock crap is on the right. Stupid. But the worst design sin is that there is now this big bloody fracking square advertisement at the top of my right hand column.
Without scrolling, the information that I care about in my right hand column is now pushed off the bottom of the window. Instead of a banner ad that was outside of my customizable content area, I now have to deal with a non-rectangular content area when laying things out the way I want.
Upgrade? Yeah, sure, I’ll take an upgrade. Google’s personalized homepage is looking like a damned fine upgrade, thanks.
March 11th, 2007 at 5:07 am
Get an ad blocker, I use Safari with PithHelment and I don’t see the ad. Well yeah, there’s one line of text advertising, but the box collapses and takes very little vertical real estate.
March 11th, 2007 at 11:46 am
I have used Pith Helmet in the past, but I can’t use it on most of my machines as they are running stuff that cannot be perturbed by unsupported plugins.
March 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Well, in that case, you could easily eliminate the offending ads using a custom CSS stylesheet, I first learned this trick from floppymoose.com although this technique is not as popular anymore since real adblock software has become widespread. You’re unlikely to get more official support than CSS, it’s certainly less intrusive than SIMBL.
March 12th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Neat hack, but still a pain in the ass. I don’t want to have to install or maintain it across multiple machines. Nor does it excuse Yahoo’s crappy design. I shouldn’t have to work around bad design decisions just to make something usable!
For now, Google is proving to be far superior for my uses and I don’t have to hack to make it usable.
March 16th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure? I keep telling people, the whole POINT of the web was that the users would be in control of the presentation layer. You have the right to reformat and refigure incoming web pages any way you like. If you want to use Greasemonkey or CSS to eliminate certain specific elements, that is just what a web browser was designed to allow. You are no longer required to allow commercial websites to shove advertising down your throat.
March 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Fine for you and me. I fracking hate CSS though and could really think of not much more torturous than trying to explain how to install such a fix to my Mom or Sister.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I just read this over a year after it was posted and I have to say that bbum’s point was entirely correct. Of course you can use any number of methods to alter the content of websites (greasemonkey, CSS and so on), but the point is that yahoo’s new design is atrocious. The simple economics of the internet are that people gravitate towards the easiest to use websites and not the ones which are so poorly designed that they only become usable after the user has spent twenty minutes redesigning them. The reason we use yahoo, google, msn or, indeed, virtually any commercial product, is that we want somebody to have designed and implemented the product for us. The fact that you can change it doesn’t present any defence for the original design – no more than a hideous sweater is somehow more acceptable once you realise that you can dye it, cut bits off and restyle it.