Look at this, a screen grab of Yahoo's News Page viewed inside my Firefox browser. I think it is a pretty typical example:
Note there is more screen devoted to the framework than there is to the content. I gotta rant about it, line by line:Line 1: Header tells me it is Firefox and that it is Yahoo! News. On the right are some buttons I do use: max/min the window and close it.
Line 2: A number of largely unused menu items. I do use the bookmark list and occasionally open a new tab from here, although "new tab" is also incorported in the line 4
Line 3: A "back" button I use, an address window I use, a Google Search window that is hardly more useful than going to Google as a bookmark. In fact it is less good since it limits what text you can see while typing.
-----------ALL OF THAT COULD BE SIMPLIFIED AND TAKE UP 1 line NOT 3--------------
Line 4: The tabs - This is a good idea as it shows all the open windows and lets you open and close them individually. Note the active tab tells me this is Yahoo! News
Line 5: Nearly a complete waste of space giving me various forms of access to my yahoo account, all of which could be a single button on the top line.
Line 6 (actually several lines deep): Another waste of space telling me it is Yahoo! News again. Also there is a Yahoo! Search feature, which I rarely use and which is mostly redundant with Google.
Line 7: A list of places in the news you can get to.
Line 8: A list of the sub-menu items already available as pull down list(s). Largely useless.
Line 9: Multiple lines given over to being a permanent Facebook advertisment [I am not on Facebook].
Line 10: Finally you get a narrow window of content.
Line 11: Argh! These bastards have found a new place they can stick an advertisement.
Line 12: A scroll bar that is essential functionality, largely because they have wasted so much space that there is content spilling off the screen to the right.
Line 13: McAfee has decided to steal this line at the bottom to show how their product is bravely doing its duty - go figure!
And that is it. Let's analyze what is actually good:
A line with Firefox ID, max/min/close Window and a back button.
A line with Yahoo! News, and search window(s),and access to my account
A line with tabs.
---------------SO WHY TAKE 9 lines FOR THIS???----------
Lines for content
Space for advertisements.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo and Firefox should have an understanding about use of the top line.
Yahoo should get one line of its own.
Tabs and content/advertisement and scroll bar should be all that remains.
--------------------------------------------------------------
I'll bet the developers at Yahoo have huge screens at work but this is ridiculous.
Next up: blogs that devote 2/3 of the vertical columns to advertisements and redundancies.
No comments :
Post a Comment