Well, that was useless

[crazyscot]

I am quite a heavy Google Maps user. I got an invite to try the new Google Maps.

I found it completely unusable, at least on my home machine; the CPU pegged out at 100% constantly and whenever I moved, it took many seconds for the screen to update. Even typing into the feedback form took many seconds to show my keystrokes. Thankfully the email welcoming me to the preview program had a return-to-classic link that worked, taking me to a more useful (ordinary-web-based) feedback survey.

Possibly it's because I'm a Luddite with a five-year-old machine with an elderly graphics card, running Linux where the driver support is often lacking. But I am not really minded to spend $$$ upgrading when my current machine works perfectly adequately for my existing needs, TYVM.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Are they trying to put the whole Google Earth visualisation thing into Google Maps? It doesn't make sense to me for a mapping utility to be so heavy on the graphics, especially as a fair part of its use is going to be folks out and about trying to find out where they're going.

[crazyscot]

I wasn't even using the Google Earth view, this was the plain map view.

I bet they'll keep a mobile-optimised version up. Just a question of finding it...

[hrrunka]

Sounds like they've got something badly wrong, then. There's no excuse for making the plain map view into a resource-hogging beast.

[gerald_duck]

Personally, I'd rather they upgraded Google Earth to include the better route-choosing features from Google Maps.

Then leave Google Maps as a lightweight thing.

[crschmidt]

They've changed the rendering in the new Google Maps to be client side (I believe), which gives them the ability to do many things they couldn't do before, but probably requires a relatively recent computer and graphics card to work well.

I expect given the direction they're going that they don't really care a whole lot if people use the UI a lot less, so long as they use it for the things that make them more money.