I've noticed cosmetic change in Google Groups. The thread display is more compact than it was before; a definite improvement. The control for sorting by the date of first message (rather than sorting by date of the most recent message) has been moved to the bottom of the page in any newsgroup. One big probem remains, though, which is that the Reply button fails to include the replied-to message quoted in the compose window. The user must click the Show Options link, then click Reply, to see an auto-quoted message for intelligent replying. This confusing feature mix, combined with AOL's discontinuation of Usenet service this year, has led to an epidemic of unquoted Usenet conversation, even by experienced users who can't figure out how to make a backquote appear. Google: Change this!
1. That's not the only problem with Google Groups 2 (1 was excellent), they break up the display of teksts with the br tag, which means it looks totally crappy on some displays (like mine).
And if you tell MSIE to disable font sizes their dependance on stylesheets makes the pages look totally fucked up, and they don't seem to give a damn.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Mr. Jones