Yahoo Mail Beta should have been an Alpha
Monday, October 16th, 2006
In a day and age when there is such a push for web standards I find it inconceivable that a major internet company can’t design a new interface that will work in a majority of the major browsers. Some may argue that Safari is not a major browser because it’s current market share is in the vicinity of 3.5%. Fortunately or unfortunately Apple’s OS X is still a major player in the consumer OS market and OS X’s primary built-in browser is Safari. Yes I could use Firefox or Internet Explorer, but when I am on my Mac I prefer to use Safari unless I absolutely have to.
Browser incompatibility isn’t the only reason that Yahoo’s new Mail Beta needs some work. I tried it in Firefox on both my PC and my Mac to disasterous results. The new interface would be better termed as Yahoo Mail Billboard, as in the billboards you see driving down the freeway. There are so many ads that the interface is cluttered to the point of confusion. To make matters worse, in order to maximize their advertising dollars various areas of the page continuously reload themselves and their rotating ads. Since the ads are continuously changing you would expect that Yahoo would be careful about each of the ads keeping a uniform size….they weren’t. The end result of this mess is a page that appears to be having a seizure, each time an ad reloads and changes size the page has to readjust to fit the new size.
