AJAX being over used in Live products? | The Coffeehouse

Winston Pang

What do you guys think towards the live products, i find that AJAX is overused, and sometimes slows things down, in comparison to google, for example gmail vs live mail.

Also, why exactly is there a need to have a Windows Live Mail Client, when they can just enable pop access for us in our live mail accounts?

Manip

I thought the original point of AJAX was to speed things up and generally make things more convenient for the user?

I guess somewhere along the way they lost sight of that and are now just doing it for the eye candy appeal.

intelman

I like the look and functionality of AJAX. www.on10.net and local.live.com are great things. I don't think AJAX sped up live.com, something about it just feels slow to me still.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

Winston Pang wrote:
What do you guys think towards the live products, i find that AJAX is overused, and sometimes slows things down, in comparison to google, for example gmail vs live mail.

I think it's a tad overused. It's more "normal" for me to have a high bandwidth connection available than a powerful machine. Web apps are, after all, supposed to be used from any underpoewred machine with just a browser.

Winston Pang wrote:
]Also, why exactly is there a need to have a Windows Live Mail Client, when they can just enable pop access for us in our live mail accounts?

Er.. that's not the point. The WLMD (Windows Live Mail Desktop) client is there to enable offline processing and rich interaction for hotmail accounts. It's pretty much guaranteed that it will be the only email client installed on my machines where Outlook is not needed.

Web apps should die a fiery, gruesome and painful death, but that's only my opinion, I'm not talking on behalf of my employer, etc etc Smiley

harumscarum
out of memory

Yes it is over used. I have tried to use the site a few times and was extremely annoyed. If they were going for the cool factor congrats they won. However if they were attempting usability they failed miserably.

I too can not wait for the death of the web apps. If the ajax style is the future then why should I waste money on a new OS and PC. Are we on our way back to the CICS screen?

Winston Pang

I can only hope WPF/E is the future, and AJAX is a temporary solution for dynamic web-apps.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

Manip wrote:
I thought the original point of AJAX was to speed things up and generally make things more convenient for the user?

I guess somewhere along the way they lost sight of that and are now just doing it for the eye candy appeal.

I "THINK" that it's meant to speed up operations like form processing, interaction, etc, etc...

We run across the same issue with AIM Pages. When in editing mode the initial load is slow however once that happens any loading of modules is pretty much seamless.

Mind you at the begining of a page load it takes time to load all the js references and such...so question? Is it slow on load or interacting? I think it's fine...just need to know the right time which it's supposed to be the speed it should be.

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

yman wrote:
The live product which I thought abused Ajax was the live shopping portal. When you clicked on a product it changed the whole screen (including a throbber indicating the status) through Ajax. I wouldn't have mind just reloading the page.

I was going to bring up shopping.live.com.

MSN Shopping has a pretty good interface. It's easy to navigate.

Live Shopping ...doesn't. The AJAX is annoying, unweildly, and slows the entire experience down. It's slower than MSN Shopping on broadband, and unusable on dialup!

They've basically taken an interface designed without AJAX and re-created the same thing in the Live AJAX Framework. Not good, not at all.

I also think that AJAX is oversed across the Live platform.

Live is NOT about AJAX!

It's about an integrated set of tools that operate online, seamlessly merging the offline-and-online services. AJAX is simply a way to make the experience more pleasent.

It's not doing that.

mVPstar
I'm white because I smelt an onion.

alwaysmc2 wrote:
Well, I really like the interface of loca.live.com. It has changed recently, and I like how the welcome bar slides in and out. and the transparency, of course.

Live Local looks more cluttered now.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

mVPstar wrote:

alwaysmc2 wrote: Well, I really like the interface of loca.live.com. It has changed recently, and I like how the welcome bar slides in and out. and the transparency, of course.

Live Local looks more cluttered now.

Hmmm... We apparently that's subjective, because I think that the interface is better than ever.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

Well, I really like the interface of loca.live.com. It has changed recently, and I like how the welcome bar slides in and out. Big Smile

and the transparency, of course.

edit:
that's local.live.com, not loca.live.com

yman

The live product which I think abuses ajax is the live shopping portal. When you click on a product or section within the UI, it downloads the page for your request item, however it's not done elegantly... They use a central throbber and "dim" the screen using a div element with opacity to illustrate that it's processing; not pretty....