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There are several things that frustrate me about the Internet.
- Downloads with no size information. Seriously, is this thing 12KB or
1.2GB? It kind of matters!
- Links that won't open in a new tab. So you've got a screenful of
search results, but you *cannot* open each result in a seperate tab.
Sometimes a new tab opens, but the original tab navigates to the new
location as well. Sometimes you get a new blank tab. Sometimes you get
no tab at all. Either way, I've got a huge number of links to
investigate, and I have to do it by manually using the back button to
get back to the search results. WTF?
- Network installers. You know, you download the "installation package",
but it's just a 5KB executable that downloads the *real* installation
files. And redownloads them every single time you want to install the
application. Thank you, genius, the entire reason I manually downloaded
rather than clicking "install now" is that I don't have much bandwidth
and I've got 20 PCs to install this thing on!
- Advertising. You know the sort of thing. Excessive Flash animations.
Windows that pop up every time your mouse pointer happens to brush past
something. Every third paragraph being a bannar ad. Pages that open with
"First, a word from our sponsors. (Click below to skip this.)" Are you
TRYING to annoy me to the point of leaving your site?
- In a similar vein, "Would you like to chat to a customer advisor?" (If
I WANTED to talk to the pushy salesman, I would have clicked the "talk
to pushy salesman" button! :-P ) "Would you like to take part in this
survey?" (How about AFTER I've been using the site for more than 12
seconds?) "CONGRATULATIONS! You are visitor number 1,000,000. You just
won a car!" (...do I *look* stupid?)
- Stuff which is "free", yet you still have to "register" to actually
get it. Sometimes they won't let you download it until you give them
your life history. Sometimes you have to give them an email address so
they can email you the download link (and a bunch of spam for the rest
of your life). Sometimes the software is "free for anyone to use", but
each time you install it you have to enter a machine-specific "license
key" to "activate" the program. (I.e., you can't just install it on any
machine you want.)
- Products which utterly fail to explain what they are. "It has feature
X! It has feature Y! New in v0.0.0.2.4 is features Z!" Yes, but WHAT
DOES IT DO??
- Websites where every link takes approximately fourteen millennia to load.
- Broken links that pretend not to be broken links. I.e., you request a
page that doesn't exist, and the server attempts to "guess" what you
mean and provide that, rather than actually telling you "sorry, that
page doesn't exist". Obviously, being a machine, it always guesses
wrong. And so you end up with a random unrelated page and no idea why it
happened.
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