The All Music Guide was recently reborn with a new, rather attractive design. Sadly, the site became much less usable owing to some of its new features and design cues.
I spend a fair amount of time on the site, and several of the features really are starting to annoy me:
- Bios & Reviews all require you to click Read More even if there are only 3 words not showing.
- You have to click the Discography tab to see the album list, then several tabs within the discography tab to view main albums, compilations, singles, etc.
- all the links on the page are protected by javascript to prevent you from opening them in a new window, tab, or even just copying the link to send to a friend.
- the page titles are excessive in their use of ((( Unuseful characters ))). Did the artist grow gills?
- The pages just generally look worse in Safari than in Mozilla. I’m not sure how they look in IE – I don’t use it to avoid viruses.
- Primus’ Frizzle Fry is not selected as an AMG album pick, and is rated lower than The Brown Album. That must be a dotNet bug….
Evidently I’m not the only person that is upset. Adrian Holovaty has released a Firefox plugin to defeat several of these annoying features.
Though I can see problems with the site-specific plugin approach, I’m going to use it because given a circumvent doing something the stupid way, I’ll choose it.