Yahoo now sucks...

[Chad]

I've been on the internet since 1994 and Yahoo has mostly been the home page on both my home and work computers. But a few months ago I was on Yahoo and an ad expanded and proceeded to invade and fill up almost the whole screen. How annoying! I slowly have begun to convert my computers to Google. Plus, I started searching more with Google (yes, I am several years late to the party) and have found that it does work much better.

The only computer I haven't yet converted to Google is my work computer because I like some of the daytime news info on Yahoo. But yesterday I clicked on a Yahoo news article that linked to a video. There were so many ads on the page that it literally took over the video, started some other ad video, and had stuff moving all over a large portion of the screen. It was totally ridiculous. I'm probably gonna be converting my work computer to Google and only go to Yahoo when I want a news story.

Anyway, I guess my point is that Yahoo has really succeeded in screwing things up. They have almost completely lost a person who was a 16 year die-hard Yahoo fan.

By the way, my work email is also through Yahoo. Ever since they "upgraded" it a year or so ago it has been far worse. I think so much of it is Java based and they don't have all the bugs worked out. Their webmail has turned into a steaming pile of crap from what I can tell.

Most ironic thing is that when I went to login to my Yahoo work email it had a Yahoo ad mentioning how 32.7 million people have made Yahoo their homepage. Interesting to be seeing that right about the time I'm ready to jump ship. Who are they kidding?

[Chad]

By the way, not specifically related to my Yahoo rant, but when opening Firefox does anybody know how to stop the cursor from going to the text entry part of the search engine I have as the home page? Whether I am on Google or Yahoo that happens. It is annoying because sometimes I just want to go straight to the Open Location bar and type where I want to go and half-way through typing it jumps the cursor down to the search box of Google or Yahoo. Very annoying. Has it always done that or was this some upgrade Firefox made awhile back? Any setting I could change to keep that from happening? If I want to enter something in a search engine, then I'd prefer to click there on my own.

[Grandturk]

Don't enter a home page - just have it bring up your browser with a blank page, that way you don't have to bother.

[fordsho90]

I agree, they have become the National Enquirer of the Net, hooking you w/a B.S line to get you to read a story or to see a video and then you get bombarded w/garbage and then when you finally able to read or watch the story doesnt match up w/the lead in; bastards....

[micha]

but they still do have the oracle, don't they?!


if you don't have yet; you should give ABP a try chad. great ad-block-plugin for firefox.
it works pretty well. I'm amazed sometimes when I turn it off out of curiousity how much commercials is on some homepages...
and you can block certain images manually as well. not a problem here, but I browse some other forums where the users seem to make a sport out of adding numerous GIFs and images to their signature. since I use ABP I not only have five posts on my screen where there used to fit two or three in, it loads way faster as well.

[audiophile]

Just Ctrl-L anytime
shortcut for open location

[Shawn Lutz]

its not just yahoo that have the annoying ads, everyone is doing that these days...I noticed the biggest annoying one yesteday at cnn.com took up 3/4's of the screen real estate and took a bit to locate the close link.

[Spivonious]

Don't know if Firefox has this shortcut to, but in IE pressing F4 will take you to the address bar.

Yahoo is practically bankrupt, so you can't blame them for selling some ad space. Google is even worse since they track everything you do with them and sell it to advertisers. That's how they make their money.

As far as search engines, I've been very happy with Bing since I switched a few months ago. Nice features like if you search a tracking number, it shows the progress; if you search a sports team, it shows the scores for the past couple of games and the top stories about them; if you search a movie, it shows you the showtimes for theaters in your area. Bing Maps is also way more featured than Google Maps. Connecting Photosynth to the map was a genius move by Microsoft. Image search lets you scroll infinitely, video search plays the video when you mouse over it. It's little things like that that make my Bing experience much more fulfilling than Google.

To block ads without a plugin, just add the domain to the restricted sites section (that's what IE calls it, but I'm sure Firefox has that feature too).

A lot of the most annoying ads are running in Flash. I believe Firefox has an add-in called "FlashBlock" that will block Flash items until you click on them.

[Shawn Lutz]

Spiv, do tell how Yahoo is practically bankrupt....They're sitting on a ton of cash don't have much debt, Yahoo is pretty far from being bankrupt.....perhaps after a few more 100 million dollar failed marketing attempts they will

[Spivonious]

Well, they were losing tons of money a year or so ago. MS offered to buy them, they refused, kept losing money, then they signed a deal to share search technologies, i.e. stay afloat a little longer.

[Newc]

Check your Options for something that says move caret or cursor to a given field automatically (i.e. the Search box). And yeah, these new invincible/unstoppable popups are insulting, to say the least.

I can understand advertisers want their product advertised, but if they don't care how much of an inconvenience to me it is then why should I care of they go bankrupt?

[Bert]

I don't think they were ever losing a ton of money, just not making nearly as much as Google, and starting to lose major search share.

If you haven't tried Chrome yet you should. Much better than firefox.

[Spivonious]

I don't think they were ever losing a ton of money, just not making nearly as much as Google, and starting to lose major search share.

If you haven't tried Chrome yet you should. Much better than firefox.

Chrome just lets Google track me more. No thanks. Honestly, IE8 has been great for me. MS finally caught up with the rest of the browsers.

[Chad]

Update: Every computer I own and every computer at my workplace has been converted from Yahoo to Google as the start page when opening a browser. Quite a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time kind of liberating to give Yahoo the bird. They lost a 16 year dedicated fan!