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Comment by googleisking | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps, like several other google products (like Groups, even Search), has seen a constant degrade in user experience since 2005 or so.

Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning.

Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality, but this has stopped being universally true since many years.

Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett this enough.

Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use:

  https://maps.here.com/

Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality in several regions.

Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as far I'm concerned.

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OpenSteetMap is very difficult to compare to Google Maps as it uses pre-rendered raster map images at fixed resolutions, rather than a dynamic vector-based approach. For me at least, this makes it far slower to load in non-cached areas, and the lack of precise zooming is super annoying.

For me Google Maps is slower than OpenStreetMap anywhere in the world, cache or no cache. Might have something to do with not using Chrome, where Google makes their websites work the best of course.

What do you mean by "the lack of precise zooming is super annoying"? In my experience, zooming in Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap are very fast, and only in Google Maps you're waiting ten seconds for the region to load and browser to respond before you can zoom further.

On Google Maps, your zoom factor is any real number within a range. On Open Street View, you are stuck using one of several predefined zoom levels (integers 1-20).

To test out, try modifying the "10" in both of the links below: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z

https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep

Google maps also changes the zoom level to the nearest integer. You can't do 12.5 for example. When I change the 10 on the google maps link in your comment to 10.5, it rounds it back down to 10 and rewrites the URL. Have ran into the issue before doing custom maps for sites where 14.5 would be the perfect zoom level, but can only pick 14 or 15 :(

There's vector stacks using OpenStreetMap data, I guess it will be a while before one is in use on openstreetmap.org.

Mapbox has one, Mapzen has one, various apps have their own vector map implementations, there are convertors that take OSM data and output maps in the custom vector formats used by GPS devices and so on.

Google Maps is ridiculously slow even in Google Chrome.

Google News on mobile has become an awful experience on mobile. They hijacked the scrolling so it doesn't keep momentum like every other scrolling page in the system, and if you accidentally scroll downward with too much of an angle it swipes to a new section. I'm amazed every day it still exists and has not been fixed!!

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