Announcing the full roll-out of the updated Google Maps for desktop | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the full roll-out of the updated Google Maps for desktop

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22 pointsdietlbomb22 comments

Classic maps was usable and feature rich. New maps is terrible on both fronts.

I use google maps for about 15-20 minutes a day, every day. I didn't even realize we had been upgraded to a new version - Just took a quick peek, and the 4-5 things I do (Satellite, Transit, Traffic, Address Lookup, Driving Directions, Street View) - all seem to work pretty much the same on both maps - the newer interface seems to be more modern to me.

I have to believe, based on my what I would consider my own moderate google maps power users perspective, that fewer than 1% of google maps users will have any issues with this change.

New maps on computers without some sort of GPU acceleration is pretty painful and laggy compared to old maps. Compare maps.google.com to maps.bing.com and there is a noticeable performance difference (obviously not feature parity though).

Wow, some of the user feedback in that thread is brutal.

Agreed - people are going ballistic. It's actually a good thread - I've learned how to:

  o Measure distances in google Maps (and put a nice marker on the screen)

  o Get the Long Lat for any point on a map.

The thing is - I don't actually know why they are so upset, because they are, for the most part, not really calling out what their issues are, and the ones they have, seem kind of minor, like Missing a zoom bar.

Some of their rants are about things that exist (showing distance bars in Metric or Imperial, on the screen)

And some of them seem really, really niche: "Photo icons placed at the location of the photo overlaid on the map, and not in some useless "carousel" feature."

Some of them seem wrong, "Autocomplete not working" - sure works for me. To a spooky degree that makes me wonder how it knows from "St. R " to automatically fill out "St. Regis, Singapore" - I mean, yes, that's what I wanted, but seriously, WTF - how did you know?

Anyways, I'm guessing that their user interaction surveys have shown that nobody except the die-hard classic maps users will care. I wonder if there was a similar uproar when Apple decided to shut down aperture, and move to photos. Probably not, as all the people who cared had probably switched to lightroom a long, long time ago - and the ones left on aperture are probably going to be totally happy with Photos. (raises hand)

Great so this is the way a good product becomes AWFUL.

- Classic maps is great on all devices New Maps sucks when there is a lower power CPU? Slow and laggy

- Why is there a Honking big Search box Hiding my map

- AutoZoom that randomly decides that a "drag action' is a Zoom

- Where are my previous searches? Why do they show up at-Most one at a time?

-- On and on

This is truly a step backwards.

I didn't realize it wasn't completely rolled out. I've been using it for _years_.

I'd really like to see some basic navigation fixed first. For example, I was visiting Paris last week and you cannot get directions from airport (CDG) to any street address in the city for public transit. Similar to other route reachable via RER trains (ex. Disneyland Park). I'm sure Maps are great in USA, but they turned out to be quite useless for simple tour in one of the world's major cities.

And I'm not talking about departure/arrival times here. Just basic routing from point A to point B.

My real complaint with google maps of late is how terribly slow they've been. I've tried on an android phone, an osx laptop, a windows desktop, all at different locations. The common theme is the abysmally slow load time. Bing maps has loaded quickly, as has open streetmap.

I'm not sure what's going on with their setup, but that's my only real complaint.

It seems to me that CPU is the bottleneck as it requires a lot of processing power. For example it feels really slow both on my Intel Core2Duo computer and on my Samsung Galaxy S2 Android phone. On the other hand, it works really fast on 2014 MacBook Pro with Intel Core i7 and it's solid on Nexus 10 tablet (although, this has degraded a lot after upgrading it to Lollipop).

Apparently Google engineers are using top of the line hardware and nobody is aware of the issue. Looks like some dogfooding is required. :)

Yeah, the new maps is entirely unusable on older hardware, especially hardware without GPU rendering.

I am curious if this will affect maps built using the API. I have a few sites and apps using the API that were created a number of years ago.

Haven't been able to find any comments that mention the API, so I'm hopeful it will be a transparent switch.

I guess I'm among the minority of people who use google maps just to look up directions, see traffic, and look up nearby businesses, and that's enough for me. The one feature I don't see though is the ability do traffic estimations which was convenient.

I know the team will get there, I cannot fully support their decision to disable old maps but I can understand it. Most of flame in that thread is unfortunate and unnecessary and reminds me of this comic where in the first panel someone introduces a new feature, the customer complains and moans, and say the first version was good enough, then the next panel they introduce yet another version and it's the same behavior as the first panel, they want the one that is just about to get taken from them, always and forever.

The new googles maps has traffic estimates, can show traffic, and it's pretty straightforward to even change your departure times (and show what the traffic will look like when you do).

It pops up when you query directions.

What I'd actually likes as a feature is an output telling me WHEN to start my trip based on the lowest travel time due to traffic. Would be wonderful to have a histogram by hour for journey times based on traffic prediction.

The biggest complaint I'm seeing is that a specific feature is removed from the new version.

I too previously had a complaint about the peg man being removed. It was impossible to find the street view I needed without that.

But, peg man is back, right?

Yes, and that's when I started using the new version. So I understand the complaints about features missing. If there were no peg man I'd probably be pretty frustrated using Maps.

You're in the majority. That's how these product managers make these decisions, they look at the data and if a feature is used <1% of the time they kill it because, they say, they need the interface to be as simple as possible.

The problem with that is a statistical logic one. The majority of people will use a rare <1% feature occasionally. When the feature isn't there the user finally realizes how dumbed down the product is and that it doesn't fit their needs. Even if it fit their need for years it let them down when they needed it most. The PM will respond that it wasn't worth it to have the feature uglyfying the interface for years just so it was available that one time.

The new version has been working great for a while now. My only complaint is how search results are displayed. Using svg over images is important.

Note that Multi-Point distance measurement is magical on the new Google Maps - is that even possible on the Classic?

For the downvoter - try it. I don't think i've ever seen anything like it on a mapping application - I added about 20 points, and it worked flawlessly.

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