It is hard to tell whether the recent degradation of Yahoo!
Mail is part of a “perfect storm” conjoined to the release of Mountain Lion. It
certainly seems to be the case that Safari has gone through yet another phase
of deterioration. The primary difference is that, where you used to be able to
see at the bottom of the window where it was hanging, you no longer get that
cue.
The good news is that recovery seems to be both simpler and
more effective than previously. I have discovered that clicking on the X in the
address window now does a more reliable job of enabling the Stop command.
You then get the reload arrow, and clicking on it seems to lead to a rapid
loading of what you wanted in the first place. Thus, things are better than
they were but probably not yet good enough to deserve to be called “improved.”
Yahoo! Mail, on the other hand, seems to be suffering from
an acute case of “hyperlink amnesia,” at least on Safari (and I have not tried
to test this systematically on other browsers). This is most painful when the
Insert Addresses link does not work for composing a mail message. If you need
only one address, you can click it in the “new improved” Contacts display
(which I actually think is an improvement). If you need to consult
multiple addresses, be prepared to open the Contacts in a separate tab and do a
lot of copy-and-paste work. Otherwise, you are in a classic SOL situation.
I continue to believe that this is not so much a “perfect
storm” as simply a result of engineering
talent that is far less skilled than it used to be. This, in turn, is a
consequence of tools being more powerful than they used to be. The problem is
that, rather than augmenting the skill of the engineers (that great dream that
surfaced with the appearance of the mouse at the SRI Augmentation
Research Center, Douglas Engelbart’s research project), it seems to be
dumbing down the work force. If it can be done by using the right power tool,
then it gets done. If it requires more than engaging a single tool, then it is
dismissed as too difficult, if not impossible. As a result of too many power
tools, no one seems to know what is happening under that metaphorical hood any
more; and, to continue that metaphor, one of these days we are going to have a
major software product that drives us off a cliff (if that has not already
happened).
Meanwhile, most of those academic institutions with
reputations for producing quality engineers are turning into Internet-based
correspondence schools; so it is hard to imagine that our educational system is
going to help solve this problem
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