
Announcing the full roll-out of the updated Google Maps for desktop - dietlbomb
https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!category-topic/maps/news/Zgqoqsvfipc
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chatman
Classic maps was usable and feature rich. New maps is terrible on both fronts.

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ghshephard
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.

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MrZongle2
Wow, some of the user feedback in that thread is brutal.

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ghshephard
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)

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suprgeek
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.

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

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babuskov
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.

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wambotron
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.

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babuskov
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. :)

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

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terrilldent
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.

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jastanton
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.

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sixothree
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.

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ghshephard
But, peg man is back, right?

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sixothree
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.

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ArtDev
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.

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

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ghshephard
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.

