And in my experience Google products have gotten significantly better and more polished in the last few years. Goes to show that their products aren't getting worse, just shifting in focus and priority.
Some products have improved, and some have gotten worse (losing Exchange on Gmail, Reader, Google Talk, Google Checkout) and some haven't changed in years (Google Finance).
I use a lot of Google services, and it's frustrating when they keep removing features, or killing off products that I use daily. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather pay for a service now and be the customer rather than signing up for another Google product.
Google should just shut the google finance android app down. Its so bad its embarassing. Adding arbitrary securities (some foreign adrs in the cases I have found) will prevent any portfolios from being displayed at all. When you open the app and hit update it will update the portfolios and show a notification that portfolios updated but the portfolios themselves will never appear anywhere in the UI.
God. I have two different google accounts linked to my android devices -- my work address and my personal one. And Google Finance just Can Not Cope with that. Every time I open it, it prompts me (again) to choose (again) the only account I've ever used for Finance. And then, having chosen my account, it promptly makes all of my stocks disappear. THANKS FINANCE. So then I background and foreground and refresh a few time and it says, "Oh, okay, maybe I'll list your stocks for you."
As its postscript, if you click on your stock, you get a list of articles about that stock! Helpful! Those articles are webpages. So if you click on the article that's actually a link to the webpage, in a Google app, it will open the webpage in the other Google app that's designed for opening webpages, ie Chrome, right? WRONG. What you wanted was a crippled web browser inside the Finance app, right?
Google finance is one of those apps that seems to just work, but if you try to actually use it you keep hitting bugs. My latest bug is that it thinks UUU should redirect to UUU.TO I keep end up going and using yahoo finance for quick things, what about you guys?
For me Google does indeed return Uranium One, Inc.(TSE:UUU). WolframAlpha on the other hand interprets the query correctly and provides sensible alternatives:
Assuming "UUU" is a financial entity | Use as an airport instead
For me, Google also returned Uranium One, trading on the Toronto Exchange.
However, Yahoo Finance showed Universal Security Instruments trading in New York, Uranium One in Toronto, and some wireless company trading on six different exchanges. The only symbol without a dot qualifier was the one for Universal Security Instruments.
It's all subjective but I love the new Gmail interfaces, Hangouts is much better than Talk and keeps getting better. Google+ photos is so much better than Picasa, I love how I can search for 'blue cars' in my photos and it returns them even though I've never tagged any of them.
Android has seen enormous improvements, I love stock 4.3 and Google Now.
Chrome's new 'native' apps wrapper-like thing is neat.
Even Youtube has improved a little bit, they've got a nice nifty ajax loader bar up top instead of refreshing the entire page when you go to another video.
But I guess with a different perspective, someone could argue how they don't like any of those changes. But for me, I love them.
I'm using a poor internet connection (because of geography) and my experience is that the usability of Youtube has gone down dramatically.
They made a change a while back where the video will only buffer a few seconds beyond where you've paused it. Previously, you could go a few seconds into the video, pause it, and let it buffer 100% in whatever quality you needed, now I find myself having to constantly pause the video to let it load. One workaround I was forced to use is TaperMonkey Chrome addon with a script that adds a download link underneath the Youtube video in Chrome. I download the video and watch it offline in perfect quality.
YouTube Center [1] allows you to disable Dash [2]. I had the same problem and worse, before I could autoplay 720p video but with Dash that didn't work.
Ah, I was wondering why I kept leaving videos in tabs to buffer nowadays and they just never did it any more. Very sad day. ;/ Sucks for someone on a mobile connection 99% of the time like me.
I double that. It's slow, clunky and unnecessarily heavy. That's why most of my contacts have already switched to other platforms.
Talk for Android 4, that added support for multiple accounts, was just good enough.
For many queries Google search is now better than Wikipedia. For example, Google 'Tom Cruise' and the right-hand side of the results page has an almost perfect summary of the actor: A great selection of photos, a concise biography, a clickable list of his popular movies and other actors related to him. This is the sort of thing that makes Google search far better than the competition for most people.
Yeah, even the rather homogeneous group of HN readers seems to have very different opinions of what got better and what got worse :)
But with Android I was talking features. The UI is not bad but (without ever having used Win mobile) MS seems to have the better UI. And Apple the worst (again, without having used them).
