Simon Willison’s Weblog

More Connected Earth

11th July 2002

Connected Earth is getting a fair amount of criticism for its shoddy browser detection. In my opinion, browser detection is only a small part of its problems. Should you get past the front door the interface used to present information is “mystery meat” navigation at its very worst—identically coloured dots which reveal only a hint of their purpose when you hover over them, leading to pages that contain two or three paragraphs of information at the most before you have to click on another dot. Pages are slow to load even on broadband so trying to follow content quickly becomes a painful experience. There’s a lot more to this dinosaur than just a browser detect page.