Try Lite Mode: https://www.google.com/maps/?force=lite
Too bad they don't tell you about it when your browser hangs.
THANK YOU !
I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/
Re:Gmail, We Need to Talk
by icebraining on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @06:14PM
(#10543363)
I completely agree regarding the performance issues; it's often painful to use on my Nexus 7.
Re:Gmail, We Need to Talk
by manigandham on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @06:51PM
(#10543604)
On a puny Macbook Air with 4gb ram and Chrome with 30 tabs open I'm getting perfect framerates and instantaneous UI... perhaps this is something local to your machine?
It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.
Re:Gmail, We Need to Talk
by iainmerrick on Wednesday November 11, 2015 @06:19AM
(#10546036)
It's true! Google Maps is really fast on some computers and impossibly slow on others. The only fix is "Lite Mode" as mentioned above, and unfortunately there's no link for that on the main page.
They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D <canvas>? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)
Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.
It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.
Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.
Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.
Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.