Yahoo Shuttering Its Web Directory

An anonymous reader writes You may or may not remember this, but before the advent of reliable search engines, web listings used to be a popular way to organize the web. Yahoo had one of the more popular hierarchical website directories around. On Friday, as part of its on-going streamlining process, Yahoo announced that their 20-year-old web directory will be no more: "While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they're passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory."

Comments

Wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo still exists??

Re:Wait

[doccus]

Yahoo was, if I remember correctly, my earliest search homepage.. I remember it being much better than Google at the time in finding certain things. Same with Altavista, "Ask Jeeves", and that one that Netscape always wanted you to sign up with (or was that Yahoo?). All are gone now. Awallowed up by that big beast Google. AOLand Geocities too, although they're perfectly preserved in the wayback machine. A directory is sometimes much easier to work with.. for me..and, re this directory, isn't there an application that can copy the entire directory and pages, with correctly resolved links and all? I know there used to be, for Apple OSX (or maybe it was an OS9xx classic app). If anyone knows please comment here.

The web is long dead anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the world wide web's death and considering people don't surf it anymore, this is long overdue.

All hail to our facebook/google overlords.

Re: The web is long dead anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I often have a need to find information (like finding the name of the newspapers in a town) but thought that Yahoo had turned off that feature long ago. I'll have to go back and look for it while it is still around.

They Hadn't Already?

[l0ungeb0y]

Last time I saw the Yahoo Web Directory was circa 1999 -- and it was an outmoded next to useless service back then compared to Yahoo search (which was top dog at the time) I had just assumed they'd shuttered it, what with Google kicking their ass so hard that they all but left the Search market to focus on acquiring trendy startups in other areas so they could run them into the same sort of irrelevancy they did with Search.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Moridineas]

I don't think Yahoo was ever top dog search?

I remember switching from Altavista to Google sometime around 98/99. WebCrawler before that? Yahoo is one of those companies I've never understood why people used their products. Or, for that matter, how they're still around today.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Snotnose]

Alta Vista used to be top dog in search. Then in 94/95 they decided to rank paid advertisers at the top of searches. I and many others dropped AV and went looking for alternatives. Google came out the winner. I never did get into Yahoo's categorization, always preferred to just search on what I was looking for.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[mgf64]

Which is, interestingly, precisely what Google is doing today.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Slick_W1lly]

Google was also a winner for me because of its clean single line text input for search. No images, no clutter, no links on the page - in the age of a 9600 baud modem the less clutter on the page the better. That was why *I* swapped from alta-vista to google. Alta-vista had started presenting a 'portal page' which was all the rage back then, and I preferred the quick, efficient search from google.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google was also a winner for me because of its clean single line text input for search. No images, no clutter, no links on the page - in the age of a 9600 baud modem the less clutter on the page the better

9600 baud? If we define the start of Google as when the "google.com" domain was registered in late-1997, then 28Kbps modems had already been around for a long time by then, and 56Kbps ones were available and starting to become commonplace (*) to the point that the by the time I bought an unremarkable budget/lower-midrange PC in April 1998 it came with a 56Kbps modem at no noticeable premium. (I certainly don't recall 28Kbps even being an option at that point).

So yeah, compactness *was* more important in the dial-up days, but Google was well past the 9600 baud era. (And given how expensive going online *was* in the 9600 baud era, I'm sure anyone who could have afforded *that* would have been able to afford a 56Kbps- or at least 28Kbps- model when those were available).

(*) Albeit with the stupid "K56flex" vs. "X2" standards war I'd almost forgotten about, which was resolved circa 1999.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Immerman]

I wonder what baud a 28.8Kbps modem ran at? By that point I think they had shifted to phase modulation instead of ampltude modulation, and were probably using 2-3 bits per symbol (90* or 45* phase shift increments), which would put the signal rate at either 14400 or 9600 baud. Of course you couldn't go *advertising* it that way and expect to sell upgrades, which is no doubt why modem labelling changed from baud to bps at around that time.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't figure out if that was genuine question or if you were attempting to pedantically catch me out if it had turned out that the 56Kbps modem was operating at 9600 baud- albeit not 9600 bits/second!- anyway.

So... let's look into it. :-) The Wikipedia modem article lists the various V.xx modem standards- and it turns out that both the 56Kbps standards operate at 8000 baud (implying 7 bits per symbol). Close, but no cigar...

But here's the interesting part- since we're being pedantic, there's no standard operating at 9600 baud at all. There's the 9600 bits *per second* V.32 standard, which I think we can assume is the one the OP was talking about, but that only operates at 2400 baud (implying 4 bits per symbol).

'Course, *I'm* not going to hold that against the OP, because we both knew what we meant and weren't being pedantic on that level. :-)

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget MNP level 5 compression for up to 115200 bits/sec on text.
I feel old.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Immerman]

Holy crap, 7 bits per symbol? That's insane! I wish I had a use for trellis modulation - at a thousand-fold reduction in uncorrectable stream errors it sounds quite impressive, but I can't quite wrap my head around it i a brief survey, and I'm not going to sit down and puzzle it out without having some sort of application.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Immerman]

Ugh. it did make websites and email load slightly faster, but on-the-fly compression is worse than useless when downloading files that have already been heavily compressed by more domain-optimized algorithms, like graphics and zipped files. Basically everything of any size you'd normally be downloading is essentially incompressible. And you can't read text at anywhere near even 56kbs anyway.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[kmoser]

Why would they get rid of it? Yahoo's web directory provides valuable spider bait for Google and other real search engines.

Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablet focused design has ruined the web

Re:Yep

[jc42]

Tablet focused design has ruined the web

Nah; the people who still use the web haven't seen much of anything "ruined". They see the web they've long seen, just with a larger set of web sites each month, and maybe a few new features in their browsers. It's just the suckers that succumb to the vendors' enticements into their Walled Gardens that think things have changed. If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets), they'd see that the web is chugging along as it always has, some parts of it good and other parts not so good.

The fact that the marketers have pushed their New! Improved! products for small, portable computers doesn't mean that the old products have suddenly lost their capabilities. It just means that some of the customers have been persuaded to switch to other things that may or may not be any better.

The biggest problem with "the web" from a tablet user's viewpoint is all the old sites built by "designers" who haven't yet learned that their sites need to work on whatever screen the visitor has, including the small screens that so many people are carrying around now. The days are past when a site designer could design only for people with screens as big as the fancy one sitting on the designer's desktop. If your site doesn't work on the small screens, you won't attract many of the billion or so people who weren't using the web 5 years ago, but are now.

This isn't the fault of "tablet focused design"; it's a problem caused by designers' contempt for people with such small, cheap and portable equipment. They've been essentially anti-tablet since before tablets even existed. But they're slowly coming around, as they slowly realize how crappy their sites really are, from the viewpoint of most newcomers to the Internet.

(Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers". Those built by people with an engineer's concern for usability have always been a lot more useful, and they tend to work pretty well on tablets, phones, etc. The "designers" usually don't think they look pretty. But people continue to use google a lot, for example, despite its blatant lack of "design". Or maybe because of it. ;-)

Re:Yep

[Snotnose]

The fact that the marketers have pushed their New! Improved! products for small, portable computers doesn't mean that the old products have suddenly lost their capabilities. It just means that some of the customers have been persuaded to switch to other things that may or may not be any better.

Maybe up until a year or so ago. Now websites are converting to the Metro interface, which prefers splashy pictures over descriptive text. Those bookmarks get deleted (nbcnews.com anyone?)

In addition more and more websites just don't work anymore. Why, I don't know. Examples? Both tdameritrade.com and vons.com don't work under Chrome, but do under Firefox. I read fark daily, at least once a day I find a site that won't render under Chrome (I don't bother firing up FF for those). Seems like every month one of my bookmarks gets deleted because it no longer works with Chrome.

/tdameritrade worked fine on my WinXP + Chrome last November
// did not work on my 8.1 + Chrome last November
/// vons worked fine on my 8.1 + Chrome up until a couple months ago
//// now trying to login does nothing.
////. Yes, I've tried both sites with all plugins disabled under Chrome
///// No joy
///// If a site won't work with Adblock+ I won't be going there much anyway.
////// I haven't installed Java on my Win 8.1 lappy, mebbe that's the problem.

Re:Yep

[guises]

Tablet focused design is why Flash isn't as ubiquitous as it once was and why javascript has gotten (slightly) less annoying. It is certainly not the reason why Yahoo is shuttering is web directory.

Re:Yep

[Zontar The Mindless]

Bingo. One of the Web's biggest problems has always been "it's just like print" types who create static layouts that fit only within the biggest screen they can lay hold of, and the rest of the world be damned.

Re:Yep

[AK Marc]

That was a problem long before tablets. I still run across sites hard coded for a specific resolution. Previously 640x480, but higher later, but still hard coded for a single resolution. And assuming full-screen display.

Re:Yep

[Zontar The Mindless]

I still remember people in 1996 asking me how to change the user's screen res using JavaScript so "they can view my site correctly" and getting all bent out of shape when I tried to explain to them why this was a horrible idea (and not allowed in any case).

Re:Yep

[AK Marc]

The "best" solution would have been to have a windowed viewing that would display the page in the requested window size (with permission of the viewer). Instead, I still find myself with large bars along the side of the browser from the explicitly unused area of the screen. Even in "late" 2014.

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashies? What is this, Fark.com?!

Re:Yep

[ConceptJunkie]

Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers"

So, no Slashdot Beta then...

anyone else have the periodic table of the www?

[ihtoit]

I'd take a photo (I'm really sad I think in having a hard copy which I've had in a frame since 1997, on my wall) and upload it, but I'm sure there'll still be a copy online somewhere. It's easy to distinguish between it and the 2007 version, myspace isn't in there. Slashdot's still there in group 9, tho (so's Chips N Dips which is odd, since they're the same site).

Re:anyone else have the periodic table of the www?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2...

downloadable content

[Champaklal]

if they allowed downloading their directoy, it'd help NLP and machine learning engineers.

Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[arielCo]

Seriously, no hand-edited directory has been able to keep pace with WWW content for... ten years now? fifteen?

For those who don't mind the lag: DMOZ - the Open Directory Project.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[dbc]

Yahoo wasn't keeping up when it was brand new. I remember using Yahoo when Mosaic, compiled from sources by yourself, was the recommended procedure for installing a web browser on my workstation at work. Yahoo wasn't keeping up even at that time.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that's all that could run on the horseless carriage?

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gopher is still around.
Take that, WWW.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was never about keeping pace with WWW content. It was always about keeping consumers fenced into an area to increase the chances of landing a sale.

Re: Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[Anonymous Coward]

The gopher of today is a pale skeleton of what once was.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[Anonymous Coward]

there is still, i think, a place for a hand-curated web directory with common categories and selected popular, reputable sites listed.. not an often outdated free for all like dmoz or a paid-for-placement system that yahoo evolved into, but a site people can bookmark or make a home page and know that they can find something for a lot of things there and know the links on it are ok.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[loimprevisto]

Delicious.com, formerly del.icio.us, is quite close to this. Interestingly enough it was bought by Yahoo...

Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[LetterJ]

While I haven't used it in years, like most geeks, I do have a soft spot for Yahoo's directory. I remember sitting in a college computer lab after Yahoo launched, visiting every link they included, amazed at this HUGE pile of information available at my fingertips. Funny to think of it now.

Re:Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[Trenchbroom]

I know that for almost everyone else (women, kids, old people, non-nerds) the web is a billion things. But for me (and I suspect for many of my fellow male, older nerds), the internet is defined as a source of knowledge, far beyond being a music/movies/sex/friends/whatever provider. And it's all because of a similar experience to you the first time I sat down at a computer in college and tried the World Wide Web for the first time.

Re: Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[Anonymous Coward]

First time I logged onto the internet was also the first time I tried meth. Stayed up all night.

I never did meth again but I've been addicted to the internet for like 17 years.

Re:Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[WillKemp]

Yeah, for a few years back there, i was constantly amazed at what was on the web. That would have been a bit over 10 years ago and there was hardly anything compared to what's there today. I've been using the web for 20 years now and i can barely imagine (let alone remember) what life was like before everything was online.

Re:Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[AK Marc]

My experience is that a directory makes it easier to find new things that are interesting, and a search engine makes it easier to find what you are looking for. They are different things for different purposes.

Re: Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[Immerman]

Should've picked the meth, its less reliably destructive to your social life...

Re:Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Same. I remember when I got my resume listed there back in the mid nineties. You had to post it, and because it had to be accepted, there was just a tiny bit of "you're in the club". It was a bit of geek cred (that and posting it to Dice back when they still had you use telnet).

Cool Yahoo, a phrase not much heard now, a term of days long gone.

Linux is dying thanks to systemd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hipsters and advertisers haven't just killed the web. They're doing their best to kill Linux, too. They've already managed to destroy Firefox, and GNOME 3 killed the GNOME project for all intents and purposes. Now they've moved on to the core of Linux itself, by forcing systemd on everybody who uses Linux. There's going to be a serious migration away from Linux coming in the near future, I'm sad to say. Some will go to Windows and OS X, with others moving to the BSDs. FreeBSD, whether they know it or not, is going to see a huge resurgence very soon. The FreeBSD leadership will not put up with hipsters their systemd idiocy. It flies in the face of decades of experience. Binary log files? Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that's an awful idea. So FreeBSD will remain one of the last bastions of good operating system design and implementation, while the Linux ecosystem and community burns to the ground.

Re:Linux is dying thanks to systemd.

[Snotnose]

Why do I think parent AC and replier AC are the same AC?

Re:Linux is dying thanks to systemd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you're an idiot and unable to notice that they probably aren't the same person due to the very different posting styles?

My oh my, touched a nerve with me, haven't I, "Anonymous Coward"? What do I think of getting away from the computer for a while and do something else, eh? Get a grip, me.

Their what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alta Vista, Baby!

$299 for a Directory Listing (annual fee)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure anybody who just paid $299 for a Yahoo Directory Listing will be delighted with this news .......

Re:$299 for a Directory Listing (annual fee)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure anybody who just paid $299 for a Yahoo Directory Listing will be delighted with this news .......

I did, and was. I find it sexually exciting.

Re:$299 for a Directory Listing (annual fee)

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, it's getting expensive to run a website. So I have to pay a $299 Yahoo Directory Listing fee, and I also have to pay a $699 Linux cock-smoking-teabagger licensing fee? Fuck me, this is really adding up!

Re:$299 for a Directory Listing (annual fee)

[Anonymous Coward]

(Someone with no sense of humour and a short memory will mod the parent Troll, alas.)

Meh, I want my infoseek

[damn_registrars]

Yahoo's directories were like gopherhole directories for html. Web searches didn't start to mean much until infoseek came around.

Re:Meh, I want my infoseek

[tepples]

Disney bought Infoseek in 2001 and switched it to use Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) as its back end. In 2013, it switched to its current format: a list of properties to avoid if you're still boycotting Disney over the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

What about Ed Krol's O'Reilly book

[Anonymous Coward]

The Whole Internet?

what's a search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your site doesn't appear immediately when someone types a keyword into Google I'm Feeling Lucky, your site does not exist.

Re:what's a search engine?

[Immerman]

Does ayone actually use that? I never feel lucky enough - the page I actually want is usually halfway down the list.

Search wins over directories

[whereiswaldo]

Maintaining a web directory is like keeping nicely pruned and organized browser bookmarks: nobody does it anymore. Keyword search is good enough in both cases.

Unreliable sources

[tepples]

Keyword search does not help users determine the reputability of a particular site. I can't think of anything better than human curation to assess that, and the result of human curation turns out to be a directory.

Re:Unreliable sources

[whereiswaldo]

Google's page rank algorithm goes a long way to mitigate that by tracking how many links refer to a given site, but of course Google needs to be vigilant of abuse.

Re:Unreliable sources

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, to the extent that you have to game Google massively with links to stand a chance of being seen on the search engine, unless you are already a huge established web presence. Most of your competition realizes this, and is doing the same.

Google sees thousands of links hitting all the "popular" sites, and assumes that its algorithm is doing a GREAT job. Dumb fucks.

Re:Unreliable sources

[tepples]

Just because a document on the web is widely cited doesn't mean it's reliable. Hoaxes can and do spread.

Re:Unreliable sources

[fyngyrz]

Google's page rank algorithm goes a long way to mitigate that by tracking how many links refer to a given site

No. Popularity is a horrible indicator of usefulness, and/or accuracy and/or value. A well curated directory, on the other hand, can be all wheat, no chaff. Unfortunately, no well-curated directory exists.

RIP

[demonlapin]

Sad to see one of the last vestiges of the Old Web die.

Oh, who am I kidding? The modern version kicks the old one's ass seven ways to Sunday. I've been an Internet user for over twenty years. Yahoo was amazing at the time, but Moore's Law reigns supreme, and thank FSM for that. akebono.stanford.edu, anyone?

Re:RIP

[gcalvin]

Came for akebono.stanford.edu, leaving happy.

Re:RIP

[demonlapin]

This is probably one of the few fora left where you have a substantial portion of users who remember the early days, outside of The Service of Which We Speak Not. The one that predated Google Groups.

Re:RIP

[markhb]

We don't speak of DejaNews?

Re:RIP

[demonlapin]

You know what I mean.

No Bid Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have my copy of the Internet Yellow Pages.

Safari monopoly

[tepples]

If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets)

That would require buying a second noon-iPad tablet on which to run a non-crippled browser. Because the iOS API lacks support for runtime generation of executable code, all browsers in Apple's App Store are either Safari wrappers or, in the case of Opera Mini, remote desktop viewers.

Re:Safari monopoly

[jc42]

If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets)

That would require buying a second noon-iPad tablet on which to run a non-crippled browser. Because the iOS API lacks support for runtime generation of executable code, all browsers in Apple's App Store are either Safari wrappers or, in the case of Opera Mini, remote desktop viewers.

So which case describes Chrome? I have it installed on an iPad, and it lacks most of the "walled garden" flakinesses of Safari, pretty much doing things the way browsers on non-Apple systems do them. Thus, Safari balks when you try to get it to display a PDF in a page, but Chrome does it like you'd expect, and sometimes even sizes it to its container correctly. Safari can display PDFs ok, if it's the only thing in a tab, but if you try to surround a PDF "object" with HTML, Safari flatly refuses, showing the "not implemented" message instead. I've taken to including a link to the PDF inside the "not implemented" failure message, and clicking on that link works fine, showing that Safari is quite capable of displaying such files. It just doesn't like to do so inside a web page with, say, additional information about the PDF. But somehow Chrome implements both cases. Google finds a number of complaints about this, and comments that nobody seems to be able to find a fix for Safari's flakiness in this case (and many more ;-).

Re: Safari monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome on an iPad is just safari in a chrome wrapper.

Rationalize it all you want. I guess you can polish a turd after all.

Re:Safari monopoly

[stoborrobots]

Safari wrapper. http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-will-always-be-inferior-to-safari-on-iphone-and-ipad/ has you covered...

Bummer

[hwolfe]

I kind of miss it, and had forgot it was around.

It was kind of a big influence on me, as I hacked a perl script together to take a netscape bookmark file and turn it into something resembling the Yahoo directory.

Web Directories Became Social Bookmarking, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think web directories still exist, they are just slightly less centralized and usually have some gimmick or domain attached. There's still a single authority in charge, but the directories are simply in the hands of the users, which in turn is aggregated per-site.

Examples: Pinterest, Delicious, Reddit (to a point), StumbleUpon, Pearltrees, Kifi, Scoop.it, etc.

Most of these are simply bookmarks or a curated directory. IMO, just about the same thing, only differing on presentation. Amazing how people continually reinvent something and declare it genius. At best, we've seen refinement, more or less efficient UI, and attached search capabilities.

As for those who think full-text search can replace curation, I think you're sadly mistaken. Spend a few weeks really researching search engines, ranking, SEO, language processing, parsers, etc. and you'll find that anything remotely resembling Google's approach is full of problems and challenges. I believe it is impossible to say that one is better than another. I see search as part of a larger whole that includes curation, text, semantic, pattern matching, structural, and other kinds of search techniques combined. It really just depends on the actor's use cases:

Can you quickly find what you're looking for via text search?
Do You know the exact terms and filters for your search?
Do you need recommendations or suggestions?
Do you need to work your way forwards or backwards?
Do you need to pivot on the results?

There are many more questions and answering these influences what is best for you. I think it's a mistake to say directory/bookmarks are useless for these reasons.

Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Yahoo exists and is one major provider of "free" webmail. I guess they spy on me, put ads above or below the mailbox, and they finally permanently retired the "Web 1.0" interface which was faster, showed more mails and allowed to open them in tabs.
But I went looking for major non-ISP "free" webmail (or any mail) and I didn't find much. Good e-mail stuff was for a recurring monthly or yearly fee, or did not accept new accounts since like 2003, or was on invite / need to state some community reason.
Still, I have webmail from a national postal service, but I use that extremely sparingly for "official" stuff with my real name. Yahoo is my shitbox (and one of the bigger security/privacy risks I have, because of 'been using it for extremely long and signing up to many shit over the years)

At least, when I'm logged to Yahoo I'm only logged to Yahoo. No Microsoft account, no Google account (which follows you on Google and Youtube like the plague!) and I only use Yahoo for the webmail and the persistent txt notes you can store along it.

Re:Webmail

[sillybilly]

I pay yahoo $19/year for email, that way my emails do not get lost and account deactivated - they used to deactivate a lot in the past, like 8 years ago, after like 90 days of inactivity. Also exchange of consideration, paying them, means they are sort of responsible not to lose my emails, which is complicated territory when you use their service for free. I used to have various email addresses that needed constant updating, at first from my college, then from various dialup isp's, but by the time I switched to cable broadband I've been permanently with a single yahoo email addy, so I don't have to keep changing it on my resume and other various places and accounts every time I move, or change ISP's. It does get spammed a bit, but some of the spam is actually nice, and I like to read it. I prefer yahoo to both Microsoft's Hotmail or Google's Gmail, because Yahoo is kind of an underdog, the power should not get to their heads that much compared to Microsoft and Google who are on top of the world and might think they can get away with any kind of abuse of their customers. Too much power corrupts. Plus I'd like yahoo to stay in business, but sometimes I see difficulty with that, when they blow billions of dollars on very questionable purchases that they later have to write off. I also use them as popmail through Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2, so that lessens a bit their responsibility not to lose my emails, especially the old ones. I do have a free account with them too, that I rarely check, except when I have to fill out some bs online form to get an access password, and I know all they want my email for is spam, and that account has like 100,000 spam messages in it. They used to have a classic webmail interface that was awesome and fast, but their new one is absolute crap, it hogs the CPU with javascript, and is very limited on features. Like I can only move a couple emails at a time from a custom folder to the Inbox, so it gets popmail downloadable, which only gets stuff from Inbox. I used to not do popmail, just webmail, and then if you leave stuff in the Inbox it gets autodeleted after a year, while if you create a folder and move important messages there, you can come back to them for years, but that also means you get at least a couple thousand important messages in that folder, and if you want to move those temporarily back to the Inbox, you can only do like 20 at a time, and if you display a lot more per page then the javascript slows your computer to a crawl. It's really poor programming all over the web these days, including yahoo, facebook, twitter, youtube - why the hell do you need a supercomputer to list videos and their images on a youtube page? It's all pisspoor programming with a purpose, to force everyone off classical computers onto handheld smartphones, where they are locked into a very tight and very low feature world. I also have two gmail accounts, but I haven't paid google much yet, except through clicking ads and buying stuff that way, and one time I bought an organic chemistry ebook from books.google.com, that I had no idea it would be DRM'd, only readable with adobe crap running on top of dotnet. I simply refuse to run the megabloat of dotnet crap on my computers, so I'm kinda pissed at Google for pimping DRM. I hate DRM. It means the book is only readable as long as Adobe is around as a business, and as soon as they are out of business, or simply refuse to authenticate my new device, telling me to upgrade or pay them some money, more than I paid for the stupid DRM pdf ebook, I'm screwed with a DRM ebook. That's like Microsoft who might refuse to authenticate new installations of sealed retail copies of XP, telling people to upgrade. They probably haven't sunk that low yet, but it's coming. That's why Windows 2000 is the last windows and Office 2000 is the last Office to the general consumer without activation that will last even if Microsoft is ever gone out of business, except maybe some corporate versions of XP or hacked versions, maybe, if there is a workable hack. So many things that used to

Re:Webmail

[xushi]

Seriously.. It's called the Enter/Return key. Read up about it..

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use the HTML <p> and </p> tags to create chapters.

It works like this: <p>First chapter</p><p>Second chapter</p><p>Third chapter</p>.

Re:Webmail

[jenningsthecat]

...Yahoo is my shitbox.

This, exactly. I use Yahoo accounts as spam-catchers - I don't even use spam filtering on my 'real' email address, as I don't need it.

...they finally permanently retired the "Web 1.0" interface which was faster, showed more mails and allowed to open them in tabs...

AdBlock and NoScript fix that crap to a large extent. It's annoying to have to click on the 'proceed without updating JavaScript' link every time I log in, and it's annoying to have to temporarily re-enable JS when I want to send an attachment; but the result is an interface that is (just barely) useable, and devoid of ads. If I couldn't turn off all the shitty 'features' that Yahoo has introduced to 'improve' their service, I'd have left long ago - the current stock interface is simply unuseable.

...At least, when I'm logged to Yahoo I'm only logged to Yahoo. No Microsoft account, no Google account (which follows you on Google and Youtube like the plague!)...

I've stuck with Yahoo the same reasons; plus, I find the GMail interface to be not much better than the stock Yahoo interface.

Re:Webmail

[CronoCloud]

I've stuck with Yahoo the same reasons; plus, I find the GMail interface to be not much better than the stock Yahoo interface.

Why are you reading GMail and Yahoo mail in a web browser instead of in a proper e-mail client over IMAP?

Re:Webmail

[sillybilly]

I know all that. I just like to write blocks of flowing text, and you don't have to read it. You are the kind of people with low tolerance to pedantic transgressions that I don't want my posts to be read by. Go stick a carrot up your asses.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Try inbox.com , last I saw they were a decent free email provider.

Re:Webmail

[ahaweb]

Writing walls of text without paragraphs is called lacking literary manners. The people I know who do it are the intellectual equivalent of obese people.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you.

The reason we write with spaces in between paragraphs is that it simulates the breaks in conversation where the speaker would be breathing. Our minds need this to process the information.

If you don't want to bother to write to nominal standards then don't expect anyone to bother to read your shit. It's not good enough to just have something interesting to say, you also have to know how to say it.

Re:Webmail

[sillybilly]

I can hold my breath for a long time. This is how I like to think, one long rambling stretch of thoughts without breaks. As I said, it's not mandatory to read my shit, if you don't like my style, just simply move along, there is nothing for you to see here. Quit whining like a baby about style.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it makes you look uneducated, therefore nobody will want to read it.

What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[Animats]

What does Yahoo still do, anyway?

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Force long-time remote workers to choose between moving to another city where they can actually come into an office and losing their jobs.

So, what do I win?

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

They call their CEO chief yahoo and pay him huge salary.

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Him? You mean her.

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[irq-1]

Duh, they buy startups.

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[NotRightAway]

Flickr?

Re:What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[GoJays]

Fantasy Sports.

How about Rocketmail ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have my rocketmail account that I signed up very very long time ago

I hear rumors about rocketmail isn't accepting any new email account applicant

Is that true?

Ali-bye-bye

[Bob_Who]

Yahoo directory was almost completely forgotten, but they just had to bring it up again...Now they have an excuse to clean house before lunch is delivered. That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles.

Never used it, not going to miss it

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose I am one of the few internet users (and I was before the WWW) that NEVER used the Yahoo! directory. Heck, many years passed before I was aware Yahoo! had a search engine... which neither have used. I am member of some Yahoo! groups, though.

What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Email for those with legacy addresses, games, some media that they bought out several years ago (ref: broadcast.com), non-technical people like their news and homepage for some strange reason, and they are still relevant in overseas markets.

Uh, it's slashdotted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdotting Yahoo should be quite a feat, but I suspect this particular service to be underpowered.

WTF is the word shuttering?

[spiralx]

What the hell is wrong with the word "shutting"?

HTML5 features that Apple left out

[tepples]

Does Chrome for iPad support WebGL? Does it support uploading any data type other than pictures and video to an HTML form containing <input type="file">?

Nostalgia gone awry

[THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER]

Are you also nostalgic for slavery?

Re:Nostalgia gone awry

[Immerman]

Why be nostalogic? Slavery's still going strong, even here in the supposed land of the free. Not nearly so openly as it once was, but human trafficking is still a major issue that ruins a lot of people's lives.

And that's even before you consider things like wage-slaving and non-human slavery (there's a reason they call it "breaking" a horse - that's generally exactly what you have to do to its spirit)

Re:Nostalgia gone awry

[Oligonicella]

Lot of US fud there. As for the horses, you're apparently unaware of current horse training methods. Or... more fud.

Re:Nostalgia gone awry

[Immerman]

Keep believing that, just be sure to avoid any of the various organizations documenting the ongoing existence of human trafficking in the US. It's illegal, and not as bad as in some places in the world, but there are in fact people buying and selling sex slaves, etc. in this country (prostitution, especially of children, being one of the areas where profits are sufficient to justify the legal risks).

As for horses - training methods have improved, but the end result is still shaping the mind of a willfull animal to mostly obey your orders without question or hesitation. Perhaps you would prefer if I used pigs or chickens as an example instead? Animals that today mostly spend their entire lives imprisoned in cages barely large enough to hold them in order to produce and/or become food for us. They live and die at our pleasure, in a situation where they have essentuially no opportunity to exercise free will - that's about as extreme an example of slavery as you can get.

No problem

[PPH]

There's always AltaVista.

Re:Moderation

[jc42]

Wohoo! I got informative + insightful + flamebait mods for my message! That's one of the mods I've been trying for for years (plus the rare chance to use "for" twice in a row).

Now to see if I can achieve the ultimate: getting "funny" along with flamebait and (informative or insightful). Preferably all four, though I'd wonder if that's actually achievable if you start with 2 points.

Uh, it's slashdotted.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been down for a few weeks already, at least from some locations. https://twitter.com/peternowee/status/512612416996536321

Re:Moderation

[markhb]

It should be possible since Flamebait is a -1.

Yahoo

[Gruff 2005]

I used to rely on Yahoo as my gateway to the Internet and had an email account with them. No longer, they have just become irrelevant.