Google Reader mobile goes backwards

Even before Nazi-gate happened, I had given up on Indian newspapers. The usual male morning ritual of taking the newspaper to the loo was replaced with my iPhone.  Google had a great version of their RSS news Reader for the iPhone and I used to catch up on news using that. Notice that I said had.

The new version is all AJAX’y and stuff, with spinning status indicators and in-line reading without page reloads. But is it better than the original HTML static interface? A lot of users including myself seem to think NOT.

The older interface had blazing load times, with the pages showing a snippet of the news which the user could click to read the entire article. The new one actually loads the entire post content in the background so it can snappily display the entire article when the user clicks on it. The older interface allowed quick navigation using relevant links and support for the browsers back button. The new interface greets you with a spinning wheel all the time. To top it all, the new interface defaults to showing the “All Items” view, which obviously means that load times are always high.

The users are clamoring for the old interface. Let’s see if the Reader team gives them what they want. Interestingly, this must be a deja-vu for them since a similar thing happened when they switched from the original scrolling Reader interface to the present one.