Safari Books - bad redesign

I've had an account with O'Reilly's Safari books on and off for years

I've cancelled it before beacuase of design issues that rendered it unworkable for me.

This time they have "upgraded" the site from an AJAX based layout which allowed me to choose between "print fidelity" and "HTML view".

The new layout uses Flash to render the pages as they look in print in a scrollable window.

I hate this because

  • I work on a widescreen laptop with development toolbars and tabs in my browser - this layout of a tall thin view just doesn't fit on my screen.
  • I can't scroll the Safari menu and banner offscreen
  • Most of the time I don't care too much about formatting I just want to read it and HTML is easier to read
  • The scrolling doesn't respond to my mousewheel
  • I like to get a nice big page of text onscreen and the use the browsers search to quickly home in on the bit I want to read.

Oh well - back to books for now and another incentive to try and get the perfect ereader...

Tags

Comments

I don't know why the keep

I don't know why the keep tinkering with a good thing and actually making it worse. I've also had a Safari account for a few years now. I found it useful to download chapters of books to my phone to read on the underground for research, that was untill they decided to kill it off! Since they did that I haven't bothered to renew my subscription.

Comments

Safari Complaints link

http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/topics/new_safari_books_online_websit...

Apparently they've had a few complaints about this and may restore HTML view

Post new comment

Got something to add - just enter a comment
all other fields are optional.

Your email address will not be published.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image without spaces, also respect upper and lower case.