This quote from Performancing.com is beautiful!
"Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory."
The comments on their blog were interesting and this was my contribution: I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don't want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive. One person mentioned that all widgets slow down the page load - but this isn't technically correct. There are a couple ways for a widget developer to delay rendering until after the page is loaded - similar to the way images load after the page is downloaded. I think modern browsers grab images on the fly so the display is faster, but its a similar idea. The trick is for the developer to care enough and be clever enough to do it right. For example, the widget I implemented at Others Online (which is very useful widget for bloggers in general - check it out) draws a simple grey frame then continues with the drawing of profiles after the page is loaded.
That damn Snap preview thing annoys the hell out of me too. I just don't get any value out of it.
Posted by: Jordan | May 09, 2007 at 09:12 PM