Sunday, July 30, 2006

Allmovie.com Goes glacial

I have used allmovie.com for a while now. Although less cited than the "Internet Movie Database" (imdb.com), it has carefully researched reviews and extremely useful cross-listings. However, allmovie recently redesigned their site such that pages take absolutely forever (OK, a few seconds, and up to a minute) to load, one has to visit more pages to get the information one wants, and the browser freezes completely if more than a few pages are open at once. This has nothing to do with bandwidth. It is about ads (the status bar mentions "bannerfarm.ace.advertising.com") and some seriously bad web design that somehow convinces the browser (yes, I've tried several) to take up most of the available CPU. Since fewer and fewer people are actually going to see these ads, this will probably be a temporary situation. In the meantime, imdb.com and the New York Times will have to do.