Google ruins everything they touch

Check out the difference between the Google Maps bicycling layer at zoom level 14, and at zoom level 13.75. For some reason when you zoom out all bike paths disappear. Bike lanes and sharrows are still there until sharrows disappear at zoom level 12.75.

Hopefully this is a screw-up someone made right before the weekend rather than an intentional design decision. Those regional bike paths like the Southwest Corridor or the Minuteman are what someone who pressed the bike button probably wants to see at a regional map scale.
 
Competition is on the way: Spotted an Apple Maps vehicle (cameras, spinning laser, etc) doing "streetview" in Central Square today.
 
Arlington said:
Competition is on the way: Spotted an Apple Maps vehicle (cameras, spinning laser, etc) doing "streetview" in Central Square today.
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I saw one at Wellington Station in July
 
Google Maps's 2D satellite imagery for Boston has been updated after over a year, the view now shows summer 2016 instead of spring 2015. It's in Google Maps but not Google Earth yet. Lots of construction progress in the Seaport, Fenway, and the other usual hotspots.
 
Scipio said:
Google Maps's 2D satellite imagery for Boston has been updated after over a year, the view now shows summer 2016 instead of spring 2015. It's in Google Maps but not Google Earth yet. Lots of construction progress in the Seaport, Fenway, and the other usual hotspots.
Click to expand...

Also...ho-leeeeee crap does the new Maps gobble a ton of memory. Firefox can soar to up to 1.2 GB of RAM usage after several minutes of scrolling around in Satellite view. Click the lightning bolt icon at the bottom to switch it to Lite mode, and the memory usage is instantly slashed by 50-60%.

It's gotten more responsive over the last couple weeks, especially screen re-draws and Street View...but memory usage hasn't declined much with the speed increase. WTF is in this new rendering engine secret sauce of theirs that's so hideously bloated?
 
Justin7 said:
^It is loading a 3d city into memory.
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I hope they optimize the shit out of that engine in coming months, because >1 GB on any single browser tab with a site that's by-design in constant re-rendering is just asking for stability problems on any browser. Not to mention a total battery murderer on laptops. I like the new functionality, but the difference between Lite and Full mode isn't that dramatic enough to explain the humongous difference in resource requirements.


I don't use the Android Maps app often enough to see how that fares (or if they've even enabled greater than Lite mode yet), but even with local pre-loading of the engine they're going to have battery and bandwidth problems if they can't get it pounded down a whole lot leaner.
 
I don't believe the android app does 3d rendering.

Google took the basic features of the google earth application and stuck them into the maps site. I think it's great.

Yes, it's a single browser tab, but we've kind of moved passed the point where that means a whole lot.

If you are concerned with battery life or RAM you have the option to turn off 3d. So we both win. However, if you want to use the 3d rendering it is going to use a lot of RAM. Optimization may improve things things along the margins, but there's no way getting around that basic fact.
 
Scipio said:
Google Maps's 2D satellite imagery for Boston has been updated after over a year, the view now shows summer 2016 instead of spring 2015. It's in Google Maps but not Google Earth yet. Lots of construction progress in the Seaport, Fenway, and the other usual hotspots.
Click to expand...

It's in Earth now. Also, if you click back, you can get a nice image of Boston only from March 2015 with feet of snow built up.
 
How 'bout that: the Maps measuring tool now calculates area if you draw a shape.

2ah5b4o.jpg



This will be an infinite daily time-waster over every piece of under-developed acreage in the city.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Also...ho-leeeeee crap does the new Maps gobble a ton of memory. Firefox can soar to up to 1.2 GB of RAM usage after several minutes of scrolling around in Satellite view.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if there is a noticeable difference in memory or not, but google maps seems to work much better/faster on google chrome than on my other browsers. (this is particularly true for IE but I haven't tried it much on firefox)
 
DZH22 said:
I'm not sure if there is a noticeable difference in memory or not, but google maps seems to work much better/faster on google chrome than on my other browsers. (this is particularly true for IE but I haven't tried it much on firefox)
Click to expand...

Turn 3D view off to get the 2016 imagery and it's very brisk on FF. The old view--even at 2D--is still dog-slow, chews up near-pornographic quantities of desktop memory, and gets glitchy with the Street View icon guy when you've been panning around enough to pollute the browser cache. Maybe this is a new rendering engine they're beta-testing before they retire the old one, turn on 3D for the new one, and switch everyone to the new imagery. But it's a stratospheric improvement over the slovenly piece of crap it replaces. Responsiveness is finally back pretty close to where Classic Maps left off.
 
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