I posted about All Music Guide’s somewhat ill-conceived redesign last week, and it looks like someone has come up with a partial workaround. Adrian Holovaty has written an “All Music Guide Corrector” extension for Firefox that fixes some of the layout-related bugs of the redesign, including:
- It cleans up the horrible JavaScript-only links sitewide, thus enabling 21st-century browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing and opening links in new windows.
- It hides the annoying Flash spinner thing atop each page.
- It changes the functionality of the “Read more…” links on band and album detail pages. On the old AMG, band and album pages contained full reviews. Now, they feature only the first few sentences, with a link to “Read more…” on a separate page. The extension changes the functionality of that “Read more…” link so that, instead of taking you to a new page, clicking the link will dynamically load the full band/album review and insert it inline.
I guess I should give AMG some credit; the site has gotten quicker since they presumably rebalanced their server loads. The use of this extension makes the redesign somewhat easier to deal with, although it’s still not as good as their original design. Why they came up with a design that forces you to search through multiple tabs and pages for information that used to be all on a single page I don’t know…
This is also a great example of how the use of extensions in Mozilla products can improve browsing experiences by not just augmenting the browser’s overall capabilities but in this case by improving a poorly conceived layout. For the latest Firefox extensions, keep an eye out on the Mozilla Update Extensions Page, and as always, if you haven’t tried Firefox yet, now’s the time! 🙂
