Five Wishes for Better Webapps

As we look ahead to 2010, we're hoping it's the year the web becomes a truly great platform for working and connecting online. Here are five things we'd like to see fixed for that to happen.Photo by Morten Lund.
Over-aggressive Flash and widgets
One week after your first time ever opening a web browser, you knew how it worked. Text that was differently-colored and turned your cursor into a little pointing hand was a link. Images could also be links, and content and advertising usually have distinct barriers on the page. When sites get annoying, they blur the lines.
Festering squarely at the bottom of the barrel are "search" and "preview" bubbles that automatically pop up when your mouse glances past certain topical words on blogs and news sites. Sometimes they're double-underlined, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they simply offer a graphical thumbnail of the page you'd travel to if you clicked, and sometimes they promise "explainers" that are nothing but ad-infested, self-linking nightmares. In any case, they break and cheapen the web's promise as a reasonable, if loosely organized, center for information. It's akin to walking through a library, glancing at the Young Adult fiction section a few rows over, and then being startled by a sales representative for the Twilight books, leaping (continue reading...)