Big reason why I hated YouTube being bought by Google–Names!

I never liked Google buying YouTube from the very beginning. For a long while, there were barely any improvements to YouTube after being bought out.

YouTube has interested new features (more or less evolutionary than revolutionary) but they’ve also brought some terrible stuff. Pre-buffering advertisements (some that you have to wait 5 seconds to skip, others you can’t skip) is one. The inability to buffer the entire video so you can view the darn thing in offline mode started happening last year.

Since last year at least, Google has been big on pushing me to provide my stupid “real” name. Well I don’t want to provide you my full name Google. Real or fake. I just want to use my username that I’ve had for a long time, thank you very much. Get over it.

But nope. After so many refusals from me, they kind of give up for maybe a few weeks. But then try again right after that. I’m just commenting on a video and the stupid “Give-us-your-name” prompt comes up as I type a few letters, as shown in the picture above.

There’s no X to close, so I click “I don’t want to use my full name”. Then it comes with this prompt:

Uh… where is the option to exit out of the stupid thing? I only have four choices:

1. Preview my name – Uh, no I don’t want to use a name, remember?
2. Same name – Again, I don’t want to use any name…
3. Different names – Do I need to repeat myself?
4. Why is this important? – Well it isn’t important to me, so buzz off.

They keep claiming “Don’t want to use your name? More options are coming soon.” Yeah right. You’ve been saying that for a year. This isn’t a social network or an ordering site Google, it’s just a place I watch videos. I don’t know any other video service that pushes you to sign up for a name.

Either way, those 4 options are nothing I want and hitting refresh like twenty times doesn’t work. Do these count as page views? Seems like Google games their site views this way. After a long while, they’ll come up with a similar prompt, but I get a fifth option to not use my name. It’s ridiculous why that doesn’t show up first at the very beginning, but it’s Google hoping that people will get tired of refreshing and provide a name I guess. 

I finally relented and picked one of the dumb options today. I picked “Same name”. Sigh.

What are your thoughts on this? Leave some comments below.

If only IE could recover webpages after a computer crash

Sometimes my terrible HP 2000-363NR will have a system crash if I jerk the computer too fast in the process of moving it somewhere else. I usually use both Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 11.0.

When I restart my system, I notice Firefox consistently manages to remember what tabs I had before the system crashed and presents it to me and lets me even pick which tabs I would like to reload instead of just loading them all.

IE9 on the other hand acts like I didn’t have any active tabs before the crash. I load IE9 after the crash, and it just goes to my homepage. Once in a blue moon, it will show some kind of prompt with something like: “Your browsing session appears to have crashed. Recover webpages? [Yes] or [No].” There’s no choice to load particular tabs or windows, and it won’t work for pinned IE9 sites. Plus this behavior isn’t consistent; 9 times out of 10 I get no chance to recover webpages.

So the IE team, please get a clue and have Internet Explorer consistently pick up wherever you left off, regardless of a system crash. If there is a crash, I should be able to either restore all tabs/windows, or selectively checkmark on a list the tabs/windows I’d like to restore. Thanks!