Yahoo! Mail Classic "upgrades" making it unusable

How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"?  Let me count the ways:

1. Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason.  For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order.  For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no option to change this without also changing the order of presentation.  Now it's changed back.
2. Yahoo completely changed the way the UI works, breaking several normal browser features in the process, and removing any option to switch it back.  Several methods I use to manage my mail efficiently are partially or completely defeated by these changes, and it takes me far longer to do what I need to do.  For instance, the new AJAX code causes control-click to open the selected link in the current tab as well as a new tab.  This makes it very slow to open a series of folders or related messages in tabs, because one has to right-click the link, wait for the menu to display, then click "Open link in new tab".
3. Yahoo appears not to listen to problem reports from customers.  Yahoo DOES NOT CARE that this is a problem.
4. Long-standing problems remain.  For instance, if a user turns off site-selected colors and backgrounds (to make pages more readable), lots of icons fail to display in e.g. message composition.  Re-enabling colors is not acceptable.
5. Customer support is universally incompetent and dismisses problems for spurious reasons.  Faced with a report of a problem which is clearly due to changes at Yahoo, they blow off a user for "using an unsupported operating system".  Never mind that the problem is exactly the same under Windows - they don't ask.
6. Yahoo does not offer any workarounds, either in the help pages or from Customer Care.  For instance, I can restore the functionality of the control-click feature by disabling Javascript in the folder view.  However, Yahoo does not offer any suggestions about this.  Anyone with different needs or usage patterns is simply blown off.

There are also problems with certain of mail's servers; many pages fail to load without several retries.  This is bad enough, but the new AJAX code hides these failures so they do nothing; there are no error presentations to tell the user to try again.  This is very irritating.

Yahoo, PLEASE stop "fixing" things that aren't broken.  I despise the policies of your major competitors in this market, but if you can't stop crippling me every time I turn around I'm going to be forced to switch to one of them.

¶ 5/30/2009 07:48:00 PM