Google kills Classic Maps

You know how, when new products come out that are worse than the old ones, or are incompatible, or are inextricably linked with “the cloud”, or just plain don’t do what the old one does, the rebuttal is “you don’t have to use it”?

Well, here’s another piece of evidence against that rebuttal, because eventually, you don’t have a choice:

Soon, the updated version of Google Maps will become your desktop Maps experience. You’ll no longer be able to use the older, classic Google Maps.

The classic Google Maps, i.e., the one that works. The one without zillions of squares. The one that lets me type “from: CID to: la crosse wi to: mankato mn to: CID”, knows exactly what I mean, and creates a route accordingly. The one that doesn’t suck up the CPU to zoom in on Street View. And the one that works in Safari for Mac OS 10.6.8. As of Tuesday, GMaps defaults to “lite” mode, but chews up CPU cycles and no longer has zoom levels on the scale, just plus/minus.

For the moment, iPhoto Places appears to be unaffected (but still has the long-standing map-jumping issue). If anything happens to that I’m going to be furious.

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