Taming annoyances in the new Google Maps (Shallow Thoughts)

Taming annoyances in the new Google Maps

For a year or so, I've been appending "output=classic" to any Google Maps URL. But Google disabled Classic mode last month. (There have been a few other ways to get classic Google maps back, but Google is gradually disabling them one by one.)

I have basically three problems with the new maps:

1. If you search for something, the screen is taken up by a huge box showing you what you searched for; if you click the "x" to dismiss the huge box so you can see the map underneath, the box disappears but so does the pin showing your search target.
2. A big swath at the bottom of the screen is taken up by a filmstrip of photos from the location, and it's an extra click to dismiss that.
3. Moving or zooming the map is very, very slow: it relies on OpenGL support in the browser, which doesn't work well on Linux in general, or on a lot of graphics cards on any platform.

Now that I don't have the "classic" option any more, I've had to find ways around the problems -- either that, or switch to Bing maps. Here's how to make the maps usable in Firefox.

First, for the slowness: the cure is to disable webgl in Firefox. Go to about:config and search for webgl. Then doubleclick on the line for webgl.disabled to make it true.

For the other two, you can add userContent lines to tell Firefox to hide those boxes.

Locate your Firefox profile. Inside it, edit chrome/userContent.css (create that file if it doesn't already exist), and add the following two lines:

div#cards { display: none !important; }
div#viewcard { display: none !important; }

Voilà! The boxes that used to hide the map are now invisible. Of course, that also means you can't use anything inside them; but I never found them useful for anything anyway.