John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

NYT Chrome app is probably the buggiest thing I've ever seen

Posted by John Smith on

I should probably have read the Hacker News thread first, but Christ, what an atrocious piece of buggy shit this is. How on earth it managed to get positioned as one of the top launch apps on the Chrome App Store, one can only guess at.

Running in Chrome 8 initially, I noticed that the pagination algorithm seems completely borked. Very minor resizing of the browser window causes the indicated number of pages for the story to randomly fluctuate - I think I managed to get the same article to claim to be between 1 and 13 pages in length, at least if the footer on the right is to be believed.

Screengrab of NYT Chrome app, claiming to show page 1 of a 6 page story Screengrab of NYT Chrome app, now saying the same story is 4 pages long Screengrab of NYT Chrome app, this time saying story is 10 pages long

OK then, let's start advancing through this ten page story. The second page is fine - if rather text-heavy and image light - but the third page is slightly empty though...

Screengrab of NYT Chrome app, showing page 3 of 10, but the story seems to end

... I'm sure there must be more to come though ...

Screengrab of NYT Chrome app, showing a blank page 4 of 10

... oh.

Safari is unsurprisingly similar. What is a surprise though, is that this is as good as it gets.

Opera 10.63 just keeps kicking you back to the front page every time you click on a story link, whereas on Firefox you have a choice of illegibility or invisibility...

Screengrab of NYT Chrome app in Firefox 3.6.13 - text is illegible due to multiple paragraphs appearing on top of each other Screengrab of NYT Chrome app in Firefox 4 beta - only the navigation sidebar appears, the rest of the page is blank

One can only imagine what further travesties might await were I to dare view it in IE...

About this blog

This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

RSS icon, courtesy of www.feedicons.com RSS feed for this blog

About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub | My CV | Mail

Popular tags

Other sites I've built or been involved with

Work

Most of these have changed quite a bit since my involvement in them...

Personal/fun/experimentation