Out with the old

Last week, I found this great article about Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die. I definitely agree with #3 and #5. I sort of agree with #2 - things would certainly be easier if work or changes were automatically saved.

Of course, I want to add a few of my own:

• Toolbars. They take up far too much room on a web browser. If you have a few of them, you only want to use one at a time or you'll be dealing with clutter and a very small page-viewing area. Instead, why don't we have boxes that can pop up with a few keystrokes or the press of a button? If, for instance, you want to do a Google search from the Google toolbar, you'd press Alt-G and a box or toolbar would pop open to allow you to do so. If we're going to keep toolbars, let's at least make it easier to show and hide them on demand.

• Buffering. There's nothing more aggravating than trying to listen to a web radio station that keeps pausing and starting. I like how Youtube handles this - you can clearly see how much of the file has been loaded. As bandwidth and technology increases, perhaps this will be less of an issue in the future.
  

• Sounds that appear when you don't want them. This includes any site with auto-starting music, ads with sound, etc.

• Making everything social. What good is a social feature on a website if no one you know uses that site?
  

• Blind links. I have an extension for Firefox that lets me preview any link or image I see. Why isn't this standard? This is especially important with the number of bogus/dangerous sites out there.

• Extremely long links. If sites like TinyURL can make URLs shorter, why can't the URL just be short in the first place?
  

Anything you'd like to add?