Google just had to go and mess up a great thing. Google Groups was the greatest thing around, until Google decided to mess it up and make it totally useless.

Google recently released the new beta of Google groups. In an attempt to improve it they've gotten rid of one of the greatest things about it. I've been a long time fan of Google Groups. It provided me a quick and easy way to search my favorite newsgroups, such as microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp. Granted you can still do that, but the feature I loved the most is gone. That is, the easy to read layout. The kick-butt feature of seeing the post threaded, via a tree view on the left side, or as single items is gone. The new less-readable, albeit prettier interface is a pain. It is harder to read and the threaded view & tree is no longer available. The layout is now much harder to follow and you certainly cannot jump around from post to post in a thread as quickly. Enough to make me stop using it.

However, there are some changes that are good. You can now subscribe to a group, so I see my favorite C# & ASP.NET newsgroups listed for quick access & searching. Also, in the posts, the quoted back is a hidden DIV which you can click to show (but defaults to hidden). You can also subscribe, or watch a particular thread, post replies, etc. These are good, and welcome, changes - but in my opinion they are useless without having the older, more useful features brought back.

Maybe I'll have to start using the web-based newsreader from Microsoft to do my searches, but I've never liked that either. Too slow and clunky.

You have your ears on out there Google?