Remedial Menuing

Click image to enlarge

Snarky comment: For the company that perfected integrated, multi-level menu navigation on the web, this new search and browse tool in MSDN is an abomination. Oh, MSDN Subscription Downloads browser, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways....

What's wrong here?

1. Jittery. Roll over the menu items with your pointer, and the selected item changes size while everything else in the menu twitches—likely the result of a poorly-defined style-sheet. This thing looks and behaves like it was created by an intern with little to no CSS, HTML, Javascript, or UI experience.
2. Spastic. Move your pointer just one pixel too far, and either the next menu pops in or the menu collapses. There's no delay here to ease into, out of, or between menu selections, and there are dead spots between menu items where the child menu disappears altogether.
3. Cramped. Many of the menu items don't even fit in the available menu space [see image, above].
4. No JavaScript? No dice. If you have JavaScript disabled for security or accessibility reasons, you'll be unable to access the downloads in your MSDN subscription library. There's no apparent alternative for browsers without scripting enabled.
5. The IE experience is not so much better as less bad. Are these anomalous behaviors appearing because the menu system is optimized for Internet Explorer? Not so much. While the layout of this over-designed tool works better in Internet Explorer than in other browsers, all of these issues still exist when you're using IE.

Hey, Microsoft: Could you just give us back the old left-side navigation menu?

Source: msdn.microsoft.com