You can sort by name it's not hard to find a person.
actually, I can see the convenience in this, at least for people with slow connections (e.g. me)
loading each page means, first, sending the request. then, when you receive a response, you
also have to send a request for every single image. even if they're in your cache, it still sends a request for them, because it has to find out from the server whether or not what is in the cache is up-to-date
then you have to do that whole process for every page you need to look through. it's not helped by the fact that choosing a field to sort by involves yet another page load
when you have latency issues, this all adds up really quickly
but this way, you only load all that stuff for the first page. for all of the javascript requests, all it downloads is the text alone. then, when it gets added to the current document, even though there are images (like the online icon or AIM icon, that junk), you've already loaded those images for that page so your browser doesn't send the request for them at all
not to mention, all the JS requests are done basically at the same time, which reduces how long it
feels like it takes
and when all
that's added up, it's a much less frustrating experience
I still don't use that list. but maybe someone else will be pleased by the difference
