Make iTunes Store better by removing it from iTunes

A lot has been said about how bad iTunes is. What bugs me most is that some actions within iTunes prevent me from actually listening to music. Sometimes iTunes is “Looking for iPhone...” and you can’t do anything until it’s done. And it still doesn’t do the most obviously useful thing for music listener: permanently display current track name somewhere. So we had to make Emcee.

But I’d like to take a look at the iTunes Store (including the App Store). How can it be made better?

What I hate about iTunes store is that it’s clearly a web site, but I can’t use a browser to browse it. The web view of iTunes is crippled and ridiculously slow. Why not use Safari? It will not only make the store better for the user, but I believe Apple will sell more songs and apps.

I can’t open a link in new window or tab. Sometimes I want to check out several things from a chart or from search results. Unfortunately, ⌘-clicking them won’t help, I’ll have to open each, then go back. I don’t think I’m the only one who forgets about going back.

I can’t add link to bookmarks. iTunes has a “wishlist”, but it’s only available on a Mac, not iPad or iPhone (or I wasn’t able to find it there). I want to use the Safari bookmarks manager with the store like with anything else and I want it to be synced between my devices. There are also, of course, no bookmarklets in iTunes, so I can’t tweet an app and I can’t send it to Instapaper (some apps have really long descriptions). No obvious way to save and share links is bad.

Some other things I can do in Safari but not in iTunes: zoom a page, drag an image (i. e. album art), pin a portion of a page to Dashboard, search history, find in page. I’ve found myself searching for a feature in an app’s description a couple of times, and I had to use eyes for that, which is just waste of time.

iTunes is already so bloated that it isn’t even funny. So adding all this stuff to iTunes is not an option. To make iTunes store better Apple should just move it from iTunes to Safari.