Can I opt not to have Reviews and Recommendations tabs?

OK, no probs. Thanks anyway! :)

Forgive me for re-opening this one, but I'd love you to put this back in your future design considerations.

It's occasionally cool to see other people's reviews and the Amazon recommendations, but frankly if I really wanted to see them I could just look the item up on Amazon (using the handy "Show this in Amazon" button that you already provide).

Downloading and saving all that review text takes time and makes DL feel slow even on a fast computer with a fast broadband connection.

It also bloats my database.

In DL1 with the XML database this was one of the main causes of bad performance that I saw. I wrote a quick and dirty Perl script to remove all the recommendation data items from the XML file, and the performance improvement was wonderful. DL1 opened my 2400+ item library more or less instantly, and saving never took more than a second or two.

With DL2 the performance is certainly better in general, but I still think it could be improved (and it's no longer a simple thing to hack the database!)

So I'd suggest you add a new preference item to control fetching recommendations and reviews:

- Automatic (as it is now)
- Manual (load and store when I press the key to refresh the details)
- Never (never load or store "Recommendations" what ever I press.

You would not have to change the GUI at all, just leave the relevant tabs blank if the user chooses not to have the recommendations.

best wishes, Toby Thurston