The iTunes Music Store has become progressively more difficult to use with every release of iTunes. The latest set of changes replace the XML-driven native iTunes interface with HTML pages. This is probably a win for Apple, as it makes maintaining those pages a lot easier - and it means that most of the UI related to the Store in iTunes is handled by Webkit.

It’s not a win for users. If you launch the store and want to browse music by genre, you need to wade through a whole bunch of stuff before you find the links that will take you into the old browser-style interface, and the Explore options take you to further web pages that also don’t have genre-specific links.  There’s a link for “recommendations for you”, but this page is full of music I don’t care about.

Compare the store with eMusic.com’s web storefront. It’s a winner.  Browse and search are right at the top, so I can easily browse by genre. he content of the landing page is tailored to me, based on my past purchases. The recommendations are right there so I don’t have to wade through them.