Today, the Google Maps team has unveiled a new feature that makes actually navigating through Street View significantly better. Now, Maps will show you, “an oval when your mouse is following a road and a rectangle when moving across the facades of buildings.” Google refers to these shapes as “pancakes,” and once you figure out how exactly they work, they turn Street View into a fairly enjoyable – if not highly useful – experience.
The feature seems to be most useful when looking down a street, as opposed to staring directly at the address you’re looking for, which will just zoom you in further when you double-click on the pancake. This means you can potentially move hundreds of yards at a time in Street View, as opposed to however far Google would let you move previously by clicking forwards and backwards arrows.
The prior problem, and the solution, are explained by Google in the video below: