Anyone use IGoogle?

Hopefully I'm not the only one that uses it. But for those that do. Who likes the new IGoogle changes that were implemented/forcibly pushed out yesterday?

Google's iGoogle Goes From Portal To Platform -- Google -- InformationWeek

Personally, I can't stand them. I feel like google really screwed the pooch on this one. Talk about a waste of space and clutter. I did find a work around for it though. You just change your location to Ireland under settings and it will revert you back to the old Igoogle. But if Google forces this change to everyone, I'm done with it. I'll use something else. They don't even offer a way to revert back to the way it use to be.

Just another example of a company becoming too powerful. They stop caring about it's user and do whatever the HECK it wants. Granted not everyone is going to like something, but this is just absolutely horrendous. It looks terrible on my macbook even though it's WS. Is anyone else as infuriated as I am?

Here a screen shot for those who aren't familiar:

Old layout: old on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

New Layout: new on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Your right, just went there, it sucks, tried everything to make it look right. It's to bad, I liked it.

jram said:

Your right, just went there, it sucks, tried everything to make it look right. It's to bad, I liked it.

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yeah, me too. It's my homepage. i had everything I wanted, the way I wanted it. Stoopid google!

just change URL to .co.uk and its normal. I use it none stop and hadnt noticed the change beacuse I use UK servers

I think it looks quite good tho.

UK get updates like 3 months later

i do use igoogle. and the new change sucks, and they should have made it optional to have them implemented in such a way. but is the only change the move of the tab bar? from the link in the OP and the way the forum seems to be going, there is more. but i didn't notice anything else?

ki99 said:

i do use igoogle. and the new change sucks, and they should have made it optional to have them implemented in such a way. but is the only change the move of the tab bar? from the link in the OP and the way the forum seems to be going, there is more. but i didn't notice anything else?

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I think that's what I'm most angry about. They just implemented it and aren't giving users a choice. It's the new page or the highway. But there are some workarounds that work though so I'm ok with it for now. If there weren't, I would look for an alternative.

One major thing is with Gmail. You can't forward and contacts don't auto fill on the new page. you'd hafta go directly into the Gmail portal. With the old style you can compose it right there on the spot and forward email if necessary and have he email addresses auto fill for you.

I don't use iGoogle, so perhaps that is why I don't see much of a difference between those two screen shots. The only difference I see is the "Home" bar on the left, which moves everything else over to the right about one tab space. If this is the only difference, I don't think it would change my mind about how things look, in general. Looks almost exactly the same, minus that one thing.

OTOH, if it's something which the end user has no choice but to tolerate, then I would totally resent Google for their non compliance. I guess, just use Yahoo's home page instead. Looks the same IMO.

Doug b said:

I don't use iGoogle, so perhaps that is why I don't see much of a difference between those two screen shots. The only difference I see is the "Home" bar on the left, which moves everything else over to the right about one tab space. If this is the only difference, I don't think it would change my mind about how things look, in general. Looks almost exactly the same, minus that one thing.

OTOH, if it's something which the end user has no choice but to tolerate, then I would totally resent Google for their non compliance. I guess, just use Yahoo's home page instead. Looks the same IMO.

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The Home bar takes up screen space for no reason! Thus pushing everything over to the right and making things that much smaller. Not only that, there are 2-3 lines of text under the title of each and every the link. Takes up even MORE space. It just looks so cluttered and there is no way to edit the settings. Sounds like I'm complaining about small stuff but if you had used IGoogle before this change you'd understand

I didn't like it at first (especially that I had no choice in the matter - can you see the ex-Linux user coming out here?) but after trying it, I like it. The mail is easier to access. The rest is just something new. Not fond of how they do the sports column but will work with that for awhile.

tkim said:

Just another example of a company becoming too powerful. They stop caring about it's user and do whatever the HECK it wants.

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Or... you know... they genuinely thought this would be a positive change and probably did a bunch of internal testing to verify the likelihood of people finding the new iGoogle better. It just happens not to have got off to a great start with some people. Personally, the only thing I dislike about the new iGoogle is that it seems to load more slowly than it did before.

Discerptor said:

Or... you know... they genuinely thought this would be a positive change and probably did a bunch of internal testing to verify the likelihood of people finding the new iGoogle better. It just happens not to have got off to a great start with some people. Personally, the only thing I dislike about the new iGoogle is that it seems to load more slowly than it did before.

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Which I'm fine with. But give the users a choice and don't force it down their throat.

Example, facebook introduced a new layout, gave people a chance to check out the "new facebook.." If you didn't like it fine, you can still use the old layout. And they also made everyone aware that the change was inevitably coming also.

Granted, people still complained about it after the switch was made, but that's their own fault. The whole appeal to IGoogle is that it's completely customizable. You can put as much crap on it that you want, wherever you want it. But for me, it was stuff that I found important in a minimalistic way. There is no option to customize anything in the new version. You can't get rid of the tab window on the left side that takes up precious screen space and you can't customize it just to show the links without the 2 line summary..

So... because a couple of people have a negative first reaction to the change the day it happens before even getting a chance to get used to it, Google doesn't care about its users and is some kind of drunk-with-power evil empire out to troll us all, as you stated in the first post of yours I replied to. The overall reaction doesn;t seem to be very negative from most people, and Google did warn us of the new layout back in April.

i just checked out mine (as i rarely go to google due to the firefox searchbar) and it hasnt changed over. it is the australian iGoogle, so i guess like the uk one, we have a few months wait yet lol (like everything else technology wise)

Discerptor said:

So... because a couple of people have a negative first reaction to the change the day it happens before even getting a chance to get used to it, Google doesn't care about its users and is some kind of drunk-with-power evil empire out to troll us all, as you stated in the first post of yours I replied to. The overall reaction doesn;t seem to be very negative from most people, and Google did warn us of the new layout back in April.

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From the searches I've done on Google, it's more than a couple..But it's hard to gauge if it's only a "couple" or a lot people.

And I'm sorry I'm not actively looking for announcements/changes. It would've been nice to get an email or a message on IGoogle, since those using it often, like myself would know. I'm not trying to sound like I'm entitled to something because I'm not, I would just like to be informed.

I have to agree that on the igoogle.au there's no real change. Maybe it'll happen in the future. If it does I'll just stop using it as my hope page and go back to the standard non fancy google page.

i like the igoogle change. most people now seem to have widescreens, so a bit of extra width is no big deal, at least imo.