Friday, October 17, 2008

You Disappoint Me, Google

So I opened up my browser yesterday to see that Google changed the layout of iGoogle, which I use as my home page. Here's a screen shot:


They added the menu bar on the left side of the page, which takes up a whole other column of space. There's no way that I can tell to get rid of it.

Also, when I access GMail through the new iGoogle interface, the links are all inactive. WTF?

So I thought, I'll send them an email, asking about the new layout, saying I don't really like it, and asking if I can edit it, while also letting them know about the link issue in GMail.

But here's their freakin' Contact Us page. I know they provide "free" services, supported by advertising. But shouldn't there be a way for a user to point out a bug? And their GUIs are usually efficient and customizable. So I say again, Google: WTF?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this post. I hate the new way iGoogle is displaying and it's so un-Google that they don't give us an option to change it back.

I'm hoping this is just a work in progress, and my hyperlinks aren't working either in Gmail.

Philip said...

Did you look at the iGoogle section of the help page?

http://www.google.com/support/?ctx=web

Philip said...

I pretty much agree with you. I can see what they're going for, though. You lose a column, but when you select a gadget it gets the whole screen. I'm guessing they were having more and more trouble squeezing stuff into small windows.

Unknown said...

So I googled "I hate igoogle start page" and found this nifty tip ( Use a non-US page to get away from this madness.
http://www.google.ie/ig?hl=en ) from this site.

Happy days are here again!

Derek said...

Thanks for the tip, Jill. Man, Google really farged this one up. I saw another fix using GreaseMonkey, a Firefox addon that let's you customize the layout of pages. I'll end up using that if the iGoogle formatting overrides the temporary fix.

And it seems that the fact that links don't work in the iGoogle GMail module on purpose. WTF?!? It's a GMail widget with reduced functionality, presumably to be more efficient. I don't know...but it's utterly moronic, rendering the iGMail virtually useless. Doing away with hyperlinks???

If this change is going to be permanent, I predict a mass migration to either Yahoo or another alternative. What were they thinking?