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M o n a x,
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Tony Adams
email: tony at atoms.net

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So much for iGoogle
For most of this year my default startpage* has been Google's portal iGoogle. While iGoogle is not perfect, it seemed to provide the best balance between simplicity and power for my needs. A while ago Google started to experiment with the layout moving the main navigation tabs from the top where they were mostly out of the way and at any rate only used one line or so of valuable screen space to the side were the two (in my case) tabs now result in an entire column of almost nothing. The result is a huge and absurd waste of space. During the experimentation phase of the project one could turn it off. Google now appears to be imposing the new layout on all their users.

It is bad enough that this change is imposed on us without giving us any option to turn it off, but the dealbreaker for me was that this wretched waste of screen real estate was imposed on us silently. One day the screen is just 80% less useful - 20% full of nothing but two links which formerly stayed on top of the display area out of the way. I'm sure there is a plan up someone's sleeve to add more tabs in that column - or perhaps I failed to add them myself? But my experience right now is that iGoogle has outfeatured its usefulness.

I'm switching back to netvibes.

*actually my browsers tend to start with a set of four or five tabs including ssome kind of widgety portal thingy such as iGoogle or netvibes.

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