Comments on: iGoogle attacked by giant widgets

New "canvas view" for the personal home page lets widgets take over the portal page. In canvas view, Google will not restrict monetization schemes from running.

[EileenUH]

I also hate the new design. Jessica Ewing, are you listening? First, the "home" tab on the left is a huge waste of space. When using my laptop w/ a 12" screen, every inch matters. Second, Gmail is one of the applications I access most from iGoogle -- now when I enter Gmail I'm in some weird version of Gmail with truncated functionality -- for example, I can respond to a mail but can't attach a document. Or, I can read a mail but not click through a URL in the message. Third, based on the iGoogle pages I have seen looking over the shoulders of others, I am a pretty typical user in that I don't have too many more applications than can fit into one screen or a few scrolls away from one screen. Having links to all my applications on the left is totally redundant -- I can already see everything! Please give us the option of restoring the old design!

[Sherylyn2029]

The use of other countries' urls for igoogle is only going to work temporarily, as google has already said the new format would follow world-wide. I too can't stand the new igoogle so I used a simple fix and you can find it here: www.netvibes.com. My new homepage at netvibes is beautiful - it has the top tabs layout, no wasted space and I've got all of what I had at igoogle. Another alternative I have seen mentioned as often at the google forums is pageflakes. I checked that one out too and it's nice, but I personally prefer netvibes.

[CLJahn]

The sidebar tab is easily the most stupid thing I've ever seen. I don't need a "menu list" of the page I'm looking at: I'M LOOKING AT IT. I can see what's there. I put it there. If I suddenly become a drooling idiot who needs a list of the items on the page I'm looking at, I will decide where to put the list, thank you.

[hallettracing]

I hate it. I was trying to delete the left column and used a new drop down to delete the tab and deleted the home page that I have been setting up for a year. I'm not going to start over, I didn't like the left column anyway. Back to Excite.com

[Personifie]

The tabs on the side with forced things like "enable chat" are awful.

Why not give people the OPTION of what they want?

You can't use an add-in in Chrome to fix this forced configuration, so it's back to Firefox. Here's the fix to remove that irritating side bar, of course you've still got a line at the top of the screen

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10113/developers/post_install?confirmed=true

Regular users of a home page don't need all those tabs so your main argument about why you like is moot for the vast majority of users.