iGoogle Experiment

I am one of the chosen few! Chosen as a beta-tester for Google's new version of their iGoogle personalized homepage. However, after my initial feeling of pride at being part of a select few (a pride that conveniently forgot that the selection was most probably made at extreme random by a computer) I have decided I want the old version back. This one is annoying, buggy and space-consuming.

As I can't opt out of this damn experiment, I can no longer make a screenshot of the old version to compare, but the new one looks like this (click on the image for a larger view).

They have moved the page tabs to the left instead of horizontally along the top. This takes up loads of space and I barely used the tabs anyway. The GMail widget doesn't work properly (you'd expect a Google product to have been tested better): you can read individual e-mails but all HTML links are dead in them and you can't even reply to a mail - duh!

Another space issues is that the RSS widgets now show the title plus 2 lines of the post itself. You cannot alter this and it means there's a lot less overview without scrolling. In the old version, if you hover over the title of a post it'll actually pop-up the complete article (unformatted) which was kinda handy.

So basically, get me back to the old one please!! (And I'm not the only one that feels this way: as can be read on the Google discussion groups - not that Google ever seems to take any notice).

It has surprised me how unintuitive a lot of Google's so-called "improvements" are. The new version of GMail (already almost a year old, I think) has a HORRIBLE contact interface for example. If I ever need to make a group I temporarily revert back to the old version of GMail as it's really annoying in the new version.