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Comment by joshwa | Hacker News Reader

One of the effects of this design is to disadvantage frequent users of any non-core Google Products. For instance, if you visit Docs or Reader every day, multiple times a day, you're going to spend a lot of time hovering and cursing.

Solution: let logged-in users star their frequently-used apps, and surface them at the root level menu (or even better, on the bar itself... almost like a Dock?).

Alternative: like the Chrome New Tab page, automatically surface a user's most-used apps.

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The reason I never noticed the increasing subordination of google reader (a product I use daily, or even hourly), is because I have other shortcuts for products I use that frequently. In fact, it's a little strange to me that someone would go to the google homepage in order to navigate to reader through the nav menu. That would never even occur to me. If I was already in the location bar, I would simply type in the url for google reader. Why would you type in the url for google homepage instead?

I think there are more people who have their browser's home page set to google.com, where every new window or tab opens that page automatically. When that's the case, why have bookmarks for other Google properties when they're already available on your default page?

Granted, I'm in the minority of users who set their homepage to "about:blank" so that it's up and ready as fast as possible and focuses the location/search bar by default. I use bookmarks to open new tabs for just about anything I visit on a regular basis.

Perhaps the intention is not to facilitate the needs of Google "power users", but instead help ease others into the core products that they're focusing on.

I, like others here, have shortcuts to those items in which I use frequently - but even then that's too much effort at times. Sometimes it's just easier to type "rea" in the url bar and let the browser fill in the rest.

For instance, if you visit Docs or Reader every day, multiple times a day, you're going to spend a lot of time hovering and cursing.

I just have it as a pinned tab in the browser, along with Mail and Calendar and other essentials. Frankly, I'll be glad to have the extra screen real estate back; of late there have been too many toolbars, and on the Chromebook I started to feel like they were eating the top 20-25% of my screen.

The alternative is definitely the way to go.

Everyone's freaking out about Reader already but it could already be setup to function like this for all we know.

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