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Comment by alexvr | Hacker News Reader

I actually think it would be better without the navbar.

Google is my homepage, but when I want to go to Google Drive or Gmail, I type "drive" or "mail" into Chrome's search bar. I think the Chrome-OS-like menu would be better than the navbar. If they do remove it, they should at least make a point to maintain a page with links to all their services.

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I am not a big fan of the nav bar either but more so because the links that currently show up there are of no use to me. I think it would get a lot more use if they allowed it to be customized or if they updated it based on your usage patterns.

Frankly it does look way better without the navbar. I never understood this move by Google of making that bar black; I guess there was some discussion internally along the lines of "yes, it looks like crap, but we have the data here and it shows people are engaging with the navbar 240% more than before!".

Yeah. Aesthetically, the black bar with its fat Arial (I think) characters looks out of place. I know they're trying to keep things simple to make their page load time super fast, but if someone can make the Matrix in JS with like 700 bytes, I think Google could make a unique, attractive menu to replace what it has now.

CMD+T > "dri" > return is infinitely faster that using the nav bar, and I echo everyone that thinks it looks better without. Still, I wonder if a customizable bar would have been an even better option (for those locations that aren't nicely formatted to ____.google.com).

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