Google Makes Its New Flat Logo And "App Launcher" Style Nav Menu Official | Hacker News Reader

Google Makes Its New Flat Logo And "App Launcher" Style Nav Menu Official

techcrunch.com

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I like parts of this but don't understand the addition of the google search box in the new tab page. Isn't one of the big "innovations" of the chrome UI the unified address bar you can search from? I use chrome as my primary browser and every time I use firefox or IE the first thought that comes to mind when I open them is, "What's the point of the separate search box, why not search in the address bar like chrome?" Now every time I open a new tab in chrome I think, "What's the point of this search box right below the giant address bar I'm supposed to be using to search from?" And to top it off, as soon as you start typing in the search box on the new tab it moves your cursor to the address bar and the logo/search box disappears from the page which is a truly WTF-worthy UI decision.

Your last sentence answers the question you pose: the new UI is attempting to train users to use the browser search bar.

A huge number of Chrome users go to google.com to search for things; if the new page looks like the Google search page, and it moves your cursor to the address bar, Google hopes these users will learn that you can just search from there. Maybe it's an experiment that will fail, but it seems like it might work.

I once taught someone at work in a technical group that typing words in the address bar is the same as searching. So not everyone realizes that.

>why not search in the address bar like chrome

In Firefox at least, I've learned that the regexp isn't as fast if you type a search query in the URL bar. It takes slightly longer for the browser to decide if the text is a URL or not. That's why I reenabled the search bar in Firefox (it's not required).

>It takes slightly longer for the browser to decide if the text is a URL or not

I had the same problem which forced me to enable the search bar. But I've since discovered that if the text you entered into the search bar starts with a "?" character, Firefox immediately assumes it is a search query.

For those checking google.com to see update, you might have to wait. It'll be rolled out gradually over the next couple of weeks.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2013/09/updating-google-bar-...

It would be nice to see that mentioned in the TechCrunch article, though.

It's in the title: "Will Roll Out Over The Next Few Weeks"

You don't have to wait if you go to google.com, paste this into your dev console (Ctrl+Shift+J in Chrome) and hit enter:

    document.cookie="PREF=ID=e66a207a51ceefd8:U=936bafc98b2a9121:FF=0:LD=en:NR=10:CR=2:TM=1378808351:LM=1379592992:SG=1:S=OXyq0fqClYB66VuV ; path=/; domain=google.com";window.location.reload();

Awesome thanks!

This is also in my start page of chrome. Google's search bar is now also the main thing on my start page. And the thumbnails for my favourite pages are smaller and under it. I hate it. Does anyone know how to get rid of this?

The thing is that this was already there a couple of months ago but it went away only to reappear two days ago.

edit: image of what I'm talking about: http://i.minus.com/ibepLSMwuCsHra.png

edit2: they also somehow managed to use the omni bar for search on google.com, there isn't any search box on the page itself. Which is also highly annoying. What's up with that? http://i.minus.com/iskQdZsxapVei.png

Are you on an experimental version of Chrome? I mean, are you using Chrome, but a variant other than the stable one?

I've sometimes found that they roll out crazy experiments in the non-stable Chrome builds that integrate with crazy features on Google's web sites, such as the "remove the search box from the web page"-feature. I've since come to prefer the stable variant of Chrome :)

I'm on dev. I'll probably switch to stable yeah. But I'm afraid that this sort of things are gonna drip down to the stable eventually :/

Same here. I got off the dev release channel at home after that, and switched to stable at work after they made the new tab page look like the Google homepage. It makes my browser less useful, and I couldn't find a way to disable it!

Weird.

But c'mon... "hate it"? I think you'll get used to it. It's not really a big change in my book.

Well, I hate it :) I mean fine add this, but make the old version available as a config option or something. I really don't need a big google logo and a search bar every time I press cmd+t

It is optional. You can disable it here:

chrome://flags/#enable-instant-extended-api

You can also install another tab page as an extension. eg:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/x-new-tab-page/cbm...

What do you want your start page to look like?

You could replace it with this app launcher we built: https://starthq.com/ext

Disable the extended search API in chrome://flags to turn it off.

Awww man, thank you! That's just what I needed!

I really don't understand why in the world they would consolidate their menu into an "app launcher" for every single view. This is the opposite of responsive design.

Here's some free web design advice, Google: I'm not on my iPhone or iPad all the time. Show me some links if I have the room - it doesn't have to even be all of them.

Anyone knows what's the story behind YouTube using its own bar and not the uniform Google bar.

It's going to be using a version of this bar:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/09/google-rolls-out-ne...

I imagine that was a major consideration when designing this new bar, "How could it fit in on YouTube?"

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