Google home page even simpler | Hacker News Reader

Google home page even simpler

11 pointsmakecheck6 comments

I noticed recently that Google has managed to simplify its home page again, in a neat way. If you don't move the mouse when you first visit, all you see is the logo and a giant search field; as soon as you move the mouse, the rest of the page fades into view.

Maybe not everyone sees this (I'm using a WebKit-based browser) but I thought it was a nice effect.

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Wow, this is great to see. The fact that they're self-reflecting and thinking "Let's fight the urge to clutter things, how can we make this even simpler?" is amazing and rare for a large company.

As a for-profit corporation it must be tempting for Google to run ads on their homepage. They'd make quite a sum on it(sure most technical users rarely see the homepage but that's the exception). It's good to see that they are swinging to the other extreme instead.

They've been testing this for the past week. I've seen it a few times, but it appears to be quite random.

Hm. Hm. I like the idea. But when loading the page there is a ever so slight delay. If I actually want to click something not displayed by default I have to wait a fraction of a second before all that stuff fades in. Which means I will normally wiggle around my mouse like crazy to make it display stuff. The delay is not long (I’m not talking about the fade in itself, that one’s perfectly fast enough), but annoying. Since wanting actually to click something is one of the only times I personally use the Google page (not true for many other people if I trust my observations, only for crazy people like you’ll find here) I notice this every time.

Don't see it. Tried it in both FF & Arora (latter is based on Webkit). I get the whole page immediately.

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