Scroogled

Two things.

First, Google has their own browser now. It looks potentially sweet. You can find out more about the designs behind it here, in a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud. (Also check out the Slashdot article)

Lots of cool new features in Chrome. Faster Javascript VM, more security, less memory usage (in the long run), tabs-as-processes (one crashed tab isn't going to take down your entire browser). Seriously, go read the comic book, there's lots of stuff there.

It's way beta, there are no plugins yet, you can't really customize it all that much, etc. Definitely not ready for everyday browsing. But that's not why I'm not going to use it yet. Which brings us to...

The other thing.

Another "feature" that Chrome has is that it changes your iGoogle ui to the new experimental ui.

Permanently.

Even if you use your old browser, it's still the new interface. And the new interface is crap.

They've taken the tabs from the top and turned them into a left-side navbar.

Old style:


New style:


The new style takes up WAY more space than the old style. We've gone from one thin line of text to basically another column. I don't want four columns, I want three. I have my settings set for three. Can I have three? No, because I can't turn off the new experimental beta ui.

Also, the new ui is buggy as hell. Lots of things break (even GMail). And you can't do things you used to be able to do (drag items to different tabs).

So, I wa all set to quit iGoogle and move to Netvibes, which is like the old iGoogle interface. RIGHT before I started customizing my Netvibes page (I was going to do so just as soon as I'd finished reading the complaints in the Google groups about the new ui), I saw a post that said there was a javascript command you can put in your location bar to revert to the old ui.

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

Write that down. If you use iGoogle, and Google switches you to the new ui (which they are doing to random people for testing purposes), this is how you opt-out.

At least, for now. Until Google sees this and disables it or something. Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"? When Google pulls stunts like this... I'm done defending them.