old habits die hard

I’ve been a faithful user of Google IG for as long as I can remember now. They changed the name to iGoogle back in May of this year but, as the title aptly states, old habits die hard. Earlier this week Google redesigned the layout of my start page and this change in my routine was an unwelcome disruption. Even though it seems like such a small change — moving tabs from the top to the side — I instantly hated it and have not warmed up to it since. I never even used the tabs! So now tabs that I don’t use take up screen real estate that I do. Also, no live links in gmail = FAIL. It’s silly, it’s almost insignificant, and I refuse to adapt. Thus, I put out a call on twitter to see what everyone uses for a start page so I could update today with my new solution.

iGoogle – while you can play with the layout a bit, you cannot make it like the old one so I’m jumping ship. Yeah, petty, I know.

about:blank – hehe. I guess some people are even more minimalist than I am!

netvibes seemed to have been another popular home page. I used to use this back in the day when I was checking every possible gaming site in the world for news every single hour, so it was handy to have them all divided by region and console. EvoTab let me do much the same thing.

Digg, gmail, and CBC.ca get some mentions as popular start pages as well. I even tried Yahoo and MSN! Since none of these options really jumped out at me as a ‘perfect’ replacement for what I had it really got me thinking. What do I want out of a homepage? What do I use? What would I want to add or take away from my old setup? Well, I was pretty bare bones about the whole Google IG thing anyway. I had my gmail window with 4 messages, no details, showing. I had Date & Time because I am horrible about knowing both what day of the week it is and the date. I also had a Wikipedia search bar cause, hey, who doesn’t waste a few hours a day browsing the wiki?

I spent almost a day with each of the options suggested by twitter followers and, in the end, I keep bouncing between about:blank and gmail. And now I basically leave it so that I start with whatever page I closed the browser with! I switched my search bar in Firefox to Wikipedia instead of goosh and I can always switch back if I want quick access to something else. I don’t tend to use RSS these days and the sites I enjoy browsing are not so great a number that I cannot visit them independently. So, all in all, this is not an earth-shattering change for me but I am much happier now that I am not shaking my fist at google in vain :)