December 25, 2005
Google rescues its homepage
Today, only several months after the fact, it came to my attention that Google’s homepage has, in the advent of Google accounts, been completely revamped with a “personalized home,” which turns the seach page into a portal. The personalized homepage is packed with totally spiffy DHTML (just like everything else Google makes these days) that lets you drag modules around. Additionally, Google lets you choose the modules you want to see, such as Gmail, weather, news from all over, et cetera, and even create new modules based upon any RSS you like. Plus, the Homepage API allows people like me to make completely new modules; neato!
As much as I dislike inaccessible HTML, which Google loves to produce, I was pretty impressed as how well this thing works; when I opened the left panel to customize the page, the page smoothly moved aside, and smoothly moved back when I closed it. When I dropped a module I was dragging, it smoothly dropped into place–it’s almost as pretty as OS X in action. Kudos to Google’s programmers–they must have spent a lot of times beating their heads on the wall to get JavaScript to work that well.
Now I might actually view Google’s homepage from time to time. Though I know you Firefox converts haven’t had integrated search since 2001, it’s been that long since I had any reason at all to view Google’s homepage.
