December 2009 seems to be the month of Google innovations- the new Google Android visual search called Google Goggles has been made public earlier this month (check out the YouTube video and listen to that Google engineer guy talking – his heavy German accent is worse than Guido Westerwelle’s).
Google search now also embeds realtime search elements with snippets from Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. This works for the most trending topics. Try it out by searching for “Obama” or “Michael Jackson“. You will see a scrolling box in the middle of the search results page, with changing headlines, derived from various news sources.
This might all be great news. However, to make the homepage look more slick and slight, Google made a tiny design change. If you open the Google homepage, the toolbar elements will fade-in after a few seconds. According to Google Blog, the engineers at Google became to like it. User reaction tends from neutral to being seriously annoyed. Whether the Google homepage fading effect harms your search experience is totally up to you- but here are some ways to get back to the old Google homepage, without blending effects and fade-ins:
1. Turn Off Fade In With Firefox
The easiest way to disable the Google fade in with Firefox is to install the Greasemonkey plugin. After installation, just install the Disable Google Fade-In script from userscripts.org. This little script sets up a little code snippet to disallow the Google homepage from blending in the toolbar.
2. Disable Fade-In with Google Chrome
The Greasemonkey extension for Chrome is still under development, therefore you have to perform some steps manually. Keith Dsouza of TechiBuzz gives a nice little tutorial on how to run user scripts with Chrome. Once you get this going, use the same user script as pointed out for Firefox.
Or, if you don’t care at all, use the Google search bar within your Firefox toolbar to perform Google searches, or just turn off Java Script (not without lowering your overall web experience though).
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