Tell them all "just go away"

[venta]

Dear Google,

It's not April 1st, y'know.

Cheers,

Venta

Comments

[ar-boblad.livejournal.com]

Wait, what? I can't disable this without being perma-logged in to Google? But I can change other settings like number of results per page? Gah!

[venta.livejournal.com]

It's worse than that: you can't disable it.

Even if you're logged in.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Huh?

[lnr]

I don't see anything obviously different. Would you care to expand?

Or is it that I'm logged into gmail so not seeing whatever it is? I don't spot anything if I log out though.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Where by 'disable' you mean 'set a background image dull enough not to hurt'?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Weird. Have you been to google.co.uk lately ? It's gone all hideous. If it hasn't gone hideous for you, I want to knwo how you did it!

[simont]

The Google front page is displaying large and colourful background images in place of the usual low-bandwidth plain white background.

The image fades in over the first second or so for me, so it's possible there's some sort of Javascript causing it; do you have anything disabled in your browser that might affect that?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Type google.co.uk into your browser.

Cower in terror.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

The classic home as opposed to igoogle has a huge horrible image behind it, not the lovely white background.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Eh? (I still view Google through the filter of the Firefox Google homepage.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha yes! Turn off Javascript and it returns to classic plain white calm and tranquility :)

Cheers. I'd assumed turning off JS would just stop the fading effect, not stop the whole thing... but it does! Yay!

(Not that I actually ever go to the google homepage much, it just distressed me in an abstract sense.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

See thread above, or go direct to google.co.uk :)

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Bah - I should f5 before posting a comment on a post which only had one comment when I actually opened it! [grin]

But ... why would they do that? [sigh] Thank FlyingSpaghettiMonster for the Firefox Google page.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Why am I supposed to be scared by a pond? It's pretty.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

But you can choose a plain light grey background (see towards the end of 'Editors' picks' in the selection box). We shouldn't have to do that at all, of course, but with any luck if Google realise that that is what everyone is doing, they will stop being such blethering idiots.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Luckily it's only there for a day to demonstrate their new feature. But yes, it's a horrific eyesore.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The comments on the google feedback page were... enlightening. 1 saying they wanted the ability to crop/resize/rotate the pictures they select and n (for very large n) saying "aaargh, make it go away".

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's a pond now. It was a freight terminal earlier, very garish, impossible to read the text over it. Hurt my eyes :(

[chrisvenus]

To be hoenst I think the .co.uk is a bug. If I go to google.com I get a plain white background that I can choose to add an image to. I think somebody put the wrong thing on the .co.uk server personally.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You can do that, if you don't mind the text still being migraine-inducingly fuzzy and shadowed instead of plain typeface :(

[venta.livejournal.com]

It is ? It will be gone away soon ? Where did you find that out ?

[chrisvenus]

Or possibly on consideration they've just bugfixed the main google page after complaints but its taking a while to push the change out to the country sites...

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's good then. Though to be honest, like several of the commenters below, I never usually see the homepage because I search directly from the Firefox Navigation bar, and that still takes me to results shown on an ordinary plain white background.

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Yeah....I default to the igoogle home....so had to hunt what people were moaning about....There is a change background pic, but yeah its a bit loud !

[chrisvenus]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-of-homepage.html seems to be a good source of info.