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iGoogle Users Irate About Portal's Changes
bhhenry sends in an InformationWeek report on a recent unannounced change in the iGoogle portal. Quoting: "Google insists that its revised iGoogle personalized home page generates better 'happiness metrics' than the old design, but a vocal group of users isn't happy about the changes." The recent change introduces what Google refers to as "canvas view," which the Official Google Blog claims "... makes iGoogle a more useful homepage and a better platform for developers." Unlike the last major change made to Gmail, there is no option to revert to the old version of iGoogle. iGoogle users are reporting that widgets and themes are broken, Gmail attachments don't work, and valuable screen space is wasted. The Personalizing Google section of Google Groups is full of thousands of complaints about this sudden and unannounced change. Many posters have have stated that they are using the Canadian or UK version of iGoogle or even moving to NetVibes.com to get their preferred layout back. It seems that Google and Yahoo are moving in lockstep in springing forced changes that users hate.
Add to that email not working properly - if you have a large image in the message it makes the window all small with no scroll bar. Quite annoying having to open a new tab and load up gmail's main page manually a couple times a day because I can't hit to open the messages in a tab anymore and when I click them to open they don't show anything more than the header. And even when they do work it still takes more mouse clicks to open a message and then go back than it used to.