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Saturday, October 18, 2008

Use iGoogle? Hate the Look & Feel Changes? Here's How to Revert

Google, with it's usual arrogance, foisted off a new version of the iGoogle look and feel with zippo warning to users.  I left my iGoogle page yesterday, opened it another tab a few minutes later, and had a classic "WTF" moment, thinking somehow I had chaged my page settings accidently.  I spent a fruitless afternoon trying to revert to my old settings, until finally realizing today that it wasn't me, but that great big Goog in the sky.

I'm going to leave aside the arguments about whether the changes are good or bad.  Personally I think they suck, especially moving the tabs to the left side of the page and the mail preview that can no longer be turned off.  But opinions of suckiness aside, the point is that I was/am familiar with how my iGoogle page works.  I don't want to have to adapt to some new way of working because some Google engineer thinks it's "better" for me.Maybe eventually I will, but at my own speed and inclination, Google, not yours.

Hidden on the "Google Operating System" blog are these instructions to get the old interface back - at least temporarily:

If you have the new version, but you prefer the previous interface, go to the settings page and select English (UK) from the list of languages. Please note that this is just a temporary fix.