I am resurfacing this post to make an important change. In the original, I lambasted Google for making the new home page personalization features workable only in IE. Turns out it was a Firefox extension that prevented the features from working in my Firefox. That extension, unfortunately, was Customize Google, a handy enhancement of search results and keyword entry that I have commented on. With that extension removed, Google's home page works fine in Firefox.I have removed the portions of this entry referring to browser incompatibility. My apologies to Google for jumping the gun and posting unwarranted criticism.
Google has updated its home page personalization, a previously
humiliating attempt at portaldom that now achieves a
semblence of respect. Many news sources have been added to the once-pathetic assortment of options. And … FINALLY …
Google has mastered the exotic and apparently difficult technology of feed aggregation (previously mastered only by
hundreds of startups). You can enter an RSS or Atom feed and have it appear on the personalized home page.
This thing is now getting fairly attractive. Google's sense of design keeps the page pretty and uncluttered, though
I'm not certain I like the somewhat childlike result. I run my screens at 1280 x 1024, and still the Google elements
loom pretty big on the screen. But the important points are feed searching and feed pasting, both of which work well. I
will never understand what took Google so freakin' long to join the party, but I'm glad it finally has.
1. ?
works fine in firefox for me...
Posted at 6:06AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Chris