[PLUG] iGoogle - turning off that annoying left side tab

[Keith Lofstrom]

I like iGoogle, and the ability to put extra little search engines
on my Google home page.  I do NOT like the fact that they have been
pimping it up with extra crud, like the left side tab (with 
default name Home ), and most recently the little "Chat" popup
that causes a screen redraw.

It turns out the old version of iGoogle is still available (for now,
until they change it). 

Instead of:              http://www.google.com/
or:                      http://www.google.com/ig
as a home page, use:     http://www.google.com/ig?gl=all 

The old straight lines come back (they render faster) and the left
side tab goes away.  That also turns off the annoying "chat" popups,
which cause the page to re-render in my case.


BTW, my favorite iGoogle gadget is the Multi Search Gadget
"mysearches" at:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?gl=all&url=mysearches.googlecode.com%2Fsvn%2Ftrunk%2Fsearch.xml

Enter search text and click one of the icons below it (wikipedia,
imdb, amazon, etc., perhaps 20 icons out of hundreds) and it goes
to that service in a new page or tab.  It is only partially 
customizable.  You must select from the 200 or so sites that the
author programmed in, and can't add your own to the list.  But it
still saves a lot of screen space. 

Perhaps some ambitious person here can rewrite it so it is
customizable.  Or at least tell me how to make a localhost
version of the gadget so I can tweak on it myself.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs