The New iGoogle

I was a bit surprised to see my tabs suddenly appear on the side of my screen instead of across the top.  And not the happy kind of surprised, either.  This is really unlike Google, forcing such a sweeping change on people, when they have made every other change a "try it if you want" sort of thing. I understand there are still people out there who still use the plain white Google homepage.

According to the official article, the change was made to allow "canvas view" widgets. These are useful. I do like being able to access my GMail without leaving iGoogle, and I can see how more of these widgets would make things even better, but I don't see how that necessitated moving the tabs and wasting horizontal screen space.

And that forces us to ask, "why are we so upset about wasting space on the side of the page? iGoogle wastes some  200 pixels of screen space vertically to give you a pretty picture with a search bar in it, and we can all deal with that just fine. But take away 130 pixels from the side of the screen and suddenly the world is up in arms.

I really think the issue is choice: if we were allowed to choose one way or the other, some would naturally prefer the sidebar, some would stick with top tabs. But rolling it out to everyone unannonced and unasked-for rubs people wrong.

So, dear Google intern who has to read the comments on the internet about iGoogle, here's one more vote for change choice. Thank you.