Remember when Google was minimalistic? This is Google Reader now:
At 1600 x 900 resolution, this relegates actual content to only about two thirds of the available screen space, part of a 2011 Google effort:
The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and consistent online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you’re using or what device you’re using it on.
The “elastic” interface concept that Google intends to follow sounds like the idea of making a single page that works well on both a desktop and mobile device. It turns out that the mobile page is actually completely different, so the new desktop look must be more for styling than cross-device usability.
To be fair, the interface is minimal in that it displays only a few buttons, but I think Google went too far making the interface look touchable. Modern phone browsers render normal pages faithfully while handling the small screen size nicely, so a page that displays well on high and low zoom on a desktop will also likely display well with little or no modification in a mobile browser. Even if it were intended to work on widely varying screen sizes, I see no functionality reason for expanding incidental controls to consume almost a full third of the screen:
- Links to unrelated Google services
- Search box
- 11 buttons
So decided to experiment with customized style sheets using the Stylish Firefox Add-on. The Stylish site already lists plenty of compact Google Reader styles, but I did this for the practice and also because many of the minimal styles I tried removed functionality such as the logout link.
I called the style “Reader Squish” and published it on userstyles.org under the WTFPL.
Should Be Simple 