
Google experiments with no navigation bar on all its sites - Lightning
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/17/after-testing-a-new-grid-menu-on-its-homepage-google-experiments-with-no-navigation-bar-on-all-its-sites/
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alexvr
I actually think it _would_ be better without the navbar.

Google is my homepage, but when I want to go to Google Drive or Gmail, I type
"drive" or "mail" into Chrome's search bar. I think the Chrome-OS-like menu
would be better than the navbar. If they do remove it, they should at least
make a point to maintain a page with links to all their services.

~~~
Mahn
Frankly it does look way better without the navbar. I never understood this
move by Google of making that bar black; I guess there was some discussion
internally along the lines of "yes, it looks like crap, but we have the data
here and it shows people are engaging with the navbar 240% more than before!".

~~~
alexvr
Yeah. Aesthetically, the black bar with its fat Arial (I think) characters
looks out of place. I know they're trying to keep things simple to make their
page load time super fast, but if someone can make the Matrix in JS with like
700 bytes, I think Google could make a unique, attractive menu to replace what
it has now.

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notatoad
This makes sense to me. The black navbar is all links with no context. A link
in-context is much more valuable: instead of a link to "play" on the top, they
can put links to relevant app or media purchases in the search results.
instead of a link to 'calendar' at the top when you're using gmail, calendar
events can show up in the gmail UI. Instead of a link to +, they've got
personal search results showing up.

the other thing i've been seeing lately is google-now style notifications in
the top corner of many google properties showing my google+ contacts'
birthdays. If they expand that from just birthdays to a full-on google now
experience, that's a whole lot more in-context links to google properties.

~~~
abraham
Now is also getting built into Chrome.

[https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/idTrXBfo...](https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/idTrXBfoKN3)

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Vieira
RSS should not be a core functionality of a web browser but guess what should?
Google Now... I like Google Now but why can't it be implemented as an
extension? Does it really make sense to have Google services entangled with
the browser? With sync it is at least possible to deploy your own server even
if the option is hidden behind a flag (and google refuses to add an option in
the UI). And then there is the new tab page with another search bar just some
hundred pixels below the omnibar that has the same functionality. And a new
launcher... When applications start implementing their own launchers it's
usually a sign they are becoming bloated. Remember Nero (not so) SmartStart?

This a team of amazingly smart people who reinvented the browser so probably
there are good reasons supporting these decisions and I'm not smart enough to
understand them.

~~~
notatoad
it is being implemented as an extension...

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justinsb
I think both experiments are consistent with the idea of thinking of the
different Google properties as individual apps, and with Chrome apps becoming
first-class apps.

Thus on ChromeOS you would access gmail through the menu of applications (not
by going to google.com and clicking on the mail link on top). If I click on
the Gmail "app" on ChromeOS it's confusing if the top navbar appears, because
then there are two ways to launch other apps.

The second experiment seems to be experimenting with exposing non-ChromeOS
people to this notion (i.e. get everyone used to the app menu, so that it
feels natural when they get ChromeOS).

It would be possible to do this by e.g. hiding the navbar only on ChromeOS; my
guess is the idea is to have a consistent experience across all browsers. If
you're stuck inside IE on Windows the app menu is embedded into the google
page. If you're on the "brave new world" of ChromeOS the app menu is native.
But if the navbar isn't there on ChromeOS, then it can't be there on IE.

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jrochkind1
I'm surprised that OP is so surprised.

I'd suspect that the vast majority of users never click on the top nav bar,
have tuned it out completely ("banner blindness"), and will not even notice
it's absence.

The banner bar also can get confusing when it has a menu item duplicating an
'inner' menu item but working somewhat different. I've at times had _two_
'settings sprockets' icons on my page, one on the top navbar and one somewhere
else, and leading to different pages. Also compare doing a google search and
then clicking 'News' on the banner bar, vs clicking 'News' from the 'More'
options in the menu below the searchbox (this second 'News' used to be avail
without drilling down into 'More', which was either more or less confusing
depending on which 'News' option you "really" wanted).

~~~
eitally
Apps for Business users do (when switching from Mail to Calendar to Drive to
Sites to Groups to .... This change happened on my account last week (it has
since switched back) and it was really disruptive while it lasted. I ended up
installing the "Black Menu" Chrome Extension.

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Jare
Personally, I like the navbar, I just don't like how it shortcuts services I
don't use while hiding services I do use under the "More" option. For a
company so bent in understanding my preferences and interests, this oversight
has always puzzled me.

~~~
shrikant
It started off as "shortcuts to services you use" and morphed gradually into
"shortcuts to services we want you to use".

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ams6110
Google. Once the ultra-lean, to-the-point search site alternative (remember
Yahoo, and the others, crammed with links and icons?). Now this once simple
search page is becoming more and more unusable for those of us who still use
perfectly good older hardware. The amount of "intelligence" now built into the
search bar, the pre-fetching, the guessing what you're searching for before
you even finish typing it... VERY frustrating.

Yes you can disable JavaScript and that helps some things but breaks a lot of
other things.

I don't really care if gMail or their other "apps" are loaded down with bling
and scripts that fire on every keystroke or mouse movement, because I don't
use any of those things. But please, leave it off of the search page. I just
want to find what I'm looking for.

~~~
brianwillis
I'm surprised that a person in your position would even bother to use the
search page instead of your browser's search box.

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anigbrowl
Interesting. I've been asking them to flatten the number of information bars
sinc ebeing a Chromebook beta tester. When you start counting from the outside
of the browser window, some Google services had 7 layers of toolbars - tabs,
browser nav, bookmarks, Google Nav, Document, Menu, toolbar (this has changed
since then).

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cecilpl
I actually dislike the navbar.

I can't count how many times I've wanted to search for news about something,
typed in my search, and hit "news" from the navbar rather than the results bar
thus erasing my search term. Why do I have two ways to get news?

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faramarz
About time! I logged into Google+ the other week and was frustrated how much
of the top header was "position:fixed;" as you scroll down. What a waste of
screen real estate.

Example:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/liv1rjcqojvblg8/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/liv1rjcqojvblg8/Screen%20Shot%202013-03-13%20at%2011.44.53%20AM.png)

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sturmeh
You should probably try the latest build of Chrome, Google is now integrated
into the browser, and that navigation bar would break away from the seamless
UI integration.

Not to mention it was ugly, and never contained the options I needed.

~~~
cpeterso
I guess that explains why this website UI change would depend on the user's
browser version.

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fatalerrorx3
If they make the menu hoverable (at least on desktop) then their other
products are still only a click away.

This makes more sense actually because it means more searches from Google's
main homepage, because there are less options to navigate away.

It also makes the page less cluttered and gives the user 2 distinct set of
actions: 1) Perform a search 2) Use a popup menu to navigate to a different
product

~~~
jrochkind1
I suspect google, like many of us, is either designing 'mobile first', or at
least prioritizing mobile highly enough that they will never design a
fundamental interaction that requires 'hover' to work.

~~~
andrewflnr
It's easy enough to tap a menu to get it to open. As an iPad user, I don't
think I would mind a well-designed hover-centric workflow, as long as it works
okay on touch too.

It would have to be well-designed, though. Apparently it's really easy to wind
up with a moronic hover-based menu, judging by the number of them I see
around.

~~~
notatoad
The trouble is that android doesn't support hover-events the way iOS does. On
iOS taps automatically turn into hovers when there is a hover behaviour, on
android a tap is always a click.

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pjbrunet
I've been saying it since 2005, navigation on websites is often
counterproductive because the vast majority of people are using a search
engine to find the pages/information they want. All you have to do is look at
your stats to see this is true. People may say they want navigation but the
metrics say otherwise.

Meanwhile, according to Matt Cutts, Google has been penalizing websites with
"bad navigation" (which is totally subjective, but I digress) meanwhile I'm
nudging Google, "You guys are in the search business, don't you want people
SEARCHING for pages instead of navigating to them?"

People want to search for pages. So why is Google discouraging them from
searching and encouraging them to navigate, when first and foremost they are a
search engine?

~~~
pjbrunet
And let me state the obvious: most of the time search is faster than
navigation. Several clicks and realizing your information is not available or
not where it should be or not comprehensive enough vs. search which takes you
directly to the most relevant result.

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thomasjames
Doesn't much matter to me. I'm addicted to the DuckDuckGo bang syntax
anyway...

~~~
jkldotio
I had DDG with HTML5 voice recognition on my site for a while, but after
consulting with Gabriel decided it was a data leak to Google. Can't wait for
voice to be a seamless part of the real web stack. Still, a keyboard shortcut
gets you to the searchbar and then you can bang on to anywhere else on the
web. jkl.io if you want to try it. I will change the font in the search box
soon. Keyboard shortcuts for the categories are underlined. I want to make it
a suitable start page (like some kind of zen Yahoo I suppose). Feedback
appreciated (although by Sunday the news thins out for Science and some
others).

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7952
How about a large button labelled start.

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tristanj
<https://encrypted.google.com> has had that navbar-less format for several
months now. Looks like they are trying to unify them. They've also changed who
signs the SSL certs: <https://www.google.com> used to be signed by Thawte but
is now signed by the Google Internet Authority (root GeoTrust), which
encrypted.google.com has used for as long as I can remember.

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IvarTJ
Next they could maybe cut down on the UI of Google Books.

<http://i.imgur.com/BXvRdwq.png>

It is often convenient to have the browser window small when working at
something else beside it.

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electrichead
I wonder if they tested that after logging in. Maybe it doesn't make sense to
offer the other services if you are not logged in?

~~~
patrickaljord
I just tried, signed out: no navbar, signed in: navbar.

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Lightning
On Chrome Canary, I get no navbar whether I'm signed in or not.

