Count me as one more Google Reader faithful user who really doesn’t like the new look.
Google, don’t make the mistake of dismissing all the criticism as “They’re complaining because it’s different, they’ll get used to it, we just to wait them out” and take the time to ponder the new look.
It’s basically black and white, with a lot (a lot) of empty space and a selection that turns the foreground (yes, the foreground, and the foreground only) of the font to red:
I mean, the whole page seems to be using five colors total. Surely it’s possible to make a better use of colors without going all psychedelic on us?
Any default theme of WordPress looks ten times better than Reader right now.
Come on, Google, you can do better than this.
#1 by Carey on November 1, 2011 - 9:05 am
I feel a lot better about the new Google Reader design after installing Stylish and writing some CSS rules to remove a lot of the whitespace. The colours don’t seem to be a big deal when the search bar and navigation aren’t taking up a quarter of the screen and the post titles are the same size they were before.
#2 by casper on November 1, 2011 - 9:32 am
Yes even i didnt like
- now i noticed the foreground color. Looks weird . They want to make it similar to google+. G+ has same selection behaviour/color etc
- *what a waste of real estate*. Top 2 rows take too much space for little use they have. A big subscribe button. As if we dont know how to find it even if it was in menu as before
- prev item/next item buttons – why ? instead of moving mouse over there all the way up, i can just click the post down directly (btw keys j / k works as before – nice)
- prediction : expect same pattern in all google UI – eg Gmail
#3 by Yeroc on November 1, 2011 - 9:40 am
The new version Google Docs has this same mono-chrome look and feel. It makes it so much more difficult for my eyes to identify important icons etc. Grr..
#4 by David on November 1, 2011 - 9:55 am
They will do the same thing to GMail…. I do not like it at all. I really do not want to take the time to skin it with Stylish, etc… Give me the option to put it back the way it was.
#5 by Matt Welch on November 1, 2011 - 10:57 am
It’s actually painful for me. I get a headache within 30 seconds of using the new reader UI. I don’t know if it’s too bright or if my eyes are just trying to differentiate things and finding it difficult or what, but it’s a problem.
#6 by Gary Trakhman (@gtrakGT) on November 1, 2011 - 11:12 am
It also seems super slow, each time I click a post the ui freezes for 3 seconds.
#7 by thom on November 1, 2011 - 12:14 pm
at a minimum they need to add the same “Cozy”, “Compact” controls that they added to gmail
#8 by Carey on November 1, 2011 - 3:52 pm
Rather than writing my own styles using Stylish, I should have just installed the “Google Reader Absolutely Customizable” Greasemonkey script from http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58577. With an additional rule
#chrome { border-left: 1px solid lightgray; }, it does absolutely everything I want.#9 by brad on November 1, 2011 - 9:26 pm
It seems like a bad, amateur knockoff of Mocrosoft’s metro UI. I am usually a fan of metro, but it is hard to do right and google missed big time with reader. And don’t get me started on the sharing situation.
#10 by Matt on November 2, 2011 - 2:34 am
also.. I don’t like being facetiously told to upgrade my browser to make it work properly – I can’t upgrade my browser, as I don’t have admin rights on this PC, so I would rather stick with the previous version of the reader that worked with IE7
Is there even an option to go back to that?
#11 by Adam Malter on November 3, 2011 - 3:16 pm
I actually quite like the minimalist look. But, where is the left panel collapse control!? Am I just missing it?
I usually pick my category and then collapse the feed tree to concentrate on reading. The new version seems to be missing this feature.
#12 by JimmyJames on November 5, 2011 - 5:11 pm
@Carey: Good idea, that’s a great extension. Thanks for your code, but I think using this container might look better. Keeps the line below the Feed Settings bar.
#viewer-container { border-left: 1px solid lightgray; }
#13 by JimmyJames on November 5, 2011 - 10:31 pm
I should add that, with “Google Reader Absolutely Customizable”, the capability exists to easily construct your own CSS using the Chrome and Firefox extension, “Firebug”, to ‘Inspect’ Reader HTML elements and allied styles, and copy and paste code for your own custom tweaking.