Changing the face of the Web for millions of users, Google plans to retire its classic navigation bar in exchange for a flashy new menu. “Google announced that it’s ‘ready for the
next stage’ of its redesign, part of which is a new service navigation system nested under the Google logo,” PCWorld writes.
In the broadest terms, ABCNews.com called the move “an effort to streamline the user
experience.”
“It's no longer satisfactory enough for Google to let visitors to its search engine simply pull up results based on queries those individuals type into the
site,” The Register writes. “The company's Google+ product dictates that everyone should
get in on the sharing game, too.”
“We’re now ready for the next stage of our redesign -- a new Google bar that will enable you to navigate quickly between our services, as
well as share the right stuff with the right people easily on Google+,” technical lead Eddie Kessler explained in a blog post. “Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you’ll now find
links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo.”
“Google's in the process of scrapping its short-lived black navigation bar and is simplifying
things with a uniform plain grey search bar armed with drop-down menus,” Gizmodo writes. “Let's hope it's an improvement
rather than the big step back they made with Google Reader.”
“The horizontal black bar at the top of the page with links to Web, News, and Images--which actually hadn't been around
all that long itself--is now history,” writes CNet.
“The bar
is broken into 3 regions -- the rollover-enabled logo, a search bar and then features and notifications on the right,” TheNextWeb notes. “Google makes a point of saying that, even if you’re not
logged in to your Google account, you can still use the drop down on the Google logo to navigate to other services.”