How To Enable The Super-Spartan, Totally Buttonless Google Home Page


Earlier this week we wrote about an experimental new homepage that Google has been rolling out to a small subset of users that takes the search giant’s obsession with minimalism to the extreme. The page features exactly two elements: Google’s famous logo, and its search box. That is, until you move your mouse, when a nifty fade effect reveals with rest of Google’s standard navigation options. Alas, most people don’t have the option enabled, and are forced to endure Google.com’s beefy 30+ words at all times.

This morning Google Blogoscoped posted a special snippit of code that you can copy and paste into your browser to enable the new minimalist design. But that version falls short of greatness: it includes the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons. For those looking for the ultimate in austere, these buttons are little more than ugly blemishes marring an otherwise perfect design. Fortunately, we’ve gotten our hands on the code for the version of the homepage that excludes the buttons. Note that this may not work for all browsers (I couldn’t get it to work with Safari, but it worked fine in my nightly build of Chromium).

To set the cookie, do the following:

1. Head to google.com
2. Paste the following code into the address bar of your browser:

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=2602f2ce49362929:U=7b6893b1882d5a94:TM=1239881060:LM=1254195610:L=0qXJlAA:GM=1:S=CwDGQD20E8U14zDg;path=/;
domain=.google.com");

3. Hit enter or ‘go’ to run it (you have to be on google.com at the time). It will not give you any feedback, it will just run and set the cookie.
4. Refresh the page.

Thanks to Don MacAskill over at SmugMug for the tip.