Sorry about the spam link trap, I had a pretty low number set to trigger than, and have since bumped it up- when spammers link dump its usually like 100 links, so I ought not to punish those sharing legit links.

There are a few other customization tools you might have mentioned, as well. The most popular of these is probably the ‘Stylish’ Firefox add-on. It lets you easily modify your userContent.css stylesheet to define custom rules for how Fx displays certain–or all–websites. It’s also pretty easy to modify userContent.css manually.

If you’re comfortable working in CSS, you can write your own rules; or, you can download them fully-formed from userstyles.org. As I recall, there were several google search skins. Given some people’s recent concern over the energy-wasting default Google interface, you’re even doing the planet a (tiny) favor if you switch to a darker theme

Finally, don’t even get me started on the awesomeness of editing Firefox’s userChrome.css to control the interface of Fx itself; I guess I’ll have to write a post on that later.

PS: I tried to include links to all of the above, but the spam filter killed my comment, and I had to write it again. Google and Google Scholar (for the Tractinsky piece) should find everything easily enough, though.

Yeah the widgets each are hitting a server, but the load time seems to be not all that awful, and its worth it for me to see my Gmail inbox, latest del.icio.us stuff from others, and my random flickr photo. What I *really* like is the Google Browser sync extension for Firefox, that makes my experience the same no matter what computer I use.

I still resist using the iGoogle homepage for a few reasons. One of them is load time. I currently use a local html page as my homepage, with links to all the servers I maintain on it. The one advantage, clearly, is the network availability/cross-machine access of iGoogle. I do think you are right that the ability to personalize, even small things like images, is not trivial to getting people to feel like software is ‘theirs’, but I’ve found (especially with dynamic themes that switch images) that this just compounds the problem.

I will give it another try, as it’s probably an ‘old habits die hard’ kind of thing, but I haven’t personally been won over yet.

At least we have the choice to go plain or decorated, is that reasonable? And this is not my search page, its just where the browser bops when it opens. Ny search page is command-K (cursor to the Firefox search bar), type, press return to white page search results.