iGoogle Home Page

I don't like having Google as a home page and I don't it when other people have Google as their home page, and this is equally true of iGoogle.

I guess my reason may be kind of petty, but to me it's a huge niggle. I don't like the way it takes a little while to load, and then once it's loaded, it grabs keyboard focus. If you are typing something, for example, into your browser's address bar or search bar, the Google page hijacks what you're doing and you end up typing the tail half of whichever word you're on into the Google home page, and then you have to go back to the address bar or search bar, figure out how much of what you typed actually made it into there, and resume from where you left off.

My browser already has a search bar, I don't need a big Google search box loaded when I open a new tab.

Last time I tried iGoogle, I found that the interface for adding a new feed was far too restricted. I couldn't figure out a way to just paste in the address of a particular feed I wanted to add - instead, it wanted me to browse through their categories and select one of their pre-defined feeds. I see that this has now changed. Not only can you add any feed you like just by pasting the address into a box, but you can now have Google Reader show up, so I don't even need to duplicate between them.

I belong to the subset of people who like their homepage to load instantly, rather than requiring any contact with the world wide web at all. At work, my homepage is just a blank screen - that doesn't take any time at all to load. At home, I have a homepage I created myself which contains a whole bunch of links I often use. It also loads instantly, because it is a local file on my computer. And it doesn't steal text focus from whatever other text box I may want to start typing in.