Make Google Homepage Fade-In With PREF Cookie Change
October 16, 2009 00:06
Apparently, Google is testing an alternate version of their homepage, where there is only the big Google logo and the big input text field. Typing will yield auto-complete suggestions, and you can hit enter and do your search without ever seeing anything else.
Whenever you move your mouse, however, all of the other links fade in, making it look like it normally does.
You can recreate this on your own machine (not sure how long it will be possible) by manually setting a cookie for google.com. To change the cookie, you can go to the Google homepage and enter this into the location bar at the top:
javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=eccf36675ab8ad44:U=717a8deedbdd4468:TB=2:TM=1246468900:LM=1253724703:DV=AA:GM=1:S=h3uCjmCCtTlEQ2Rk;path=/;domain=.google.com");
Hit enter on that, then type in www.google.com again and hit enter. You should now get the clean version.