here's what i have wondered.

google.com is my home page.

so say i am looking at it.

i click on iGoogle on the google.com page, it takes me to iGoogle.

so, once I am there, I click the 'home' icon on the browser.

it takes me to iGoogle, since that's the last version of Google page I visited, even tho iGoogle is NOT my home pg, it's google.com

It saves a cookie when you enter iGoogle and if that cookie exists when you enter google.com it will automatily redirect you.

Technically you still have all of the functionality of the 'Classic' homepage when the iGoogle page is loaded. The difference I guess is speed of loading your iGoogle page when compared to loading the 'Classic' Google homepage. The 'Classic' homepage definitely loads quicker. If speed was your main concern you could always use the search box in the upper right hand corner of Firefox, IE 7 or Opera.

I like the simplicity of the Google homepage (and it's load speed). Wonder if it would've been feasible to not have a separate gadgets page, but to grow the same homepage "iteratively":
- you're always on Google.com
- there's a small link like "add gadget"
- as soon as you have 1 or more gadgets, the Google logo will become a bit smaller to leave more room for gadgets; however, there will be no tabs, because some people might not like tabs, and if there's only a single tab the tab bar is redundant
- as soon as you have 1 or more gadgets, there's also an "add tab" link; add one and you'll see the tab row
- remove all secondary tabs, and the tabs row disappears; remove all gadgets, and the Google logo will come back to full-size

With this approach, the "feature not product" philosophy of Sergey & Larry (the one they used to veto against the "iGoogle" product name) would be closer to reality... you know, like "Windows" doesn't change to "iWindows" when you add a custom wallpaper or install a program. Of course there may be a huge technical difference & difference in engineer teams between iGoogle and Google, but the user doesn't need to be exposed to the behind-the-scenes architecture & company structures...

Just an idea, and now that Google went for "iGoogle" branding it seems to be not realistic Google takes this route anytime soon/ ever...

Yet another Stupid Unnecessary Domain Name... such a feature could have been done in a perfectly logical way with a subdomain like my.google.com.

Google's been pretty weird about handling subdomains or making them available. I would think that reader.google.com would make sense, but instead when you go there they redirect you to www.google.com/reader/view/ (similarly, calendar.google.com also redirects to www.google.com/calendar/render)

But then something like images.google.com works as expected.

Why is this gone so high in the forum when the last post was 19 days ago?

I have a suspicion that you entered the thread at just about the second I deleted a spam post that was showing here (temporarily pushing up the thread)... so you might not have seen the spam but you posted anyway, thus permanently pushing the thread up in the forum.

[This message will self-destroy soon!]

Cool! How do you do that?