Google’s homepage has gone all pictorial this morning, with a full-bleed image cluttering up their normally pristine page. You can change the picture, choosing from a range of pre-selected shots (including shots of work by Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (隈研吾), Kwon, Ki-soo (권기수) and Tord Boontje, as well as shots from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic.
You can stick in your own images too (that’s one of ours above), choose one from a public gallery, or set it to a single colour (as below), or even back to white (which is actually quite elegant, leaving a shadowed logo, rather than the usual mulitcoloured one).
Except if you’re using Safari, which isn’t playing along at all, just showing the classic Google homepage. Wonder if that’s a tech issue or just a low-level skirmish in the browser wars…
And frankly, as Safari users, we’re happy with the standard page: we don’t want our search window to be anything other than a search window. Less, as ever, is more.
Awful idea from Google….
Safari 5, for me, is rendering Google’s UI disaster just fine (as in, the way they intend it).
A stupid stupid move…less is better than more. It’s distracting, annoying and not in keeping with google’s image. I may change my search engine if they do not give one an option of no background
Hugh – hmm, maybe it’s a .co.uk (or more likely, any of the non .com URLs) thing then… it’s still not showing for us in Safari.
Agreed!
Doesn’t work on Safari 5.0 for me either, whether I go to .co.uk or .com or am logged in or not.
I don’t like it anyway.
time to go back to the old fashion search window or at least and option to opt out
safari users are lucky. i want my normal google homepage back. if i wanted to use bing, i would use bing.
I liked it better when it was just nice, simple and white. Don’t want to be forced to load an image – there is nothing wrong with white background! Google needs to make it optional!
With the AdBlock Plus add-on you can stop Firefox loading the background images but you get white-one-white.
I can’t comprehend why Google think this is such a great idea, particularly as there is no easy opt-out. I have now switched to using the toolbar search box and have changed my homepage from google.co.uk to something else.
Its only featured for 24 hours as a showcase guys. I like the background, and I’m sure there are people like me who like the idea but never know until today. Tomorrow your good old google will be back….
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-of-homepage.html
I think it shows a lot of freshness from google that they dare to change what we are sp used to use that we freak out if a pixel or 2 is not on the same spot when googling
Hey man instead of change pics please make some more games same the doodle, that was especially good for working people so they could be a little less productive, hey bring some more games man 
Thankfully, Google reverted to the “you decide” model of bkg imagery, but I think you’re right: the non-.com Google entities did not exhibit this problem today. This was actually widely reported as a way to avoid the forced bkgs, as was using the SSL “https” beta version.