I’ve been using Google personalized homepage since it first rolled out, and now I’m loving the new themes feature. I got off work today, logged into my gmail account, and noticed some new text on the personalized homepage. Hello, “Select theme!” How long have you been there? Not long, I see.

I like Google. They’ve been my only search engine since my early college days. I’ve always had them as my default homepage. So, it made sense to use the personalized page and add my own customizations. It’s now my web portal with the awesomeness of google search. (Though I usually type search into the Firefox bar. Maybe there is some web psychology behind that). Anyhoo, eventually, I did get tired of the white background. Firefox has a couple plugins called Greasemonkey and Stylish. They add some ways to change the look of the personalized page, but they were never that great. They usually changed a few text or background colors. On certain holidays, you’d see a new Google logo replace the original, but it was still the plain white google page.

The new themes add a lot more liveliness to the basic google page we’ve grown up on. There are currently 6 themes, but more have been proposed. They add a spiffy dynamic graphic to the top background and it will blend the colors to the rest of the page. The dynamic graphics will change accordingly to the conditions of your area code: day, night, cold, hot, season. Personally, I like the Tea House theme. Green is so calming and the Asian fox dude is cool.

I think the old guy is checking if he’s “Sure” or not. Apparently he isn’t, because no one wants to be around him. =P

EDIT:
After the first 24 hours of using the new themes feature, I was sure that I had seen all of the backgrounds for the “Tea house”. I thought it might be an neat idea if there was a special picture that would only load on a specific time and disappear the next second. Well, apparently there is: Themes Easter Egg. You need to reload the page at 3:14AM. (Pi Day!)

There is also a css edit to make the image appear without being on the 3:14AM time. It shouldn’t be long before people make their own backgrounds. (if they aren’t already)