How To Remove The Share And Notification Area And Footer On The New Google Home Page

This entry was posted on December 6, 2011, in Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment

As many of you may have noticed by now, Google have been re-branding the look of their products, with the latest one rolling out to everyone being the new redesign of the home page. The black (and blue for some people) bar has now been replaced with a drop down menu of their other produce (News, Gmail, Search, Images, Maps etc) which will disappear via clicking away somewhere on the page. If you still don’t have the redesign, then clearing your cache may help.

For some people though, they like the home page to be as minimalistic as possible and would prefer to not have the sharing area in the grey bar at the top or the text in the footer at the bottom of the page. To get rid of this is fairly simple and can be done by adding a couple of filters to either Adblock or Adblock Plus depending on which one you use. This is for Firefox and Chrome users only, sorry.

Here’s the two areas you may want to remove (Chrome using AdBlock Version: 2.4.32 )

As you can see the filters we are going to apply will remove the areas selected in Red. First select the AdBlock icon at the top left

Now select Options

In the next window select Edit

Now add the following filters to the bottom of the list.

  • ##DIV[id=”gbu”] This removes the Notification area at the top
  • ##DIV[id=”footer”][class=”ctr-p”] This removes the footer, text & grey bar from the bottom

You don’t have to add both, it’s up to you. Don’t include the text in red as this only explains what each filter does.

Remember to hit Save. Now refresh your browser by hitting F5.

You should now have a much cleaner home page

Now lets have a quick look at how to do this in Firefox using AdBlock Plus (Version 1.3.10)

Click on the AdBlock Plus icon at the top right hand corner of the browser window and select Preferences

Now in the next window, select Filters>Add Filter

Now add either one or both of the filters below, depending on how you want your Google home page to look

  • ##DIV[id=”gbu”] This removes the Notification area at the top
  • ##DIV[id=”footer”][class=”ctr-p”] This removes the footer, text & grey bar from the bottom

Hit OK when you have added them and hit F5 to refresh your browser.

That’s it. Hope it helped.

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