frugal google

inspired by malarkey's recent gift to google, i decided to tackle something that has been bothering me for quite a while: firefox's default home page, a branded version of google.

not only does it still use a table-based layout (which in and of itself is not a crime, as it still ensures compatibility with older browser ... but is puzzling, considering that this page is really only meant for firefox), but its kludged 1990s markup doesn't even validate (no DOCTYPE, and it's not even HTML 4).

so, dear google ... from me to you, a recoded version in nice, clean and fairly semantic XHTML/CSS. and incidentally, if you compare like for like (optimised source code, all links and image paths the same, etc) this new version plus images still comes out around 2Kb slimmer - an approximate saving of 8%.

it's worth noting that, unless i'm mistaken, opera gets the positioning of the options to the right of the text input wrong. if you find an easy tweak to get it to work as it should, let me know!

completed:

08/04/2005