How To Get Rid Of Google’s Big Black Bar

If you strolled over to Google at any point today, you may have noticed that a big black bar had annexed some valuable top-of-screen real estate. Some people like it! But in case you’re not one of them, here’s how you can banish it.

Curiously, Google doesn’t seem to provide an easy way out in its settings, so you’re going to have to do this the (only very slightly more) hard way. Fortunately, Geekosystem came up with a few options to revert everything back to normal:

Your first line of defence: Greasemonkey’s already got a script that’ll disable the black bar altogether, with updates to come that will let you set whatever colour you want and, for those who have a hard time letting go of UIs, revert back to the old menu bar.

And if you’d like to keep the functionality of the bar – those links are handy, after all – but would rather not have a dark mark the page, check out Chrome web app Stylish (also available for Firefox here). It keeps all the same options but scrubs the new scheme.

So there you have it! Your own private Google. And if you’ve got other ideas on how to whitewash your search page, please share with the rest of the class in the comments. [Geekosystem]