Ditch the Everything Bar on Google’s Search Page

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If you’re a heavy Google user such as myself, then you probably noticed the new mandatory “Everything” bar now located on the left side of your Google search page. Some may not care but me being a daily Netbook user, I need all the screen space I can get. A friend emailed an article from TweakGuides on how to get rid of this new annoyance. I thought I would pass along the information in case anyone else finds this new Everything bar as useless as I do. With a desktop machine or native widescreen it’s not as much an issue because the search results usually don’t take up the entire span of the screen anyway, but none the less heres what to do.

With “Everything” Bar

 

Tweaked without “Everything” Bar

 

These instructions pulled from the TweakGuides website:

Internet Explorer

There is a way of customizing IE using the free IE7Pro Add-on which despite its name works with IE8. Follow these instructions:

1. Download and install IE7Pro, but during installation make sure the ‘Enable Userscripts Plugin’ option is ticked, and then select the ‘Do not install ProgSense’ option. Upon launching IE, if prompted to allow IE7Pro access through your Firewall, you can cancel such requests for our purposes.

2. Open Windows Explorer, right-click in an empty spot in a directory and select ‘New>Text Document’. Open this document and copy and paste all the text from the following user script into it. Save this document and rename it DisableGoogleBar.ieuser.js.

3. Move the DisableGoogleBar.ieuser.js file to your \Program Files (x86)\IEPro\userscripts directory – note the (x86) part of the directory name doesn’t exist on 32-bit versions of Windows.

4. In Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu and select ‘IE7Pro Preferences’, then click the ‘User Scripts’ item in the left window of the preferences box, click the ‘Reload All Scripts’ button and tick the ‘Hide Google Sidebar’ box, then click OK.

5. There’s no need to restart Internet Explorer, simply go to the Google Search page and search results should now appear without the Everything Bar. If the bar is still there, press CTRL+F5 to force refresh the page and load the new CSS style.

6. If you wish to disable the additional toolbar IE7Pro installs, right-click on the toolbar area and untick the new ‘Grab Pro’ item. This will also remove the ‘IE7Pro Preferences’ item in the Tools menu – you can re-enable this at any time by right-clicking on the toolbar area and reticking the ‘Grab Pro’ item.

IE7Pro also allows a wide range of other features for Internet Explorer, though its use requires careful consideration as it can destabilize Internet Explorer if you make too many custom changes.

Firefox

To remove the Google Everything Bar in Firefox, you will need to edit a UserContent.css file to add customized code. Follow these steps:

1. Go to the following folder:

Windows XP – \Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[randomstring.default]\chrome\

Windows Vista or Windows 7 – \Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[randomstring.default]\chrome\

OSX – ~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/[profile folder]/chrome or ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[profile folder]/chrome

2. Rename the existing UserContent-example.css file to UserContent.css, or create a new text document with that name.

3. Open the file with Notepad or any text editor.

4. At the bottom of the file, copy and paste the following text into the document exactly as shown:

/* Remove Google Everything Bar*/

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google)
{ div#leftnav { display: none !important; }
#center_col { margin-left: 0px !important; } }

5. Save the document and close it.

Close all instances of Firefox and then restart it, and when you next launch a Google search, on the search results page you should see the familiar (old) appearance for search results. If you find the script doesn’t work, change the http://www.google portion shown above to exactly match the Google Search domain you use. To undo this change, simply follow steps 1 – 3 above but this time delete the text above and save the document, then close and restart Firefox. Note that the full details of how to add custom CSS code to Firefox are on this page of the Firefox Tweak Guide, including samples of other useful codes.

Google Chrome

To remove the Google Everything Bar in Google’s own Chrome browser, unfortunately you cannot simply edit a user-based CSS file as in Firefox, so the best way to accommodate customization to the appearance of web pages is with the free Stylist Extension. Install Stylist, and then follow these steps:

1. Click the spanner icon at the top right of Chrome and select Extensions.

2. Click the Options button next to the ‘Chrome Stylist’ extension and select the Styles tab.

3. Click the ‘Add new style’ button, then in the box presented with the greyed ‘Stylesheet text’ prompt, copy and paste the following text:

div#leftnav { display: none !important; }

#center_col { margin-left: 0px !important; }

4. Enter a name in the ‘Style Name’ box at the top (e.g. Remove Everything Bar), then click the ‘Prefix’ drop-down box and select ‘domain’, then in the ‘Site Domain’ box enter the URL you normally use for Google Search, e.g. www.google.com or www.google.com.auwww.google.co.uk, etc., and finally, click the Save button at the bottom of the box.

There is no need to close or restart Chrome, the change will be implemented immediately. If at any time you want to disable or remove this change, follow steps 1 – 2 above then click the box with the name of this style, and either click the Disable button to stop it, or click the Del button to remove it altogether.

I use Google Chrome browser for just about everything except a few intranet sites at work. I performed this tweak for both Chrome and Firefox and was successful the first time around with the instructions provided. Both took only about 5 minutes to complete and were rather simple. Im a heavy internet user and find myself searching Google for just about everything. About the only added service I use with Google is the “shopping” which is still available at the top of the bar along with just about anything else you’ll need accessible by using the more button.

Both Chrome and Firefox are fully tweakable to do just about anything you can imagine. There are thousand of guides and sites that provide information and links to just about any add-on you can imagine. This is a simple but effective way to gain back some lost screen due to Google’s new mandatory feature. I’m a huge fan of most things provided by Google but found the everything bar to be annoying at best. TweatGuides is a great site for all kinds of custom tweaks and game guides. Head over to the site for more tweaks and guides.

via TweakGuides

[Thanks to A.P. for sending me the tweak.]

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2 Comments on "Ditch the Everything Bar on Google’s Search Page"

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  2. How To: Ditch the Everything Bar on Google’s Search Page http://bit.ly/aDW1mm

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