After Google Reader’s UI change of today I, like millions of users, was furious. I won’t go into detail about the reasons (you can read them on my Romanian blog), but summing them up is easy: the new UI was probably designed on a couple of 30″ computer screens and is a visual insult to anyone trying to use it on a normal, smaller, screen. Regardless of the colors and fonts used, the new Google Reader UI is unusable due to its excessive use of whitespace which fills up the screen with unneeded padding and margins, while the actual content is crammed into a tiny space forcing you to scroll like a mad man.
Solutions started to appear pretty soon after, in the form of user-side scripts using browser extensions such as Greasemonkey or UserCSS.
Being a Safari user myself I followed a Twitter friend’s suggestion and created my own little UserCSS stylesheet which fixes the excessive whitespace issue, while keeping the new style.
If you are curious to try it, check out this page on Github. You can easily insert the style into a Greasemonkey script, if you wish.
From this..
..To this
