I find this interesting as well as unimportant at the same time. Interesting because it shows that Google has responded to increasing connection speeds by adding bells and whistles to their homepage. That's really great.
Unimportant because with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. - going to the google homepage is almost entirely optional. Google is working so hard into baking themselves into almost any facet of web functionality that their homepage is becoming less and less important over time.
The only reason I check the google homepage is to look at the doodles.
Strangely, Google is killing off the one thing that keeps me going to their sorta homepage, iGoogle. When they finally do kill it about a year from now, I'll have to come up with some substitute which may not be so Google-centric.
I've switched from iGoogle to opera portal ( http://portal.opera.com/ ), which is a pretty close equivalent (similar 3-column view etc). Only major loss is it has very few gadgets compared to iGoogle, it's mostly just for rss feeds. (And no, you don't need to use opera to use it).
That is true. This feature has been around for many years and used to be advertised on their navbar before Google+ came about, but it never stood out as a prominent component of the Google experience. I figure they are pushing people to adopt Google+ as their "portal" but I'm likely wrong as the two products are quite different. It could also be that it doesn't generate any revenue and the experiment is nearing the end of its life cycle.
Totally agree to your point of view--Google is growing, then what's the problem if the code grows? It doesn't matter, what matters is that the load time is low.
Unimportant because with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. - going to the google homepage is almost entirely optional. Google is working so hard into baking themselves into almost any facet of web functionality that their homepage is becoming less and less important over time.
The only reason I check the google homepage is to look at the doodles.