The new iGoogle theme just launched, which adds “full canvas views for gadget and support for full feed reading.” In short, the new view places the tabs that you typically see at the top, under the search box, now on the left hand side. It then allows you to add gadgets that support canvas view, to the new iGoogle look, which gives some gadgets a higher usability factor.

Let me illustrate below:

Here is a before screen capture:

Here is an after screen capture (I don’t personally see the new iGoogle, so thank you Keri for sending this my way):

As you can see, it opens up the page more. You can really see the impact by looking at how this works with the Google Reader Gadget. The Google Reader blog has screen captures illustrating this.

For a full list of canvas view enabled gadgets, see this list. This should be rolled out to all U.S. users any time now and then worldwide in the near future.

Related Topics: Google: iGoogle

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz