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How to Remove or Disable Google Sidebar in Firefox & Chrome

May 7, 2010 by Amit Bhawani

Google has now started displaying a Sidebar on the Search Result Pages, when you perform any search. The new list of options would be useful to many but for people like us, who love Google only for the clean looks, this is something irritating and we need to get this fixed. Hence here is a quick solution for the same.

Google Search Results Sidebar

  • Mozilla Firefox : First of all you need to install the GreaseMonkey Add-on for Firefox browser, which can be downloaded here. Once its installed you need to restart your browser and then proceed towards the next step.

    Next you will have to visit this link, which is a script created by some excellent developer. Click on the Install button and it will add the script to your GreaseMonkey add-on automatically and instantly Enable it too.

    GreaseMonkey Installation

  • Google Chrome : In case of the Chrome Browser you need to install a Google Chrome Extension which would disable the new sidebar and give you back the same old look with limited stuff. Visit this link and then click on the Install button to proceed and complete the installation process.

    Hide Google Options

    You will find a new icon next to the Address Bar in Google, with the Extension Enabled right away, hiding the Google Options section totally in Chrome Browser.

Next, again access the Google Search Result Pages like this – http://www.google.com/search?q=Amit+Bhawani and you will find that the Sidebar won’t be displayed. If you carefully observe the Google Result Page loading then the sidebar does display for a second on the browser following which the script hides it totally from our view.

These new options on the sidebar are :
Everything – This would enable you to search all the types of content for a given query
Images – This option would enable you to search the Google Images section, though the same link is already available in the top navigation links in Google Search, hence no point of a duplicate option.
Updates – This is one excellent option, which would allow you to search in Real Time with data fetched from different social media websites and news portals. Useful when you need to find about some latest trend.
Other Options here are Videos, Maps, News, Shopping, Books, Blogs, Discussions etc.

Google Search Updates

The above listed options are for both the Browsers Google Chrome & Mozilla Firefox, while other browser users like Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera should expect a permanent solution soon, though till then they can start accessing the Google Website through an alternative link which does not have the sidebar displayed here

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About

My name is Amit Bhawani and here I like to share my internet/tech experience with my online readers. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram at @AmitBhawani I am also the Editor-in-Chief of PhoneRadar & Master Gadgets

About Amit Bhawani

My name is Amit Bhawani and here I like to share my internet/tech experience with my online readers. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram at @AmitBhawani

Comments

  1. Yogesh says

    May 8, 2010 at 5:09 am

    Wow…amazing greasemonkey.

  2. Avinash says

    May 8, 2010 at 8:03 am

    Amit, GreaseMonkey Scripts can also run opera, In opera the scripts are called user scripts.

  3. Bruce says

    May 8, 2010 at 9:40 pm

    Free – Gizmo – Firefox & Chrome – Sidebar on/off/on/off with a click – seotools.com/hide-google-options/

    Supports ccTLD’s.

    Better solution than others

    Released April 21st – so the solution was there.

  4. Tony says

    May 10, 2010 at 8:36 pm

    Brilliant tool ty,
    Is Google is trying piss people off so they use Bing ? i think this sidebar may lose a good few users

  5. Smith says

    May 15, 2010 at 3:03 pm

    I am also feeling uncomfortable with this Google new look. Now going to remove sidebar after reading this article

    Thanks Amit

  6. Jase says

    May 27, 2010 at 11:30 pm

    The only possible reason for Google NOT offering the option to collapse the sidebar is the hope that they will generate a few more ad-clicks by drawing the user’s eye away from the relevant search results. Pretty low for a company whose mission statement is all about the user experience. http://tinyurl.com/38jjbyr

  7. Glen Danzig says

    July 21, 2010 at 1:40 pm

    The Userscript page for the Greasemonkey script is now offline.

  8. u64 says

    October 8, 2010 at 6:10 am

    Seems setting HTTP UserAgent to Opera/8 makes
    google search normal again.

    Chrome/Iron command line
    –user-agent=”Opera/8″

    Firefox addon BrowserMasquerade
    http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/212320
    Follow the Help to create settings.

  9. Web Host says

    February 3, 2011 at 3:23 pm

    Is their not a option in Firefox to directly disable it? Would you like to run another script on Firefox to disable sidebar? or you would like to just keep it like that !! In my sense it better to keep the sidebar instead of running a script on Firefox which consumes resources.

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