Google's new Navigational Menu is here..!!

Google is reportedly making a change to its homepage and other online services which will see it dropping its horizontal, black navigational bar containing links to social, search, Gmail, images, news, and more, in favor of a new menu that more closely resembles the app launch icon found on Android smartphones. The new square-shaped button which instead launches an app grid containing colorful icons pointing to Google’s various properties, will appear at the top of Google websites, next to the notifications button and links to users’ profiles.

This design has been in testing for the better part of 2013, with some seeing the then experimental interface as early as February, according to the unofficial Google-watching blog, Google Operating System, which was also among the first to spot what appears to be official confirmation of the new design’s ETA by a Google employee.

On a Google+ post where a user was sharing a screenshot of the updated look-and-feel, Google+ Community Manager Justine Rivero commented, “Glad you noticed! We’ll be rolling out this new feature in the next few weeks…stay tuned!” Before today, Google has only been showing the updated navigation menu to portions of its user base as an experiment. It had not yet announced that the menu would be more broadly rolled out.

Searches on Google+ this morning indicate that a number of users are beginning to receive the changes, and are posting screenshots with comments like “gone is the black bar,” “no black bar,” and so on. Twitter users are seeing the same thing.

Other sites are also reporting that the new navigational menu will appear across Google properties beyond Google+, including Search, Gmail, Blogger, YouTube and more. The same “app launcher” interface has been seen on Chrome’s new tab page, where it can currently be enabled as an experiment, too.