First and foremost, I love a lot of what Google has to offer, particularly Gmail and Reader.

Recently, Google released a new Gmail version to the world with many wonderful upgrades. One thing however, left me scratching my head. I noticed they replaced a regular old HTML <select> tag with a smaller drop-down widget.

Apart from the apparent visual improvement, it doesn’t seem to be all that better and innovative to me. In fact, I’d imagine it suffers a bit as far as accessibility goes.

Growing pains

Being a daily Reader user, I also noted that their drop-downs are pretty custom as well. What’s interesting, is that they have a completely different look from Gmail’s.

I dug deeper and found that drop-downs across most of Google’s web apps did not look much alike. In fact, sometimes there was more than one look within the same app!

These inconsistencies are most likely attributed to Google’s exceptional growth. It’s huge now and all big companies have the same struggles. Yahoo is no different and I see this first hand almost everyday at work.

Plenty of examples

Another one from Gmail

Analytics – my favorite

Calendar

Docs

Groups

Picasa

Reader

Conclusion

Google has done a pretty good job keeping the main look similar from from one app to another. What’s more important, their services are pretty good and are actually helpful.

Still, they need to work out and implement various design patterns for specific controls that appear on multiple apps. The latter part is the hardest of course, but Google can do it, can’t they?