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'Larry and Sergey's HTML5 balls drained my resources'

Users left moaning by bouncy Google experience

Google's latest animated logo on its search homepage has caused a kerfuffle among many surfers whose CPU has been besieged by the ballsy doodle.

The Mountain View Chocolate Factory released its fancy HTML5-based BuckyBall animation on Saturday, and immediately users began complaining that it was sucking up too much CPU.

Reg reader Paul contacted us, after he initially thought that his computer may have been attacked by a virus.

"It appears the new Google Buckyball animation is consuming 100% CPU. I found this out after fearing, eek system CPU usage bit much, Trojan panic and found out it was the Google homepage animation sucking my CPU and increasing my electricity usage."

The Google forum also filled up with gripes from users not happy about the logo's CPU consumption.

"I had a background image on the Google Classic search page, but removed it to play with the doodle. When [I] found my Core 2 Duo running at 30-40 per cent usage with the animation, with no way I could see to turn it off, I decided to solve the problem by going back to the background image, but the 'Change background image' link is gone!," noted someone with the handle bluequoll.

"However I've solved the problem — don't use the Google Search page! In Firefox I've got other ways to do a Google Search anyway: the browser search bar, keyword search from the address bar, and iGoogle. Who needs Google Classic — leave it for the Google kids to play their games on!"

An easy workaround is for users who want to continue to have the Google search landing page set as their homepage is to change it to https://www.google.com/ in order to prevent the logo from, well, ballsing up computers. ®

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