WTF? Starting this afternoon, when I visit www.google.ca,
the top menu line is now not-visible. Still there, still clickable,
but not visible.

WTF?

This is with Firefox 3.6.8/Linux.

Changing the user-agent string "fixes it".

Saving the page and viewing it in Konqueror gives the same result.
But visiting www.google.ca using Konqueror does show a normal menu.

WTF????

Hmmm.. reverting to a full image backup from this morning, when it as was working, makes zero difference.

Ergo.. something changed (for the worse) at www.google.ca ??

How odd. I get the same result with Firefox 3.6.3/Linux, and Firefox 3.6.6/Windows 7 x64.

I should amend that...

If I'm not logged in, I get the regular menu. If I subsequently log in, the menu disappears, and stays hidden.

I never "log in" at google. No menu shown.

But.. something Good has now come from the incident.
I dumped User Agent Switcher in favour of the HeaderControl plug-in, which allows per-site specification of the User-Agent string.

So now, I give "Unknown Linux" as the UA to google, and it has also gotten rid of their cutesy/annoying "delayed menu feature"!

Woo-hoo!

On google.com (US), they made a change a while back so that the top bar would fade into view. It would appear that they attempted to do the same thing on .ca, but screwed up actually changing the opacity after load.

The fix is to change "opacity: 0" in the source to "opacity: 1". How you want to do that is another question. Greasemonkey? Stylish?

No, we've had the same crappy fade-in for as long as you folks.
It's just that today somebody b0rked it.

Now, by using the HeaderControl plug-in, I get it all working, and _without_ the fade-in delay!! Yay!

I think Doug Robotic also complained about the fade-in delay once.. now we have a fix for it.

I do not. I'm on Windows 7 x64, and I went to Google.ca on Firefox 3.6.3, then upgraded to 3.6.6 (I don't use Firefox anymore), and then tried Chrome. None of them had the same result.

Still b0rked here, on my backup system. I doubt it will stay b0rked for long.. somebody there is bound to notice and start fixing the million or so servers.

Not that I care: my primary system now just avoids the whole scripty thing with it's silly fade-in delay.

Maybe you got lucky and hit a fixed server!

I've been happily running a Greasemonkey script- Disable Google Fade-in

Doug didn't understand why I was annoyed with having to move the mouse to get the menu to appear. All I could muster was that it was just annoying to have to wait for my clicking target to appear before moving towards the target.
At last I have another answer that is stronger than my first- on my Samsung Q1-U tablet I have no mouse to move, per se.
Yes, I can control the cursor with a joystick or with a usb mouse, but if I've got the stylus in my hand or I just want to poke at things with my fingers... well, the links kinda need to be there up front to poke at!

Sweet. Doing the same here, now.

I never use the Google front page anyway. I have a Bookmark Keyword set up for Google searches.

Just checked google again from my other account -- looks like they clued in and fixed it. Amazing.

What do you use the top menu for?

I'm so used to Chrome's address-bar-as-search that I don't even consider Google.com as a place to go anymore.

Good question and good point.
Long ago I made google my homepage. Not so long after that I set up keyword searches for the Firefox address field for google (g), google image search (gis), youtube (y), and wikipedia (w). Great stuff.
But I haven't shaken the habit of clicking on gmail and maps at the top of my homepage in order to get to those pages.
I rarely use the google entry field. Sometimes that's fun, though.

...and the google search field at the top left of the address bar in FF? Never used it. Actually, ClocX is covering it up.

I use the top menu to access maps, news, translations, as well as other google features used less often than those biggies.

Google's 'delayed menu feature' off again now? Seems to all appear straight away here.

The delayed menu got taken out when they implemented Google Instant search.

Ah, right. That must have happened pretty recently though?

12 days ago.

tanstaafl.

Peachy, thanks for the update.

I've now turned off the "header mangling" I was using to change the user-agent string to get rid of that stupid delay.

Cheers