I feel the same as you but I ended up installing the Stylish Firefox addon and used the recipe to hide the left navigation. (Actually I modified it some so it

I feel the same as you but I ended up installing the Stylish Firefox addon and used the recipe to hide the left navigation. (Actually I modified it some so it also hides the search box and other wasted space.) It's sad but I have too much invested in Google to leave right now and I'm not comfortable giving my Google credentials to a foreign website like PageFlakes.