The redesign

New Google Finance review: what users love and hate

Updated August 5, 2026

The new Google Finance — the AI-first redesign that became the only version on July 23, 2026 — reviews badly with the people who used the product most. The complaints are remarkably consistent: an AI panel that cannot be hidden, percentage changes with no dollar figures, portfolios that lost their transaction history, and a heavier, slower page. Here is the full accounting, both sides.

What users hate about the new Google Finance

In feedback from people who checked the previous page daily — many for a decade or more — the same regressions come up again and again. These are not vague objections to change; each names something specific the redesign took away or got wrong.

• The AI panel you cannot hide. On desktop, an AI assistant occupies roughly a third of the screen at all times. It can expand to swallow most of the page, but there is no control that collapses or removes it — even for people who never type a single question into it. This is the single most repeated complaint.
• Percentages without dollars. Price moves are shown as percentages, and the point or dollar change — the number many investors read first — is missing. There is no setting to bring it back.
• A layout you cannot touch. The desktop page is carved into panes that cannot be resized, rearranged, or closed, and nothing about the arrangement is customizable. Users describe the result as cluttered, and dark mode makes it worse rather than better.
• Portfolios that lost their memory. Per-ticker transaction history is gone: you can no longer open a holding and review every buy and sell behind it, and there is no way to record a purchase or sale by hand with an edited execution price.
• No usable sort order. Holdings cannot be sorted by daily gain, total gain, or even alphabetically — positions sit in an order no one can identify, which defeats the point of glancing at a portfolio.
• A heat map with holes in it. The old at-a-glance heat map coloured every holding by its move on the day. Its replacement, tucked under Insights, plots only a subset of the portfolio — and a heat map that leaves out half your stocks cannot answer the one question it exists for.
• Portfolio totals buried on mobile. On the phone, the total value of a portfolio — the number people open the app to check — is not on the first screen. Reaching it takes several taps, every time.
• Fundamentals reduced to raw dollars. Quarterly results used to show year-over-year revenue change as a percentage. The redesign shows a raw dollar figure instead, which makes comparing companies of different sizes close to meaningless.
• Weight and lag. The page feels heavy, and watchlists in particular take noticeably long to load — a daily tax on the exact people who open the product most often.
• Everything routes through the chat. Actions that used to be one click are now requests you type into the AI — and users report that the same question can return different answers a minute apart, which is disqualifying for financial data.

Can you use the new Google Finance without the AI?

Not by any setting. There is no preference that disables the assistant, no way to collapse its panel, and no reduced mode that leaves it out. The AI layer is the redesign.

The closest workaround is a restyling browser extension with a custom rule that visually hides the panel. That works as far as it goes — the space sits empty instead of occupied — but it is cosmetic. Hiding the panel does not restore dollar changes, transaction history, sorting, or per-purchase returns, because those were removed from the product, not merely covered by the panel. If “no AI” is a requirement rather than a preference, the realistic route is a different page entirely: the completed independent rebuild of the pre-AI experience has no AI layer at all, and early access is open.

What the redesign gets right

A fair review has to note the other column, and it is not empty:

• Nothing was deleted. Portfolios and watchlists were carried into the new page rather than wiped. The data survived the move, even where the tools around it did not.
• The AI can genuinely answer. Asked in plain language, the assistant can pull details out of your own portfolio — a capability the previous page never had. The complaints are about its consistency and its permanence on screen, not about whether it works at all.
• It reads fine on a phone — for quotes. For a casual single-quote check on mobile, the large type and simple cards do the job. The anger comes almost entirely from people with portfolios, not from occasional lookers-up.
• Multi-currency portfolios still add up. Holdings listed in dollars and holdings listed in pounds can sit in separate portfolios with the combined total shown in your home currency — behaviour the old page had, carried over intact.

What longtime users say they miss most

Read together, the wish list from daily users of the previous design is strikingly specific — less a mood than a feature spec:

• The index strip: Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq pinned to the top of every page, so the market’s direction was one glance away.
• Tabbed watchlists, several to a screen — your own holdings, tickers under consideration, exchange rates, a spouse’s investments — with one click on a tab enough to see what was up and what was down.
• Comparing up to five tickers on a single chart that stayed readable and refreshed itself without a reload.
• A news feed scoped to one ticker — or to a whole watchlist — so a sudden move arrived with its likely explanation next to it.
• The portfolio view: one-click switching between portfolios, a total-value chart with time-range toggles, and total and daily gain/loss in large type, in dollars and percent.
• Per-purchase detail: any position expanded into its individual lots — buy date, shares, price paid — each showing its return since the day it was bought.
• Coverage beyond one market: US listings and international listings tracked side by side in the same portfolio.
• Plain legibility: large numbers, green for up, red for down, nothing animated and nothing summarised on your behalf.

Common questions