You will notice quite a few changes if you open the old and new Yahoo homepage side by side.

The header area has been redone and is now much smaller than the standard Yahoo header. That makes it possible to display more items above the fold which is the most precious area of every website.

Probably the biggest change is the possibility to add custom websites and services to the Yahoo homepage. It is for example possible to add a blog like Ghacks to the left menu on the Yahoo homepage. Hovering the mouse over the link will display a description, link, search form and latest feed entries.

Popular services like Facebook or MySpace have been added to the page with the option to add additional services such as AOL Mail, eBay, Flickr, Gmail or the New York Times to the menu as well. It is also possible to remove most of the default links that are displayed in the menu.

This gives Yahoo users a comfortable way of checking out other web services without leaving the Yahoo page.

Several changes have been made to the elements on the page. Some have been moved up (today’s top searches for example are now displayed prominently in the top right corner while others have been moved down into a new footer area. All in all a pretty decent redesign of the homepage to provide users with more functionality (and them with even more pageviews).

That is basically what Ecletic for Internet Explorer does. The add-on installs itself to the right-click context menu of Internet Explorer and as a toolbar button which when pressed changes the cursor into a tool that can be used to draw a rectangle around the desired information.

The snippet that has been marked that way will be shown in a preview window where the user has to make the decision if he wants to add it to an existing page or a new one. That page opens afterwards and all elements on that page can be moved around and resized to fit the screen.

It works similar to tools like MWSnap that can take a screenshot from part of the computer monitor by drawing an rectangle around the part that should be included.

The first custom page that is created by the user will be the homepage of that user. Additional pages like weather, news or sports are available by default that have been created by the developers of the application. New pages can be created in the preview window and are afterwards accessible by clicking on the white paper sheet in the main menu.

Each element that has been added gets updated automatically be the service. The user has the option to press the Refresh button manually to update the snippet immediately. The service lagged a bit during tests, it usually took a few seconds before a new snippet got updated and shown on the pages. Pages can be bookmarked like usual websites and opened at a later time again.

The application contains a link entitled Upgrade to Professional which leads to the homepage. The homepage however does not contain any information about upgrading or buying the Internet Explorer plugin.