I hate that red thing!
Yes, I have Google+ account, so? Even I did use Google+, I would not want that red thing on my navigation bar. I bet there are 1,312 apps already on every operating system, on every pad, on every phone, in every web browser as addon, or in every app store (or even in your toilet while you are taking care of smelly business), which allow you to get notified about your... err... I have no idea what you can get notified. Because I don't use that cross, eh... I mean Plus.
I have been waiting patiently to see if Google will add an option in Account settings, but still nothing. I guess you Google+ users love that red thing.
I would like to use Evanesco, but I am out of practice. So, I used the best tool I have, instead, Vimperator, to fix that thing.
I could have just hidden the whole navigation bar, but I did use that gear icon a few times, so I kept the bar in minimum.
Side note: if you look closer, you could see Groups and Gmail have fixed width text. But that is another story and here is another compliant about Blogger's editor's HTML mode: Was that a designer who made a call of HTML mode's font? It's as if so many artists dislike Comic Sans and we programmers dislike variant width text when you are dealing with codes. It feels just as if you open Word to write a C code, so wrong!
Anyway, this is not really fixing anything, it just hides stuff. The script to retrieve the number of notifications still runs in background. And that is another point I want to make, that number is updated a least a second later or longer, how could you possibly to want that snail to deliver you so important social interactive responding interconnection index. Get a desktop notification app. (The snail: who's summoning me? Oh boy, a second please, I need to take a breath first.)
After fixing that thing, I found an interesting side-effect:
I kind of like this new Google homepage, so I didn't try to fix the fix.