This latest update for the web preview has a slew of new features, some of which will be of interest to those still sticking with the classic G+.
Community Categories Sidebar
The old drop-down menu revealing all the categories in a particular Community has been, well, dropped (sorry for the pun, folks!) in favour of a scrollable sidebar. This will make it easier for those who might’ve overlooked the drop-down menu, especially G+ newbies, and will save users from doing an extra click to access the categories they want.Autoplay GIFs (or not)
Love watching those cat GIFs? Well, now you can automatically play them in your stream! But if you’d rather save your bandwidth, you can head to the Settings and set it to have them play only on the desktop, or not at all.
Pinned Posts in Collections
One useful feature in the classic G+ that’s now in the new web version is the ability to pin posts in Collections. So whether you have that one particular post you want everyone viewing your Collection will see, simply click the post, then the three-dot menu that’ll appear in the top-right corner. Select “Pin Post” when the overflow menu pops out.New Post Creation Warning
Say you’re making a new post, but you accidentally head to a new page (or head back) on the same tab. Now, you’ll be greeted by a warning giving you an option to keep or discard the post.Clearer Notification Design
Found it hard to read how many unread notifications you had in the previous iteration of the web preview? Not to worry, because the notifications icon (aka Mr. Jingles) has received a new look when viewing Streams, Collections and Communities. Gone is the white-text-on-red-background circle, and in its place is a black-text-on-white-background icon.It’s fantastic to see the team actively listening to users’ feedback and updating on a much more regular basis than before. This shows it’s their mission to put their users front and centre of the core Google+ experience, and to rephrase the old cliché, “The user is always right.”
One has to keep in mind that this new G+ is a total rebuild from the ground-up, not just a Material Design makeover, so some features in the old design will undoubtedly take a while to come to the new one.