It's experimental, that's why you saw the fade...Google's trying to keep the word count on their website to a minimum and their homepage very simple if you guys haven't noticed already.
(maybe now it's being put into "beta" cuz I'm starting to see it more often)
And as for your internet being crap, 16 Mb download is pretty good (well at least better than mine )
Edit: O, the bad thing is no more I'm feeling lucky button (I guess that's reasonable considering that Google loses more than 100 million a year in revenues because people skip the search pages and the ads and go straight to the websites)