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The difference in the number of buttons is, let's see... you have no home button, but you always have a tab bar, even if there's only one tab, even score there.

You should try maximizing Chrome, especially if you want the most viewable web space. Tabs move up to the title bar, and out of their own tab bar then, eliminating a row. Home can be added back also, if you want it. I personally like it, because the default chrome home page (which can be changed) keeps track of what pages I go to most, so I don't have to configure anything - Chrome already knows where I want to go, and since you have to open the web page anyway, why not save a step?

The new Safari layout is apparently almost exactly like Chrome's, but their design has a few flaws Chrome's doesn't.

And of course on a Mac I don't count the menu bar because it's always there... on Linux, I recall, there's a global menu on both Gnome and KDE taking up space, so no savings there. On Windows, the task bar. Honors are even.

The menu bar on a Mac is always there, why the hell wouldn't you count it? The taskbar in windows can auto-hide, and the menu bar in Gnome at least (and I'm pretty sure KDE too) can be truncated to a little bar that floats on top allowing the window to be maximised to the entire screen real-estate, or slid to a button on the right or left side of the screen, again allowing the windows to use the entire screen.

In chrome also the page options as well as the file menu is incorporated into a button to the right of the address bar. With the incorporated address/search (which works flawlessly, unlike the IE version I've used) saving space, the two buttons for page options and file menu are very unobtrusive, usefull, and save space. Score one for Chrome.

ALSO, Chrome eliminated the status bar, instead showing a small translucent popup at the bottom whenever status information - like where links are pointing or page load progress. It disappears when there is nothing to display. The new Safari eliminates the status bar by showing page load progress in the address bar, but it does not display links. This is rather important given the number of phishing scams out there. No points for Safari if the space savings comes at the cost of functionality. Score one from Chrome.

So the score is so far Chrome - 3, FF/Opera (can you get safari in linux?) on Linux - 1, Safari on Mac - 0 (1 for the new version, they move tabs to the title bar like Chrome).

Score doesn't look too even to me. Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or not so I won't count it, but on my friends Mac, windows won't maximise all the way to the bottom of the screen if you've used the little pop-up menu bar.

How do you distinguish between a URL and a search string in Chrome? I don't know, but I'll bet you have some kind of rule, something to remember.

Yeah, there is a rule, it's incredibly complicated. It works like this:
If I want to go to a URL, say www.somesite.com, then in the address bar I type: http://www.somesite.com/ or even just www.somesite.com.

If I want to search for Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia, then in the address bar I type: Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia

Wow, that's hard. I mean, obscenely hard. Most people won't get it in fact. I can understand why you'd be afraid of something so complicated. Go ahead and stick with your cluttered UI, extra menus that you may actually use once in a blue moon, and keep lying to yourself that it's somehow easier to use because you've got more buttons.

The only time, the ONLY time, when a separate search bar would be slightly better than a combined search bar, is when you want to do a search on a URL. In that case, you have to do something like Search Google www.somewebsite.com. But it's hardly complicated, and the advantages are well worth the small learning curve.

If I sound like a fanboy, well, maybe I

emerge googleearth

And for the WoW fans out there:

su root -c 'emerge wine' && winecfg && wget http://ftp.somesite.com/path/to/WorldOfWarcraft-Installer.exe && wine WorldOfWarcraft-Installer.exe

Then you have a shiny new icon for WoW on your desktop. Enjoy. :-P

There are so many dynamic pages on the net now that one web site, like slashdot as an earlier poster commented, can contain literally millions of pages. People use programs like modrewrite, isapirewrite and linkfreeze to manipulate spiders into crawling pages that are near identical. For more than one customer I've made meta, title and content randomization, serialization and or URL rewriting schemes to make damn sure spiders index every possible dynamic page, and it works. I have a single dynamic page that must have been indexed hundreds, maybe thousands of times with slightly different content, and they are all in the index.

Google tries to detect a dynamic page by looking for ampersands and equal signs, as well as looking at the content of the page, it is really quite easy to fool.

e.g.: http://somesite.com/itemlist.php?listmode=1&category=beds&orderby=7
when 'rewritten' shows up as
http://somesite.com/items/1/beds/7.html

So 1 billion web pages could be, and I know a few thousand pages like this, just a few hundred thousand dynamic pages. Not that the pages don't have relevant information, some of the stuff can be redundant though. For instance, when the spider crawls across "Records per page = 10" > "Records per page = 20" > "Records per page = 30" etc.. or when lazy programmers don't use cookies and databases to store information but try and concatenate the URL with the user's selections. Thank god for that GET limit. People need to use POST!

If someone knows how to stop this message board from creating links out of false URLs please, let me know.

In AdBlockPlus one simply has to tell it to block http://somesite.com/js/abdetect.js . I guess you could embed the code, but that just increases the bandwidth.

When a website sucks, wouldn't it be cool if you could press a button and tell the geek who runs it to screw off? When a website requires cookies and javascript just to view their products or get some info, wouldn't it nice to tell them to suck eggs?

So why not put some buttons in the browser that simply load a URL like http://somesite.com/YourSiteSucks or http://somesite.com/IHateCookiesStopRequiring or other words "GreatResource", "GreatSite", "TooManyAds", "PopupsSuck".

It would request the URL but not bother to show the "Page Not Found" error so you can go about your business.

Then the webmaster will find those words in his logs and see them in his stat reports. If this gets popular, companies will find this a good source of feedback on their website.

No one can patent this idea, I just posted it publicly on slashdot!

When a website sucks, wouldn't it be cool if you could press a button and tell the geek who runs it to screw off? When a website requires cookies and javascript just to view their products or get some info, wouldn't it nice to tell them to suck eggs?

So why not put some buttons in the browser that simply load a URL like http://somesite.com/YourSiteSucks or http://somesite.com/IHateCookiesStopRequiring or other words "GreatResource", "GreatSite", "TooManyAds", "PopupsSuck".

It would request the URL but not bother to show the "Page Not Found" error so you can go about your business.

Then the webmaster will find those words in his logs and see them in his stat reports. If this gets popular, companies will find this a good source of feedback on their website.

No one can patent this idea, I just posted it publicly on slashdot!

When a website sucks, wouldn't it be cool if you could press a button and tell the geek who runs it to screw off? When a website requires cookies and javascript just to view their products or get some info, wouldn't it nice to tell them to suck eggs?

So why not put some buttons in the browser that simply load a URL like http://somesite.com/YourSiteSucks or http://somesite.com/IHateCookiesStopRequiring or other words "GreatResource", "GreatSite", "TooManyAds", "PopupsSuck".

It would request the URL but not bother to show the "Page Not Found" error so you can go about your business.

Then the webmaster will find those words in his logs and see them in his stat reports. If this gets popular, companies will find this a good source of feedback on their website.

No one can patent this idea, I just posted it publicly on slashdot!

When a website sucks, wouldn't it be cool if you could press a button and tell the geek who runs it to screw off? When a website requires cookies and javascript just to view their products or get some info, wouldn't it nice to tell them to suck eggs?

So why not put some buttons in the browser that simply load a URL like http://somesite.com/YourSiteSucks or http://somesite.com/IHateCookiesStopRequiring or other words "GreatResource", "GreatSite", "TooManyAds", "PopupsSuck".

It would request the URL but not bother to show the "Page Not Found" error so you can go about your business.

Then the webmaster will find those words in his logs and see them in his stat reports. If this gets popular, companies will find this a good source of feedback on their website.

No one can patent this idea, I just posted it publicly on slashdot!

<URL:http://somesite.com/>