No Tab Relocation Coming For Chrome

shaitand writes about Google disagreeing with the desire of Chrome users to put tabs under (rather than above) the location bar: "This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable dissent. But Google revealed their view on the community, saying that feedback and comments aren't considered, and today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue. [A Chromium developer] says, 'Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"

Comments

Use Firefox

[medlefsen]

Problem solved

Re:Use Firefox

[Tackhead]

Use Firefox
Problem solved

Compared to the thread on that bug, even the Firefox UI team's hostility to its userbase is but a pale imitation of Chrome.

But at least now we know where the Fx developers got the idea.

Re:Use Firefox

[Ihmhi]

I've had loads of friends ask why I don't use Chrome. Shit like this is why.

The worst thing I've had to deal with is tear-off tabs/tear-away tabs, which seems to be a highly unwanted feature by many people (and yet no configuration option exists in vanilla Firefox.) Bug 489729 is a wonderful addon which pretty much does what Mozilla was (in this one instance) too lazy to do - disable a new option they added that a whole lot of people didn't want.

In the Mozilla case, if they fuck stuff up there's other people out there who will unfuck it via addons, mods, scripts, etc. If Google fucks stuff up... well, you're just fucked.

Re:Use Firefox

[medlefsen]

I just don't get the whining. Not only are there multiple high quality browsers for every major OS, but two of the top four of them are open source. Each team is going to have their own vision for their product and that's just part of life. If you want a level of customization that Chrome doesn't provide, Firefox with it's huge extension database seems like a good match.

Re:Use Firefox

[uniquename72]

If you have more than a handful of tabs, they belong on the side of the browser anyway. Chrome allows this. Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that they're dicks, but it might help some people.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'll trade my tab location for bloat and churn. Fuck that noise. Firefox is everything I left IE over.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I hereby present you with my "Funniest Post of The Day." It's quite an honor.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox: Hey, guys, we're adding in a ton of new features! I mean, tons of them! Look how much memory we're using with all this random bullshit a couple guys with hideously esoteric tastes kept bugging us to add in!
Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We don't want features! It's too bloated and wastes too much memory! Why do we have to dig into config files and about:config to change this? Make it different! It physically hurts us somehow! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaah!
Chrome: Hey, guys, we're cutting out all this bullshit and not kowtowing to random esoteric features 1% of our userbase wants! Look how lean our browser is!
Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We want useless bullshit features! It's too nonconfigurable! Why don't we have to dig into config files and about:config to change this? Make it different! It physically hurts us somehow! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaah!

And this bitchfest right here has given me an entirely new appreciation for Firefox's and Google's devteams and some understanding of their arrogant attitudes if this is the sort of nonsense they have to deal with every day. Give the users an inch, they'll cry until you give them a mile, and then Chrome becomes just as bloated as Firefox just because a couple really loud nerds can't figure out how to install Opera.

Re:Use Firefox

[Guspaz]

Speaking as a Chrome user (and web developer), the ability to detach tabs is a critically important feature that I can't live without. The lack of said ability means that, when I need to view two tabs side-by side (often on different monitors), I have to open up a new browser and hope I can reproduce whatever was going on. It drives me nuts when I'm using a browser like IE, and am unable to do this. Even when I'm at home on my single monitor, and not working, I regularly tear off tabs and use the WIN+LEFT and WIN+RIGHT shortcuts to get them side-by-side...

I'm not sure how the feature works on Firefox, but on Chrome, there is no reason to add an option to disable this behaviour (and several reasons why not to add an option), as it's unlikely the user would do this by accident (having to click and drag a tab a decent distance to trigger it), the user can always simply not tear off tabs. Offering an option to disable it it would be like offering an option to disable tabbed browsing entirely; if you don't want to use tabs, just don't open any extra tabs.

Re:Use Firefox

[cloricus]

I'm pretty sure the rest of us left Internet Explorer due to its lack of bloat (no modern features at all) and its total lack of churn ('IE6 is perfect, it'll never need another release!').

Guess you just have a short memory.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox allows that too, courtesy of extensions. I like the Ff model of using extensions to add/modify/remove functionality, I just wish they carried it to the logical conclusion of making the browser itself minimal, with extensions providing many features that are now built in (e.g. awesome bar).

Hell, ship it with those extensions pre-installed, if you want to provide a "complete" UX by default for people without the knowledge/inclination to start with a minimal browser and choose their own set of add-ons, but let them be removed entirely instead of requiring additional extensions to override them.

Re:Use Firefox

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, while Firefox is customizable, the performance absolutely sucks. Just open one tab and go to some website that crashes Gecko, and the whole browser crashes. One tab is slow, the whole browser is slow. Too many tabs, and everything slows to a crawl, with long delays between typing into a textbox (like I'm doing now) and seeing the text show up.

These problems all exist because Firefox stubbornly clings to the antiquated and idiotic notion of having all tabs and windows run in a single process. Chromium doesn't do this, so I never have those problems in that browser. When is Firefox going to stop wasting time on useless UI changes and actually fix their architecture?

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem: For some incomprehensible reason, I want the horrid, horrid option of having tabs under the location bar rather than above it.
Solution: Use firefox.
Problem: Firefox is a buggy, bloated, memory-hogging, unstable piece of crap that can't be trusted to have more than a few tabs open.
Solution: Use chrome. Chrome just works. Realize that the idea of having tabs underneath the location bar was a retarded idea.

Re:Use Firefox

[lgw]

This may come as a surprise to you, but some people achieve less than divine perfection with their mouse input. As clicking on a tab is something people do often, it follows that clicking-and-accidentally-dragging a tab (by not releasing the mouse button as fast as you'd hoped) is a mistake that happens often. Making a product that annoys less dexterous users is almost as stupid as making a product that annoys less intelligent users.

Anyhow, who would you not offer an option for any UI behavior people are divided on? Sure, you'd want to hide most of them away in an "advanced" dialog somewhere to avoid clutter, but you can do that.

Re:Use Firefox

[Intropy]

While I'm right with you on the utility and convenience of tear-away tabs, I can see how users who do not want to use the feature might be annoyed by it. It is true that you have to move the mouse a good bit to tear a tab away, but I often like to drag tabs left and right within the same window, and occasionally while doing that I accidentally tear one off.

Re:Use Firefox

[Nom du Keyboard]

And Chrome was just overtaking Firefox. Now much might this attitude set them back now?

Re:Use Firefox

[Nom du Keyboard]

Unfortunately, while Firefox is customizable, the performance absolutely sucks. Just open one tab and go to some website that crashes Gecko, and the whole browser crashes. One tab is slow, the whole browser is slow. Too many tabs, and everything slows to a crawl, with long delays between typing into a textbox (like I'm doing now) and seeing the text show up.

My problem with FF is its still huge memory footprint. I can open up 4 tabs (a couple gMail accounts, Yahoo Groups, and Facebook) and before know it FF is consuming 450MB and climbing. That's insane for even dozens of web-pages at once. And I'm talking the latest FF.

Re:Use Firefox

[errandum]

Actually, you're mixing two things. Threads are supposed to have better performance, due to less cost when doing a context switch, but if the process crashes, everything goes. But performance and stability are two different things.

And nowadays I believe flash and things like that are run on another process, so it is less likely to crash... And having a process for each tab would require a full code rewrite, and I really don't believe it's worth it.

Re:Use Firefox

[Guspaz]

But if you're dragging a tab and accidentally tear it off, you can simply move the mouse back into the tab bar and it reattaches itself. This is no more effort than it would have taken to drag the tab into the correct position without tearing off, since you'd probably need to move the mouse back there anyhow.

Re:Use Firefox

[digitig]

Use Firefox Problem solved

Compared to the thread on that bug, even the Firefox UI team's hostility to its userbase is but a pale imitation of Chrome.

But at least now we know where the Fx developers got the idea.

Really? I wasn't aware of the debate, and would have the tabs to go underneath the location bar. I would have dissented if I'd knows such a move was being discussed. That bit of the Chrome interface is just fine for me. In other words, they're not ignoring their userbase, they're ignoring a small but vocal subset of their userbase who have reported a valid design decision as a bug. The position of the tabs is not a bug, FFS. The bug report complains that "For myself I use a program called Stickies at work that is basically just sticky notes on the screen with reminders of what I need to be working on. I generally keep these at the top of the screen because they are out of the way of any applications I have running. I am unable to switch between tabs with Chrome when it is maximized as I cannot see the tabs because they are above everything else." Well, sorry, but that's not a problem with Chrome, it's a problem with the way he's using Stickies, and if the tabs were underneath the location bar then he wouldn't be able to enter URLs. If he had a clue he'd just adjust the size of Chrome so the tabs were visible.

Re:Use Firefox

[geekoid]

Yes, because on one can make add on's for Chrome, or build there own browaers based on Chromium.

twad.

Re:Use Firefox

[geekoid]

This may come as a surprise to you, but the vast majority of users can use a mouse.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah, blah, blah. Excessive hyperbole, asshole.

Re:Use Firefox

[Guspaz]

You'd have to be moving that mouse around pretty darned fast for that to happen, but I'll concede that it'd be something that takes relatively little code to implement. However something like an option to move the tab bar isn't so simple. It would require extra clutter in the options and a ton of code changes to get around the fact that this would break a whole bunch of assumptions (both code and design assumptions), themes, etc. It would be a large amount of work for a limited benefit for a very small number of users.

Chrome has an experimental option to move the tab bar to the side of the browser. They've been working on it for quite some time. Last time I tried it, early on, it was pretty buggy, indicating that this is really not a trivial change.

Re:Use Firefox

[geekoid]

What dicks?
They made a decision, and made it clear that it's not something they are going to do.

Being a dick they would have kept the thread alive, with no real intention of doing anything. Instead that made a design, and told their users; that is the right way to handle it, even if you wanted the feature.

Re:Use Firefox

[geekoid]

Nope. It's a good, more friendly, and safer browser. the tabs being above or below matters not to the vast majority of users.

Re:Use Firefox

[swalve]

I respectfully disagree. The "stuff" for an object should go inside the object. Each tab has its own location, and as such, the location bar belongs below (inside) the tab.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you trying to say? You are spewing out gibberish! Of the 19 words in your comment, you fucked up 7 of them. That means that 37% of your comment consists of mistakes.

"on one" should be spelled "no one".

"add on's" should be "addons".

"there" should be "their".

"browaers" should be "browsers".

"twad" should be "twat".

Re:Use Firefox

[jlebar]

These problems all exist because Firefox stubbornly clings to the antiquated and idiotic notion of having all tabs and windows run in a single process. [snip] When is Firefox going to stop wasting time on useless UI changes and actually fix their architecture?

I think "stubbornly clings" is not supported by our actions. The multiprocess Firefox project is called Electrolysis. It's been going on for about two years now. We moved plugins to a separate process back in Firefox 3.6.4, in June 2010; that was part of the project. Firefox for Android uses two processes, to improve UI performance. Bringing multiprocess Firefox to the desktop is a priority, but it's hard.

We're working on it, but it's a false dichotomy to suggest that we need to choose between improving our UI and improving our architecture. Indeed, if we choose one over the other, we lose. We have to do both.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Re:Use Firefox

[MagusSlurpy]

This may come as a surprise to you, but the vast majority of users can use a mouse.

I actually occasionally have that issue when using the trackpad on my laptop. I think I am starting to develop arthritis in my right hand, because I am noticing things like that happening more and more often as my fingers just won't respond as quickly when they're in certain positions.

The mouse is still fine, never had the detach problem, and I'm still perfectly okay with FPSes and other games, but a few times a month the trackpad kills my hand, just from browsing and word processing.

Re:Use Firefox

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Keep your eyes on Electrolysis.

Re:Use Firefox

[Grishnakh]

Strangely enough, I believe the latest comparisons I've read on Tom's Hardware, I think, show FF as having the best memory footprint of all the browsers. I'm not sure how true that is, or if your use case is really different from theirs and yours is bringing out some bad memory leaks or something. Are you using an older version of FF, because these comparisons show the newer versions.

On the surface, however, it would seem that a single-process model would have a slight memory advantage over a program with a separate process for every tab/window. The problem is that this makes the performance suck.

Re:Use Firefox

[jlebar]

I just loaded up two gmail tabs, yahoo groups, and Facebook. According to Chrome's about memory, Firefox is using 262mb, and Chrome is using 288mb.

Have you tried disabling your extensions? Most memory leaks people see in FF are due to crappy extensions.

Re:Use Firefox

[Grishnakh]

Threads are supposed to have better performance, due to less cost when doing a context switch, but if the process crashes, everything goes. But performance and stability are two different things.

Depends on if your OS puts threads in separate processes or not. In Linux, every thread is really a separate process. But according to 'top', I only have one Firefox process for all my tabs and windows. Theoretically, this does have better performance and memory usage, but in practice it's another matter. The scheduler isn't going to see a Firefox process and give it more timeslices, it's going to give it the same priority as every other process. So if you have lots of tabs open, and some of them hogging the CPU because they have too many animations or whatever, then the tab you're trying to type a long message into is going to get starved and you won't see your characters showing up right away. On Chromium, with separate processes for each tab, this doesn't happen because every tab is really a separate process and no one tab can hog the CPU away from the others; the only way you'll see a real slowdown is if you use up so much memory that you start thrashing the swap space.

And having a process for each tab would require a full code rewrite, and I really don't believe it's worth it.

Well I think it's worth it because I'm tired of everything being so slow in Firefox. But I'm not waiting for the FF devs to agree with me; I simply switched to Chromium. So now they're not getting any kickbacks from Google when I do Google searches like they used to.

Re:Use Firefox

[hairyfeet]

Because Firefox performance is a heaping pile of suck? I have to support everything from the latest multicores to P4 office boxes and netbooks/nettops and I had to find another browser because after FF 4 all I heard was "Can't you find anything better? This is just soooooo slow!" Hell I even heard that from my quad core customers!

Frankly after the 3.0.x branch the FF devs lost their way, they just started aping chrome UI while slowing the living hell out of the browser. I have a 1.8GHz Sempron I use both as a nettop and test bed (since it roughly has the same performance and as an Atom based nettop) and frankly even FF 3.6 is like a bad joke compared to Chromium based browsers. With FF 3.6 launching a new tab will SLAM the CPU for a good 40 seconds and if that new tab has video? Better go make a sandwich, it'll be awhile. Compare to Comodo Dragon (based on chromium) where NO tab will slam the CPU hard enough to take control away from the user, and even video plays just fine. and do NOT say the "newer versions perform better" because that is a LIE. I have FF 7 on this quad and even with 8Gb of RAM it just creeps when compared to Dragon or ANY chromium based, its just a bad joke.

so we have a pretty good reason to whine, FF is now shite on a crusty roll, Opera? Frankly I can't stand the UI and most of my users don't care for the Opera way either, so that just leaves Chromium and IE. Now I don't know about the rest of you but I'll be recommending IE when they pry my cold dead fingers off the keyboard, as I've seen far to many drive bys targeting IE to risk it, so that pretty much leaves chromium. Hey FOSS guys, think we can have a fork?

Re:Use Firefox

[digitig]

s/have/hate to have/
Sorry.

Re:Use Firefox

[digitig]

Sorry, typo in my post. I'm on your side!

Re:Use Firefox

[DJRumpy]

That was my thought. I use this in Safari and often tear a tab out when I need to view two web pages at once. I also often recombine when I'm done. I agree that adding an option to disable seems like a gimme. Some times developers can be a bit hard headed if they forget that the people who use it are the ones to make happy, not just themselves. This is a primary reason that Linux never gained any traction on the desktop. Too much of "why the hell would you want to do that". I've made this mistake before trying to ignore user input and it only causes poor product reception later.

To this day I think some of their requests were asinine but in the end, if someone wants a feature and it's an easy takeaway, then do it and avoid the drama.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloat has to do with the memory or install footprint of a program, not the features. And churn is a reference to disk access.

Guess you have a limited understanding of the subject at hand....
 
Oh, wait... You honestly thought when more and more people were complaining about bloat and churn in Firefox they were talking about features and releases?!?!?! LOLZZ!!!! Wow. What a total dipshit.

Re:Use Firefox

[Enderandrew]

Slowing to a halt? Each successive release of FF since 3 has been faster than its predecessor.

Re:Use Firefox

[Tacvek]

You realize that you need to drag a tab pretty far to pull it off. Pulling downwards in Chrome, you have to get past the middle of the address bar before the tab pops off. In Firefox, I have to reach the bottom of the address bar before the tab comes off. Somebody who can accidentally move the mouse that far should probably try slowing down the cursor speed. That is by far the easiest way to increase mouse precision.

Re:Use Firefox

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

FireFox has color management though so images look correct!!!!!!!!!!!!

Google still has no clue about proper image/color rendering.

Firefox GPU acceleration is far better and faster.

Chrome is a fucking mess compared to firefox.

As for the ram firefox uses, chrome uses just as much. Install adblock on both, watch the ram on both.. they will be about equal.

Re:Use Firefox

[spitzak]

In Firefox, push the right mouse button on the tab, and pick "Move to New Window", and you will get a window.

Re:Use Firefox

[SharpFang]

Firefox doesn't try to conserve memory when it's not required. If there's 2GB free, it will acquire 1GB from it without any qualms, and use it to store a lot of pages including history pre-rendered for very fast switching. If the system starts running short on RAM, Firefox will scale back, flush and free the mem caches and behave more reasonably memory-wise (albeit slower).

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

while Firefox is customizable, the performance absolutely sucks

Can't imagine how that might be correlated. Nor can I imagine having a dozen processes all munching on a dozen plugins' XUL just to draw the window decorations is going to make it perform any better than the current single thread model.

Re:Use Firefox

[RoFLKOPTr]

I'll leave this here:

Comment 188 by pkasting@chromium.org, Today (99 minutes ago)
One more note here for the benefit of Slashdot (hi!) and anyone else who's not clear on this issue or how our bug tracker works.

We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time.

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback, or that we used to be listening on this bug but decided to stop. The issue is that our bug tracker is specifically about tracking what we consider to be bugs, not a general forum for feedback and debate on our design decisions. That means that in general (this bug included), we can and will decide not to address particular requests, and when we do, commenting on the closed bug is not going to make us change our minds. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to lock things down in the bug tracker precisely to prevent things from spiraling out of control or misleading people into sharing their feedback here instead of where it's helpful

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

We don't promise we'll change our minds, but we're not hostile to you expressing your point of view. This is just not the correct forum to do so.

Re:Use Firefox

[RobbieThe1st]

I think you have something else wrong with your system. I typically run 40+ tabs on my FF install and I've *never* had things get slow enough to make typing into a textbox lag(well, not from CPU usage anyway; 8ve had it happen when thrashing the disk one way or another but...). I've had animations cause skipping in html5 video playback, yes, but that's about all.

Re:Use Firefox

[RobbieThe1st]

Try disabling your plugins and extensions.

Re:Use Firefox

[BZ]

This may come as a surprise to you, but the vast majority of users under the age of 6 and over the age of 45 or so cannot in fact use a mouse at all well, in my experience.

And for the over-45 crowd it's not even an issue of never having learned it as much as an issue of getting older and fine motor control starting to go.

Re:Use Firefox

[ogl_codemonkey]

+1 Correct

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah, blah, blah. Excessive hyperbole, asshole.

Well, that's certainly helpful. Thanks for your insightful contribution. Now go kick your dog or something.

Re:Use Firefox

[mattventura]

Exactly. Chrome violates UI design principles by refusing to have a titlebar like applications should have.

Re:Use Firefox

[mattventura]

Your post makes it sound like people didn't want features. People just disliked the new "features" because they were all terrible. Up until FF4, there was never a single feature added that I didn't like. In fact, many people ditched IE due to IE6's distinct lack of features.

Re:Use Firefox

[mattventura]

The whole "more than a few tabs open" is complete hyperbole. I've had over 200 tabs open in firefox and it still ran fine. Also, tabs under the location bar keeps the tabs closer to the content, making it easier to access. Chrome doesn't just put tabs on top of the address bar, it invades the title bar, making it harder to drag windows around and not letting me see the full page title.

Re:Use Firefox

[Fallingcow]

Holy god, yes. FF needs to abandon the "fat browser with extensions" and move to a "thin browser with extensions" model. Maybe then they could make it not be a bloated piece of shit, and focus on things that are actually important, like improving JS performance and generally speeding things up.

Want to be sad? Go look up a screenshot of FF 1.0 or earlier (Phoenix or Firebird, too). What an awesome browser it used to be.

Re:Use Firefox

[Arker]

Hey, I am still using 3.6.23. It's not that I mind 'UI Improvements' but as the guy you were quoting phrased it 'UI changes.' It is common to act like the two are synonymous but to me it seems like the vast majority of 'changes' are not 'improvements.' A lot seems to be tinkering for it's own sake. Which is fine in it's place. The world's defacto standard web-browser just is not the place for it.

Re:Use Firefox

[mysidia]

they're ignoring a small but vocal subset of their userbase who have reported a valid design decision as a bug.

Except, Chrome's placement of tabs is not a valid design decision, and clearly a bug, even if some designer fancied it that way.

The problem is this design doesn't conform to the user interface design standards of the OS in question and clashes with the expectations of the average user.

The title bar of an application is not an area where application widgets are to be placed.

Re:Use Firefox

[Billly Gates]

Hey Hairfeet have you tried IE at all in the last 6 months?

On my computer it loads only 1 second longer than Chrome and is close.

I am not saying it is perfect but unlike Mozilla and Google, MS is actually listening to its users and noticing IE to firefox/Chrome migrations. Go try IE 9 or IE 10 for Windows 8 preview if you have it and compare it to Commodo and Firefox? IE is the most secure web browser out there and it is nothing like IE 6 of last decade. It is even compiled with exception handling audits to prevent attacks and it uses scrambling memory addresses to inoperate buffer attacks. It seems Chromium is ahead for HTML 5 support, but IE has them beat for video acceleration and smooth scrolling if you have a nice GPU for overall user experience. Go try a video intensive website and hit the up and down arrow keys with all the browsers?

IE 10 will rival Comodo dragon as it scores 301 from www.html5test.com. It is almost out. If you have old customers like I do in Florida who refuse to run anything other than IE, IE 9 is certainly tollerable. IE 10 for W7 will be out in a few months and try any site with Windows 8 preview with it? It will rival Commodo.

If you have a job stuck at the office with a MS only policy, then IE 9/10 are certainly doable and even IE 8 is tollerable. I love competition and this time MS noticed as they want an excellent HTML 5 accelerated rending engine for Metro. If you have business customers where you work installing IE 9 will surely work. ... unless of course you want them hacked all the time for repeat business ;-) ... then install XP with IE 7.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with that first part. It makes sense the way it is, I just didn't show up to voice my opinion. And I have to imagine there are about a gajillion little bugs and features that would come long before they add a setting to do that.

So, in short, they DID listen to their users. 3 of them shouted about something they wanted, they heard it, and rejected a bad idea. Listening does not always mean agreeing with that one weird guy over there. Next.

Re:Use Firefox

[SomePgmr]

I don't mean to be a brat, but that sounds like Chrome.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until FF4, there was never a single feature added that I didn't like.

I generally agree with you, but you forgot about "AwesomeBar" in FF3.

Ironically, AwesomeBar was/is horrible and was foisted upon users under an arrogant developer echo chamber landslide of, "if you don't like it, you are wrong." In one stroke the AwesomeBar completely broke my ability to find sites as I normally did, ie. by remembering the URL (starting with the domain). The AwesomeBar now "helpfully" reported suggestions based on page title (which I never remember) or substrings *within* the URL (seriously, who thinks this way?). People who complained about this were told, "You are wrong if you think this way. The AwesomeBar is awesome! (see what we did there?!) BTW, we helpfully obliterated any way for you to change location history mechanics back to the way it worked before, so all of those 'How to Disable AwesomeBar' guides will never actually work the way you expect."

In retrospect, it was the first sign of impending doom, a "we don't care what you want" that has become a common refrain at Mozilla. This misfeature, by itself, was the impetus for me to download and start using Opera instead of Firefox exclusively. The trend has continued over time and as Mozilla has engaged in their slow motion (but accelerating) trainwreck. Now I primarily use Chrome and Opera, with FF relegated for use at sites that don't work properly in those other two.

PS. I loathe AwesomeBar so much that I completely disabled suggestions in the FF location bar. Now the location bar suggests nothing, and I just run a Google domain-restricted search to find the URL I want. How's that for a "win"? Fuckers.

Re:Use Firefox

[Kjella]

I'd say by far the biggest complaint about Firefox is memory leaks, not memory use. To use a car analogy it's the difference between a car with poor MPG and a car with an oil leak that'll runs worse and worse and will grind to a halt unless you stop every few miles to refill it. Or leave it in the parking lot a few days and it's dead when you try driving it again. Choice is not bad. Choice that cripples the basic functionality of the product is bad.

Re:Use Firefox

[julesh]

Yeah. The problem is, how do you tell how much free RAM there actually is? The issue is clouded by two cases:

1. There is another program on the system that uses RAM because it's available (e.g. Photoshop)
2. There is a program on the system that relies on memory being available that isn't reported as in use (e.g. anything that uses memory mapped files, which includes most database systems)

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymus]

Thanks, I'll try out that test once Firefox opens. I tried opening it about 30 seconds ago, then I forgot that I started to open it so I clicked it again, so in another 30 seconds it should finally be ready.

Re:Use Firefox

[julesh]

Threads are supposed to have better performance, due to less cost when doing a context switch

The difference, if any, is minimal. A lot of the theory about content switch performance relies on outdated models of processors; note that from Core2 / Barcelona onwards, both Intel and AMD processors can store page table entries for multiple processes in their TLB and therefore do not need to flush them when the process changes. This means that theoretically, two small processes can perform as well as two threads in a single large process.

Where things *do* get interesting is in communication between those threads. Typically, a threaded model involves *more* communication (locking, etc), but each individual communication is more efficient (because it can use shared memory, rather than invoking kernel code).

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymus]

Having your own UI is, sadly, becoming standard practice now. Most of the Adobe suite has done it for years. Nearly every "quick" app designed for things like driver installation, or the free software you get with your new blu-ray drive or webcam use their own custom UI. I remember that Safari used to back when they were first releasing for Windows, but fortunately they don't seem to be so bad about it anymore.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

They are still dicks. It's the same thing with other features like ctrl-tab moving to last-selected (most recent tab). A lot of people were requesting it and a dev just changed at one point the status of the bug with "won't fix". In fact that lead me to reconsider opera as a secondary browser (firefox is my main one but I need two browsers on my PC for various reasons) and I found out that it evolved so much. I grew tired of trying to change something in Chrome.. it's a closed system much like all the Apple stuff. If you like it, use it. If not, don't even think about trying to influence its development, propose ideas or increased functionality.

Re:Use Firefox

[MaskedSlacker]

You know what else it doesn't do? Waste my vertical screen space (a major issue when almost all laptops are 16:9 or 16:10) on useless bullshit promulgated as "UI design principles."

That alone is why I have never considered going back to FF.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

In one stroke the AwesomeBar completely broke my ability to find sites as I normally did, ie. by remembering the URL (starting with the domain).

It still does that, type "blah.com/" and you'll get a complete history listing of pages that you loaded from blah.com.

The AwesomeBar now "helpfully" reported suggestions based on page title (which I never remember)

Apparently you've been using computers too long. Remembering something by what it is called or what it is about is how most people remember things. Since when do you look up a book in a library by remembering the Dewey Decimal number?

or substrings *within* the URL (seriously, who thinks this way?).

Not always helpful but websites which are properly organised ("something.com/2010/subject-area/article-title") can be searched more easily using it.

People who complained about this were told, "You are wrong if you think this way. The AwesomeBar is awesome! (see what we did there?!) BTW, we helpfully obliterated any way for you to change location history mechanics back to the way it worked before, so all of those 'How to Disable AwesomeBar' guides will never actually work the way you expect."

Because (see my first response) the awesomebar is a superset of the old location bar, it does everything the old location bar did (autocomplete based on a partially typed URL) as well as a full substring history search as well (not 'instead of' or whatever). If I invented a light switch which includes the ability to control the light brightness as well as turning it on and off (a dimmer with an "off" position) and people bitched at me that it is completely impossible to turn the light off using the new switch then I would think they were retarded as well.

Re:Use Firefox

[MaskedSlacker]

No, no one left IE over that, unless they left it five years after the rest of us. The rest of us left because it was a piece of shit to begin with.

Re:Use Firefox

[Shoe Puppet]

Anyhow, who would you not offer an option for any UI behavior people are divided on? Sure, you'd want to hide most of them away in an "advanced" dialog somewhere to avoid clutter, but you can do that.

A valid reason would be to save the effort implementing that option.

Re:Use Firefox

[Shoe Puppet]

Chrome has an experimental option to move the tab bar to the side of the browser. They've been working on it for quite some time. Last time I tried it, early on, it was pretty buggy, indicating that this is really not a trivial change.

It's gone in Canary now.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem solved

you said it sod chrome use FF..

not anonymous just got a gripe with tosser mods that are too busy getting wasted to do a proper job !!!

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you've been using computers too long.

Ah, back to the tired "You're wrong if don't you like the way the AwesomeBar works" trope. Not exactly a useful argument. I see you use an appeal to popularity in an attempt to bolster your position, naturally.

If I invented a light switch which includes the ability to control the light brightness as well as turning it on and off (a dimmer with an "off" position) and people bitched at me that it is completely impossible to turn the light off using the new switch then I would think they were retarded as well.

...and if your vaunted analogy light switch put the desired "off" setting 37% of the way between the switch poles, nestled between two "full brightness" modal points and lacking tactile feedback for the "off" mode, you would probably still be wondering why people didn't absolutely love your system. "But it's a *superset* of the old functionality! What's wrong with you?!"

That's the issue with AwesomeBar: previous operation, you would start typing the domain and you would only get results from that domain, sorted in appropriate order. Easy to find what you are looking for. AwesomeBar clutters the results up with useless crap until it's not even worth trying to filter/find what you are looking for anymore.

Because (see my first response) the awesomebar is a superset of the old location bar, it does everything the old location bar did (autocomplete based on a partially typed URL)

Simply not true. The matching and sorting are different. This makes my expected, correct match usually show up 10+ rows down. Maybe. What used to be a three character type & match now because a futile exercise in excessive typing to attempt to prune results. FAIL. If I wanted that, I would just use Google (and get body text matching too).

That said, I wanted to touch on the implications of one of your points:

Remembering something by what it is called or what it is about is how most people remember things.

Fair enough. I think what irked me the most is the attitude of the developers (and others like you). I realize that resources are finite and they chose to drop support for the system I preferred in favor of a different system that I loathe. I can grudgingly accept that. Where it crosses the line is when it becomes an ad hominem attack in support of the feature, eg. "No one wants to do it any other way.", and upon hearing protests to the contrary, retort with "You are thinking about it wrong." or "This is *awesome* and anyone who doesn't like it this way is stupid."

...at which point I will have an axe to grind. And I have a long memory.

Re:Use Firefox

[errandum]

I've had that problem when the browser needs to use the pagefile constantly (low RAM systems) but it happened in both Firefox and Chrome. But the latest firefox actually seems to use a lot less memory than chrome, and at the same time the animations run in separate processes, so both the supposed causes to your problem have been fixed.

Re:Use Firefox

[digitig]

The problem is this design doesn't conform to the user interface design standards of the OS in question and clashes with the expectations of the average user./quote. [citation needed]. Note that guidelines and style guides are not standards.

Re:Use Firefox

[Aqualung812]

That seems like a dumb memory management tactic to me.

So, if every program did this, then the programs that start first would eat up more RAM than needed, while those that start later would see high RAM usage & not grab as much.

Why not just get the RAM needed & unload it when done?

Re:Use Firefox

[datavirtue]

"unstable piece of crap that can't be trusted to have more than a few tabs open." .....Something is wrong with your computer.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is not. On a system with 8GB of RAM, Firefox--plain, vanilla Firefox with no extensions whatsoever--usually crashes when more than a few tabs are up. Chrome, on the other hand, actually works.

Also, why would you want the tabs below the address bar when you can simply move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen to access the tabs? It's a clearly superior UI choice.

Re:Use Firefox

[datavirtue]

WTF?! I had never paid attention to where the tabs are! Now that I look I'm flabbergasted. Firefox AND Chrome both keep the tabs at the top, and I like it. What the hell guys?

Re:Use Firefox

[mattventura]

Because the top of the window is where the address bar should be. I expect to be able to easily drag a window around just like every other window I open up. This is especially nice on a multiple-monitor win7 system, since you can just drag a titlebar to another monitor, even on maximized windows.

Re:Use Firefox

[SharpFang]

Not really - as the later program grabs a major chunk of the RAM left available, the earlier one sees there's less RAM and frees up some, so the later one can scale up again. So after a while they will split the RAM between each other taking a fair share each, leaving some available and if another one is loaded, the share of unused RAM shrinks again and both deallocate more to allow the third one to acquire more.

The question about "when done" is the tricky one.
  ask the user "Do you plan to go back to this page any time soon, or can I unload the pre-render already?" Or "Will you be using that tab with the huge document frequently and searching the contents at random, or will you just slowly read from the top, so that I can pre-render only the topmost part?"

This is all heuristics: grab more RAM and the user gets a better performance experience, as more things are cached in more "cooked", readily available form. You can render everything every time it enters the view area, or you can keep that all pre-rendered and just load up the image.

Re:Use Firefox

[mattventura]

Also, I only have 4gb of ram yet, as I said before, I sometimes open 200+ tabs. No crashes. And I even use some add-ons.

Re:Use Firefox

[SharpFang]

ad 1) assume there's 2GB RAM. Photoshop starts first.
Photoshop acquired 1GB of RAM. Firefox sees 1GB free, allocates 0.5GB. Photoshop sees there's only 0.5GB free, frees 256MB out of its allocation and Firefox, seeing there's another 250MB free, grabs most of it. Both have roughly 750MB allocated, with 0.5GB free. Add a third program and both will scale back, freeing some RAM for it, for a fair share.

ad 2) mmap either returns an address outside actual available memory space, not acquiring any real memory (O_SYNC) , or actually allocates quite a chunk of the memory to pre-cache the file content for random access, which then is in use, and is reported as such.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

the tabs being above or below matters not to the vast majority of [Chrome] users.

What, all 2 of them? :P

Ah, but I jest. I do use Chrome too, but due to its horrid UI, _only_ for accessing company email. Seriously, why the hell does it have to use an Aero-like window style in contrast to what Windows is actually set at? Friggin close button being 2.5 times as wide as the close button of every other friggin window I have open. I can't count the # of times I closed Chrome when I only meant to minimize it.

Re:Use Firefox

[Altus]

I wouldn't care so much about this except the tabs are up in the damn title bar on the mac. You end up with this tiny little slice of window you can click on to move it and most of the time you end up clicking on a tab instead. Its a terrible bit of interface and it assumes that all users are going to operate full screen all the time.

I have been pretty unimpressed by the UI designs I have seen coming out of Google and it does seem to come with a whole lot of the "We know whats best for you" mentality that only makes things worse.

Re:Use Firefox

[Altus]

There are fairly simple ways to mitigate this problem you simply don't pull the tab off until the user has dragged it a suitable distance from the bar. I haven't done any experiments but I would bet 150 pixels off would be a good place to start. If the user drags less than that distance you simply do not tear off the tab. You only provide visual feedback of the tear once the user reaches that threshold.

People have been dealing with this kind of problem for years and its just not that hard to work out.

Re:Use Firefox

[curunir]

Since the behavior that you use annoys so many others because it's so easy to do accidentally, why not require it to be an explicit action rather than an implicit one governed solely by mouse accuracy. Wouldn't it make sense to tie the tear-off functionality to a modifier key such that dragging merely re-ordered but SHIFT+drag (since SHIFT+click on a link opens the link in a new window) separated it into its own window?

Usability is all about making the most common usage patterns natural and the rest easy enough for people to adapt to them. For advanced users like you, I don't see a problem with requiring a slightly more complex action if it will make the product less annoying for the majority of users.

Re:Use Firefox

[Smallpond]

If your motor control is going at 45 you should probably get checked for ALS. Either that or you're using Windows and forgot to disable the "helpful" mouse features like "Enhance pointer precision".

Re:Use Firefox

[MrSmith0011000100110]

You're right. IE is the most secure browser, granted that you're not touching the internet. Look at any security forum, IE is typically below FF and the chromium based browsers(except Safari). It doesn't help that M$'s patching is done via Windows update which most people home users turn off. But to have a level of transparency between browser and OS always seemed a bit stupid to me. No wonder most Malware comes through IE.

Re:Use Firefox

[digitig]

That looks like a Mac specific problem. On Windows I still have a decent amount of bar to click on, although I'm not sure it would be right to call it a title bar because it doesn't contain a title.

Re:Use Firefox

[lgw]

It's good to be a young man and to live the life you please.
A young man is the king of every kingdom that he sees.
But there's an old and feeble man not far behind.
And you know he's gonna catch up to you,
Somewhere along the line.

Re:Use Firefox

[jlebar]

It's not that I mind 'UI Improvements' but as the guy you were quoting phrased it 'UI changes.' It is common to act like the two are synonymous but to me it seems like the vast majority of 'changes' are not 'improvements.' A lot seems to be tinkering for it's own sake. Which is fine in it's place. The world's defacto standard web-browser just is not the place for it.

I hear this all the time on Slashdot, and to be honest, I don't get it.

I understand when people don't like X or Y change, but the argument is often, as it is here, against change in general. Is the idea that Firefox should perpetually be stuck in the 2009? That Firefox 3.6 is the pinnacle of UI design, and that there's nowhere to go but down? Honest question.

To most people, the user interface *is* Firefox. We can't leave this static and expect to be relevant in three years. There are simply too many good ideas out there being implemented in other browsers. If you want a UI which will never change, use Lynx.

You're welcome to disagree with the design decisions which have been made, but I can assure you that they weren't made simply for the sake of tinkering with things. We have a team of really sharp designers who put a tremendous amount of thought into how Firefox looks and feels.

Re:Use Firefox

[arglebargle_xiv]

Use Firefox. Problem solved.

Don't worry, the Chromefox developers are hard at work to resolve this. Pretty soon it won't even be Chromefox any more, just Chrome2.

Re:Use Firefox

[hairyfeet]

If I don't have any extensions, then why would I just not use IE or Safari? That is like saying "Porsche is a gas hog but if you remove the engine why it gets incredible gas mileage!". BTW I ONLY have the SAME extensions on BOTH browsers. Both Dragon and Firefox have Adblock Plus and ForecastFox and THAT'S IT.

So the fanbois can mod down even though I'm reporting what I've seen with my very own peepers but it won't make black white nor will it make FF anything but slow as Xmas. same extensions, same OS, Dragon blows the doors of FF which seems to get slower to launch with every version, and unless you are running multicore (which I've found on multicore if you have less than a quad be ready for 100% CPU usage) it WILL make the entire machine unresponsive when launching new tabs and you can't even watch low res SD flash video without it being a slideshow. compare this to Dragon (again SAME extensions and OS) where no tab hits more than 70% and SD video plays smooth as butter, even on a 1.8GHz Sempron.

So I'm sorry Robbie but FF is going to crap. hell look at the numbers, folks just don't switch browsers willy nilly, it is often a PITA to re-learn all the little quirks and is irritating so folks don't switch until something becomes unbearable to them. for me it was time to launch and new tab generation which frankly after FF 5 became truly horrid on anything less than a high GHz multicore.

But hell don't take MY word for it Robbie, try it yourself. i'm sure like most geeks you have an older PC lying around, maybe something in the 2GHz without HT? If not simply disable cores until you are running single core, then compare FF and Dragon, or hell FF and anybody. you'll find FF is slower to load, slower to make new tabs, and if you bring up task manager (or if in Linux whatever the Linux equivalent) you'll find FF slams the living hell out of the CPU compared to other browsers. When finding something to replace FF (Because my users who typically don't have any extensions except ABP were bitching at me about how slow it was) I tried Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Dragon. Every. single. One. had better usage, both in CPU slamming and in new tab generation, than FF. don't believe me friend, try it yourself, its pretty dramatic, especially when compared to Opera and Dragon.

Re:Use Firefox

[lpq]

Being directly involved in reporting multiple bugs against this issue, it's a false idea that putting plug-ins in a separate process is a first step other than in your mind. Plug-ins have never been something that slowed down my firefox -- MAYBE on _A_ specific site, but if I was on that site and it was running a plug-in (usually multimedia), I almost have to be on that webpage because many multi-media plugins are auto-start. So you won't NEED to have them in background on a separate process!!!

What you need and for 2 years have claimed is 'too hard' (then you've got a problem -- you have a non-object oriented, monolithic core of code that is trying to emulate (run) objected oriented, separate tasks? You don't see that as being a fundamental design issue? Even the linux kernel can split off sub-processes to do work -- it doesn't try to do everything in 1 event loop, certainly it should be easier to achieve this in a browser (though I'd guess there are a few more people working on the lk, than on ff).

Each website needs to run in its own instance -- separate it out by domain.
Cross domain communication becomes inter-process communication. Any website that owns a 'frame' would be in its own process -- and inherently, it would limit would each website could monitor about other websites, to those things allowed by specification, not by browser leakage.

The UI -- is a separate process that allows the display port of a subprocess attached to a website to attach to it in an allowed window (with hooks to allow HW accell). It all fits with the new HTML5 'Displayport' model. The user could have multiple rectangular viewports into websites that could be mapped on to an area of the main window , hidden (as in a tab), or sent off to another window. The browser provides the I/O shell, and the IPC, But each 'displayport' has it's own javascript engine. Only global namespace items would be those communicated to the 'master' (presumably the GUI, though the gui could attach to a ff-daemon master
as well).

Anyway, that's what is needed -- separate processes by domain, so different windows could be opened on same domain, and all would share the same object vars...

I hope this gives you an idea of what is wanted/needed and why bringing out plugins are being in separate processes really pours salt on the wound (as it was, and still is accompanied by less stable performance than when a website's plug-in's were in the same process as the website they were running on).

-l

Re:Use Firefox

[hairyfeet]

Yep and I HATE it. No easy ABP style functionality, and waaaaaaaaaaay too many bugs out there specifically targeting IE. As someone who actually has to fix the things after they get infected you'd be surprised how many bugs come back to IE, and IE is the biggest target simply because as you note too many corps insist on IE only, making IE a juicy target rich with opportunity.

So I'm sorry Billy but before i'd switch my users to IE i'd write my own browser. IE is too big a target, too much malware, too much of a PITA to selectively remove ads (one of the biggest sources of malware) and frankly go to ANY security forum and look at how many warnings they have for IE, even the latest. It is just unreal. I'm glad i don't have to deal with IE only corps anymore and feel sorry for those that do, its just not a good browser. its STILL tied too damned closely to the OS (look at how the latest version won't run on XP and Vista, I hear the one for Win 8 won't run on Win 7, know why that is? TOO MANY OS HOOKS) which is a Titanic sized stupid design choice.

The browser frankly shouldn't give a shit WHICH OS its run off if its suitably isolated as long as the GPU supports the drawing features it requires. they simply don't know how to build a browser anymore, its an OS application that renders HTML. BAD design.

Re:Use Firefox

[bondsbw]

You're forgetting the first one.

(A long time ago in a galaxy far... nope, right here, 10 years ago...)
IE 6: Hey, guys. Suck it.
Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We want a good, free, open-source browser that can become popular and bring us true choice and extensions and get rid of crappy non-standard HTML sites.

I for one am glad that I have a real choice in 2011. We've come a long ways since the dark ages of the Internet.

Re:Use Firefox

[Arker]

I understand when people don't like X or Y change, but the argument is often, as it is here, against change in general. Is the idea that Firefox should perpetually be stuck in the 2009? That Firefox 3.6 is the pinnacle of UI design, and that there's nowhere to go but down? Honest question.

No, certainly not. BUT. This is a big but.

There is such a thing in Engineering as 'good enough.' And there is such a thing as 'switching costs.' Once a UI has reached a point where it *just works* for a large audience, changing the UI around, even in ways that are in some sense an improvement, at best still imposes a real cost on the users for an improvement that is so tiny as to feel theoretical.

In short, people rely on it every day. When they start it up and suddenly they have to find and learn and remember a NEW way to do something, they are going to be annoyed. Even if it is some slight improvement in some academic sense, the fact that I just spent 15 minutes learning the new way to do something that I have known perfectly well how to do for years is extremely annoying, at best. Add to that the fact that I dont see any real improvements in my estimation, however slight. Perhaps they are just so slight I missed them.

To most people, the user interface *is* Firefox. We can't leave this static and expect to be relevant in three years.

When a new feature is added, which does happen occasionally, some interface adjustment has to be made. But other than that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep tinkering with something that people have already learned and rely on; repeatedly forcing your loyal users to re-learn stuff we learned long ago for no apparent reason doesnt make you more relevant, it's just annoying.

Please try to keep in mind, the rest of us aren't *professional designers* and we dont use a browser or any other application (outside of entertainment, at least) because we want trendy or shiny. We use it because we want to get something done. Changing the UI around gets in the way of getting our stuff done; it's a negative, not a positive.

Re:Use Firefox

[jlebar]

What you need and for 2 years have claimed is 'too hard' (then you've got a problem -- you have a non-object oriented, monolithic core of code that is trying to emulate (run) objected oriented, separate tasks? You don't see that as being a fundamental design issue?

It is a fundamental design issue. That's why it's hard.

Even the linux kernel can split off sub-processes to do work -- it doesn't try to do everything in 1 event loop, certainly it should be easier to achieve this in a browser

We accept patches.

Re:Use Firefox

[Grishnakh]

I understand when people don't like X or Y change, but the argument is often, as it is here, against change in general. Is the idea that Firefox should perpetually be stuck in the 2009?

No, the argument is against change for change's sake.

What's wrong with 2009? Or any arbitrary year? Why does everything need to be constantly changed, just so it doesn't look "old"?

Do you see car designers moving the pedals around to different places, or putting the headlight switch in the back seat because it looks "cool" there, or removing the steering wheel and putting in a tiller because they don't want to look "dated"? When a product gets to a certain level of maturity, it doesn't need any more change, unless it can be shown that that change really is a benefit.

You're welcome to disagree with the design decisions which have been made, but I can assure you that they weren't made simply for the sake of tinkering with things. We have a team of really sharp designers who put a tremendous amount of thought into how Firefox looks and feels.

That's exactly what the GNOME and Unity guys said, and look at the crap they put out. Can't even turn off your computer without a secret keypress. That's like a house where you can't unlock the door to get out without pressing a special hidden button underneath a table lamp somewhere.

Re:Use Firefox

[Grishnakh]

Please try to keep in mind, the rest of us aren't *professional designers*

And this is probably part of the problem. When you have "professional designers" on staff, they're going to look for ways to make themselves look important and needed, and that usually involves making unnecessary changes, in what amounts to make-work.

Re:Use Firefox

[Billly Gates]

That is an obsolute argument from years ago.

Most malware comes through Java and Flash. It is never updated and installed on every computer regardless of browser. IE 9 on Windows 7 is a different beast altogether. Even IE 8 is patched frequently and is much more secure than the horrible older versions. Windows 7 updates automatically by default. In the US xp usage where that was option are below 25% now as W7 is taking over.

Windows only interferes with IE in the dlls for font rending, and drawing pixels on the screen. IE 9 uses DirectWrite and not GDI anymore so it is not that vulnerable like in the old days. Infact, Firefox uses DirectWrite too and makes the same calls to the DLLS.

I have not met a home user who wants them off except 1 who has an old system where theere is some compatibility issue.

Check any security forum for modern web browsers. Chrome is up there with the most holes. However, I give it credit the are closing most in the latest release and it auto-updates flash and PDF reading. That is a great thing to do for home users. I hope IE and Firefox follow that. IE 10 I think will.

Re:Use Firefox

[Billly Gates]

By the way I use chrome too and not a big IE only fan. I tried dragon as well.

Most of the issues I have seen in tech support are trojans that come through flash and java. Not IE unless it is really old like IE 7 with XP. Older versions SUCK really bad. I agree with you 100% on that. They deserved their bad reputation and Firefox coming in and leading people out 5 years ago.

Slashdot posted a study from a week or 2 ago showing only 1/10th of the vulnerabilities come through IE. The rest are flash vulnerabilities and social engineering tricks. If you worked on any corporation migrations from XP/IE 6 to Windows 7/IE 8 the first thing you notice is a big drop in infections and malware. It is very difficult to make any vulnerability an attack due to random ram address scrambling, exception bound checks, and full use of the EAP to make data inseperatable from execution in IE 9. XP only partially supported it due to legacy features. Some services ran without it and malware would target these services in older IE versions on XP. Windows 7 services all use EAP by default.

If people hate both browsers and change as well as insist on using IE because they do not want to learn anything else it is now a good option. Maybe not great, but certainly up there as a good browser. I prefer IE over Firefox anyday. It really saddens me to say this.

Check your latest forums again? The vulnerabilities in IE 9 are lower or the same as other browsers. Windows 7 auto updates by default now. It also warns people of a phishing link or malicious download. We of course know better but your users may not and so far the screening works best under that browser.

However, I give Chrome credit that it updates Flash automatically. MS admitted this as a security issue for IE. Dragon does not do this otherwise I would use it over Chrome. In terms of GPU drawing features a modern browser needs it. Ajax, webgl, ccs 3d, and even font rendering are all what browsers are doing where a nice directx/opengl api can make run smooth. Chrome is behind on this. Each browser has its own strengths.

Either way even if you do not use it. It is a good thing IE is getting better for everyone.

Re:Use Firefox

[RobbieThe1st]

Personlly, I've never had the issues you seem to have. I have a 1ghz pentium M tablet that I use occasionally, and I don't see the problems you do. At work, we've got a mix of 2.4ghz P4's and Intel Quads, and it seems reasonable on both: IE7 is an absolute nightmare on the P4, whereas FF7 is merely slow.
I haven't tried Chrome here for obvious reasons.

On my main quad, while I haven't done any core-limiting, I can tell you that Chromium/chrome(I've had both) is signifigantly slower to load pages(No pipelining?), and I lack any acceleration with the chrome-based browser: The CSS animation demo( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ) with the /limiter removed/ gives me around 300fps in FF, and 40 in chrome-based systems . FF is also around 40 with HW accel disabled.
I also run a number of extensions including NoScript, and end up with 500mb of memory used with my usual 40+ tabs, and it responds pretty well to random tab switching(switching within 50ms typically).
I do have slight issues with the JS GC algorithm and it making webm video skip slightly, but oh well .

Also, Chrome refuses to use my .fonts.conf file for font rendering, resulting in blurry, anti-aliased fonts. FF respects the settings I've chosen, so I get my usual clean fonts at 16px, with AA above that(I.E. like windows XP fonts). This is, for me, a *huge* problem.
That being said, I do use it - I can't get FF to use the Google Talk plugin, so Chromium is kept around for free calls via it.

As far as disabling extensions go, What I'm saying is disable everything until you get improvement, then figure out what's causing the issues. Could it be ABP poorly written or with a bad set of filters? All those filter regular expressions aren't free, you know...

Re:Use Firefox

[hairyfeet]

What OS? What make CPU? What speed HDD? How much cache? all of these things I've found make a BIG difference in FF, in dragon? Not so much. In fact the ONLY customer I didn't have complaining about FF speed (and all are updated to current,7.01) was the customer who had me replace his drive with a 7200RPM with 32mb of cache. on THAT drive its fast. 5200 and 5400RPM drives? its horrible. And while I don't know what that test you linked to is supposed to show, i know that on my customer's FB pages FF runs like ass, and often won't load half their apps, whereas Dragon? snappy and quick to load. So that test doesn't really jive with what my customers are running so it really isn't much help.

Myself as well as several of my customers use Samsung EcoDrives for OS drives, as they really cut down the heat and the large cache generally makes them faster than most 5400RPM drives again EXCEPT for FF. With FF you can launch it a dozen times, it'll be just as slow to launch the fifth time as the first. dragon by comparison is instantaneous after the first launch and damned near instant on the first launch.

I have also found that FF doesn't seem to like AMD CPUs very much, at least on windows. i have to wonder if they are using the Intel compiler which cripples any program compiled with it when run on AMD CPUs. It also seems to fair better on linux, possibly again a compiler issue. since i refuse to sell Intel CPUs since it came out they were bribing OEMs? that kinda makes for a problem.

So while I have no doubt your experience is vastly different than mine, as i've pointed out at least with FF hardware and OS can make a BIG difference. In fact on the older AMD XP boxes I've found anything over 3.6 to be frankly unsable. it simply slams the CPU too hard and can't even run the most low res flash videos, whereas again Dragon has no problem .

while i'm no browser developer I WOULD love to know EXACTLY what they are doing as far as a compiler, which one, what use flags, etc. Because i have a feeling a lot of what many of us have experienced with FF can be traced back to the compiler, like I said I wouldn't be surprised if they were using the Intel "crippletastic" compiler which makes FF simply unusable on AMD CPUs.

Re:Use Firefox

[Billly Gates]

I am sorry. Wow does that suck.

I have an aging laptop that used to run Firefox for Linux and Windows. It is just too slow when runnning things like www.msnbc.com. I switched to Chrome on Linux and use IE 9 and Chrome for Windows. I would say even IE 8 or IE 9 is better than Firefox if you have a slow system. IE 7 is truly horrible. I had font issues too with Ubuntu. Switched to Fedora/CentOS and they went away. Ubuntuy does not use standard font settings in Xorg and refuse to patch bugs assuming that is your problem too that I had.

I was just explaining to Hairyfeet too that GPU is the weakest in Chrome even if it is liter so it depends on what you value. Did you remember to go to about:flags in Chrome and turn on Hardware Accelerated Canvas? I do not know if it works on Linux as I quit that OS last March due to Gnome3 and Unity but I know on my computer it is 2d by default. I hope your office upgrades soon as IE 7 is a security nightmare compared to their latest cousins in Windows 7 which I find shocking decent. Especially IE 9/10 that has the best font and graphics rendering available.

Re:Use Firefox

[Billly Gates]

You are right on with Intel. God help you if you have a 2007 era TurionM like I have on my laptop. Yes even the Linux version of Firefox is compiled with the Intel compiler. Firefox 3.6 was slow at times but tollerable on Linux with it. Firefox 4 is bad. Chrome was much better on Linux. I miss the old fast phoenix days of Firefox but with Asa employed it is dead. I have Windows on that laptop now and still use Chrome and IE 9 and refuse to put Firefox back on it. I put in a 7200 RPM drive too. Page loads and javascript just seem to time out if there is too much of a load under FF. At least thats what it feels like and the scrolling is dog slow with no usability testing. Just fast releases in which Asa mysteriously thinks that will bring 1 billion users.

Chrome and now MS at least, are focusing on that and makeing it feel fast and decent for browsing experiences rather than supporting xyz for some unfinished spec that no one will use for 4 years.

Re:Use Firefox

[hairyfeet]

I KNEW IT! Once you know what to look for you can spot that Intel POS compiler a mile away! The difference is in load times, with the Intel compiler ANY math heavy code, or code that SHOULD be sent to the GPU? Runs like absolute shit on AMD CPUs thanks to their purposely crippling the code and forcing it to run in x87 mode, which hasn't been supported as a mainstream codepath since 1995. I honestly don't understand (except maybe for bribery) why Intel hasn't been busted under antitrust, I really don't. What they have done is EVERY BIT as bad as the "Windows isn't done unless lotus won't run" and in fact WORSE, since everyone could easily see with lotus it was Windows causing the problem since the program wouldn't run. With the Intel compiler it ACTS like the program is working when in reality it is purposely hamstringing every single application compiled so that it runs like shit on any AMD or Via. BTW did you know it cripples for Atom too? That is how they upsell their Celeron and Pentium low end chips. Sorry fuckers.

But when it runs okay on a P4 (they heavily optimize for that POS) but runs like ass on a much newer AMD? Its the Intel compiler. This just adds one more reason to the "Don't use Firefox" list as I won't have a browser that requires certain CPUs just to function. To me that is just as dumb as MSFT tying new versions of IE to only certain OSes. If it is not been EOLed it SHOULD run, period. But I could tell they went to the Intel compiler around the 3.5 branch as everything before that ran okay, everything after ran like it was underwater. stupid move Moz, stupid move.

Re:Use Firefox

[jlebar]

Do you see car designers moving the pedals around to different places, or putting the headlight switch in the back seat because it looks "cool" there, or removing the steering wheel and putting in a tiller because they don't want to look "dated"?

Consider the Prius. The Prius's dashboard isn't in the usual place. It has a digital speedometer and no tackometer. You start it by pushing a button, not turning a key. You can unlock some models just by walking up to it. Oh, and Toyota just redid the body design this year.

Maybe you don't like the Prius. That's fine. But you'll grant me that lots of people do like it, despite these unnecessary changes. Toyota must be doing something right.

When a product gets to a certain level of maturity, it doesn't need any more change, unless it can be shown that that change really is a benefit.

I think what you mean is, when a product gets to a certain level of maturity, it doesn't need any more change, unless I really like that change. But the fallacy I keep hearing on Slashdot is that what I like is the absolute measure of what's good in the world.

If the changes we've made to the UI are really so heinous, a group of people will come together and either provide security updates to Firefox 3.6 until the end of time or maintain an extension which brings FF 3.6's UI to new versions. I don't think that would be so bad. To each his own.

Re:Use Firefox

[RobbieThe1st]

I'm using a Phenom II x4 proc on my main system, though everything else is Intel - I try to go AMD when I can, but, well... it can be hard(and near impossible when picking up junk systems).
Perhaps Iceweasel uses the GNU compiler(likely) which solves that, though I didn't see any issues with FF nightlies a few months ago.
As far as disk goes, I'm currently running
3x7200rpm drives in raid-5, and I used to simply have FF's disk-cache ram backed for extra speed. Still, even without that, it's reasonable.

Using Intel's compiler, though... cheap shot, I'll agree to that.

Re:Use Firefox

[RobbieThe1st]

Let me take this one thing at a time:
1. IE7 appears to be horrible, and it was the only browser on the one P4 2.4ghz in my area - it's a machine basically used for a time clock and communicating with special stuff over RS232, so it doesn't really need much. Giving it firefox, though, gave me a workable system I could use if needed.
2. Font issues: No, on both Ubuntu and Debian it's the same: By default, all fonts are subpixel-rendered, like Win 7 fonts are. I like the sharp-and-clean look of XP, so I have a custom .fonts.conf file to make that work. FF and all other programs handle it just fine, chrome ignores it.
3.No, I haven't messed with about:flags - I don't really want to use it, and so haven't done more than a cursory attempt to improve it. I like My FF(derivitives, currently running iceweasel) due to it generally working, allows me to tweak everything and continue to use my FF2/3 UI setup, and allows my pack of addons(disabling compatibility checks really helped).
4. IE9/10, I couldn't care less about: Our two windows 7 machines(out of 4 total in my area) have FF7 which everyone uses(Hooray!) and it works well enough to keep me from trying other stuff.
Also, I suspect that when you say "best font rendering available" you mean "blurry sub-pixel antialised fonts, like the rest of W7"... which I don't like. I see XP's font rendering as far better than anything later, at least on these sub-100 DPI displays.

When we get 200dpi displays, I'll change my mind(subpixel AA looks great on my 230+ dpi N900). But not before.

Re:Use Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Go away and leave them both open for a few hours and see what happens. Firefox will just creep up for no reason until you have to close it.

This

[ackthpt]

This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable dissent. But Google revealed their view on the community, saying that feedback and comments aren't considered, and today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue.

This is what I don't like about Google, above all else. This is utterly contemptible behaviour and quite often why I find myself swearing at them as I try to find a work-around.

Getting too big for their britches.

Re:This

[tidepool]

This is what I don't like about Google, above all else. This is utterly contemptible behaviour and quite often why I find myself swearing at them as I try to find a work-around.

Getting too big for their britches.

And this is why I am downloading Opera now. Why is it once a company gets more 'market-share' in whatever 'industry', they start being absolute dickheads?

Re:This

[billcopc]

If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.

And for the record, I'm a Firefox user. As a developer, I would not want to live without Firebug and 3 dozen more add-ons. Chrome is a "consumer" browser, much like Safari and Opera, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Re:This

[NeutronCowboy]

And this is why it's important to have several browsers around that all implement the same standards. This kind of competition is awesome, because a new browser is just a click away. Don't like Chrome? Go for IE or Firefox. Or the other half-dozen options that are available. Features that drive people away will either be killed, or result in the death of the browser.

I really hope that three browsers will remain at the top of the heap for a long time. That makes it a lot harder for one to dictate how the web works, and for two to collude on how the web works.

Re:This

[Hentes]

I'm sorry, but while you can place the tab bar on the bottom in Opera, you can't place it directly under the address bar.

Re:This

[medv4380]

How is this that contemptible? It's not immoral, unethical, or even evil. It's a painter saying no I like my painting with purple grass, and I don't care that you want green grass in my painting because it's my painting. If you want green grass go to that Van Gogh guy. This isn't really a "bug" ether. It's an aesthetics request. It is behaving exactly as the designer wanted it to.

Re:This

[Nick Ives]

Yea, this is shocking behaviour.

We should organise a class action to get a refund for the money we've spent on Chrome!

Re:This

[Adm.Wiggin]

If you ask the users what they want, they'll tell you that they want a faster DOS...

Re:This

[pspahn]

Chrome is a "consumer" browser, much like Safari and Opera, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I know that Firebug is really popular. I use it on occasion. Personally, I prefer GDT. I just find it a helluva lot more useful.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting too big for their britches.

As mentioned in the rant by the Google employee last week the Google Chrome Team hates their users:

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.

Re:This

[ackthpt]

Yea, this is shocking behaviour.

We should organise a class action to get a refund for the money we've spent on Chrome!

It's not about Chrome, but their attitude towards their users/customers. While I understand wanting to maintain their direction in product development, simply telling the user base their opinions do not matter is rude. Users often offer up great feedback, which I value. I weigh everything when someone discusses my apps, to bulldoze ahead without taking any pulse is to do what Microsoft have done. See how well it has worked for them?

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

"contemtable behavior"? Seriously? It's a company making a product to their views of what works and giving it away for free. If you don't like their decisions you are free to do one of the following:

* Don't use it
* Fork Chromium and make the change

Nowhere in there is "* Whine about it and then get upset when you don't get your way."

Re:This

[mk1004]

You can have any color you want, as long as it's chrome. I prefer Chrome, or even a hammer and chisel, over IE, and as others have commented, Chrome is simple and uncluttered. If Google doesn't want it to morph into bloatware, that's their call. More power to them.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. How dare Google act upon it's opinion about the browser it pays to develop.

I'm sorry, but your assertion is just absurd. It is not contemptible in the slightest for any open source dev to create a project they want. It is their time and money. And you know what, someone is free to fork Chromium and change the GUI. Or, someone could create a patch set. Or, my favorite option, don't get your panties in a bunch about an inconsequential feature.

Re:This

[badboy_tw2002]

Ok, but they have millions of users. The vocal 185 that posted on the bug may represent 1 million users or may represent 185. This was a bug, not a design preference, and given the tasks they need to do saying "Hey, we made a decision, sorry, not taking anymore comments" on this bug is not that big a deal.

Re:This

[arth1]

I'm sorry, but a browser is not a piece of art.
It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it.
Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

Re:This

[shutdown -p now]

Er, yes, you can.

1. Right-click toolbar -> Customize -> Appearance.
2. In "select which standard toolbars you want to show", check "Main bar" (it's a toolbar that is above the tab bar).
3. Remove any predefined buttons on "Main bar", and place Back/Forward/Reload buttons, address and search fields etc on it, according to your taste. Now you have a duplicate address bar above tabs.
4. Uncheck "Address bar" to hide the 'real' address bar (below tabs).

Re:This

[shaitand]

Tab relocation isn't a feature that is going to slow down the browser or the fast js rendering engine that gives Chrome its edge. It's a basic usability feature.

Re:This

[shutdown -p now]

It's a sad day when basic UI customizability is referred to as "bloatware" - on Slashdot of all places. I remember back in teh days when Firefox (then Firebird) appeared, "bloatware" was having an email client in your browser.

I can't help but think that Apple has truly 'advanced' the industry in a very short term.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is being completely idiotic... give the users the option. Chrome is not some holy grail divine inspired gift from heaven. It's a tool... and apparently a very inflexible one.

Re:This

[shaitand]

It's a usability request. There are a number of situations, such as via a terminal server, where there is a screen element at the top of the screen. It also means moving the mouse further every time you switch tabs.

This isn't evil per say. As you say, it is their design and their browser. But it is also pitched as being open and in the open source world it is a big deal (whether you are for or against) if a project is or is not community driven. A direct statement that community feedback isn't a consideration in their development process matters to many people. I for one don't want to be part of the community Google CLAIMS it wants to foster if that is the case.

Re:This

[mr_shifty]

Yeah, except all three are in a race to copy each other.

For about the last two years, I've been in a continuous cycling between Opera, Firefox, Chrome.... back to Opera, back to Firefox, try Chrome again.

Each one of them sucks in its own particular way, and all three suck in some of the same ways.

I for one am getting sick to death of it.

I don't have a browser that is my "favorite". I just have a list of "which browsers suck the least, in this order".

Re:This

[mr_shifty]

Agreed.

Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.

And rejecting at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome that is for steering the vehicle.

It's a simple matter of a checkbox, in a browser, not a fricking vehicle redesign, in the case of a car.

If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.

Re:This

[shaitand]

Google claims to be trying to build a community around Chrome as an open project. People who might consider joining that community have a right to know that this not only isn't a community driven project but that community feedback is openly ignored in the development process.

This is information spreading and not whining. People have the right to know about something like this so they can make an informed decision about whether to

* Don't use it
* Fork

Re:This

[shaitand]

Google is free to do what they want. And I am free not to participate in their community and share their openly expressed views with others so they can make an informed choice on whether to do the same.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

you speak about terminal and you still use the mouse to switch between tabs?

Re:This

[citizenr]

I'm sorry, but while you can place the tab bar on the bottom in Opera, you can't place it directly under the address bar.

actually you can place it in front, next to, above, below, or even on the side. Opera UI is customizable to the smallest pixel.

Re:This

[hedwards]

You act like Firefox is slow, the only times I have a problem with speed is when my internet connection stalls out, and that happens with other browsers as well. Even my laptop with dual core 1.6ghz processor I don't have any trouble with Firefox keeping up.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? "Informed choice" with regards to tab placement? People need to get senses of humor.

Re:This

[hedwards]

Yes, but Van Gogh only had to sell the painting once to one person, the folks at Chrome are wanting large numbers of people to use Chrome.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Firebug is probably better in some respects, I hate the fact you can't right click file paths in GDT to open them in a new tab, also if you modify a CSS rule you have to hit enter to apply it, rather than it doing it on the fly.

But, even though I have historically developed things in Firefox, I always use Chrome for general browsing, and now find myself using it more and more for development too. The GDT does get better with each release, small things really, but when you use it daily they are things that annoy.

Re:This

[digitig]

Keep adding features like that and it will slow down load time. From time to time I open Firefox, get bored waiting for it to start, open Chrome, do the job I wanted to, close Chrome, switch back to Firefox and wait for it to finish opening so I can close it again.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you're paying Google for Chrome? If not, your analogy is dead wrong.

Re:This

[geekoid]

The problems is you.

Just like when everyone around seems like a dumb ass? it's you.

Re:This

[digitig]

It's a usability request. There are a number of situations, such as via a terminal server, where there is a screen element at the top of the screen. It also means moving the mouse further every time you switch tabs.

Or they could [Ctrl][Tab] between tabs. And if Google moves the tabs below the location bar, that screen element will obscure the location bar, and the user will have to move the mouse further to access that.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

So you have an easier time comparing a browser to carpentry than you do to art?

Also, in this case you are asking the carpenter to make a change to a cabinet that he is giving to you for free. (that is supported by the ads placed on it, I guess) ..and a change that will not only affect you but every other one of the carpenter's customers who wish to have a cabinet.
I say that because like Chrome, the cabinet this carpenter makes is a single product that is mass-produced for the public. Any changes made affect everyone. Adding the ability to make a cabinet customizable requires adding complexity to the mass-production process.

I know you would normally expect a carpenter to make cabinets to your specifications, but that is what makes carpentry a bad example.. Do you honestly expect Google to make a custom web browser, just for you?

Re:This

[geekoid]

No, it's like a company making a decision about what to do with their product. One that is given away fro free, I might add.

It's also about a company being up front about the decision instead of leading you on for fear of hurting market share.

Re:This

[digitig]

And remember, those who commented were those who looked up a bug report about the tabs being under the location bar. Users who were happy with the way things are would never have seen the discussion, so it was hardly likely to be a representative selection of users.

Re:This

[shaitand]

Terminal servers supply remote graphical desktops these days grandpa ;) I generally use the mouse when browsing as it is a visual point and click medium and outside a discussion forum my hands would rarely be on the keyboard when using a browser.

Re:This

[geekoid]

Tabs are better and more user friendly on top.

"It's a simple matter of a checkbox"
ignorance SUPREME!

It's not 'just adding a check box.

It's putting a check in code, it's remembering the selection, it's maintaining it, it's script testing, it more QA, and on and on.

All of which is doable, but not worth it for google.

And seriously, if tab position is your determination for what browser you use, then you are pretty useless.

What a simpleton.

Re:This

[shaitand]

Tabs need to be interacted with FAR more often than the location bar and since the web is a point and click medium the need for key combos should be minimized.

Re:This

[geekoid]

Fork it; build your own browser on Chromium. OS isn't not about the community driving YOUR project. If ti comes down to what a bunch of load mouths in the community want it because a pile of crap that almost does everything pretry close to good.

It's like what happens to a protest after a bunch of uneducated unemployable hippies show up.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but a browser is not a piece of art.

Wrong. A tremendous amount of design and artistic consideration goes into creating the User Experience (AKA: UX) in most modern software.

It may not be art in the traditional sense, but then again at one point Impressionism, Film-making, and Photography weren't considered art either, so what qualifies as "art" is, and always has been, subjective. As we move forward in the 21st Century, software UI/UX design is becoming more and more artistic, and could thus be considered "art" at some point in the not to distant future (when the current "art" establishment stops being stuck up snobs and recognizes a new art-form).

Think for a moment how the Chrome UI works. The Location Bar being below the tabs actually makes more sense than the other way around. If you pay attention to the UI it looks like you have 3 browsers open, but captured in the same window. The location bar is blended with the tab to make this illusion more real. A lot of thought and effort obviously went into this. Love it or hate it, it would be a major effort to come up with a way to make the same tabs look good in an alternate configuration where the tabs are below the location bar. Even in Open Source someone has to drive the community to a common vision. In this case, it's Google's browser, so they get to decide the direction. If the community disagrees they could always fork the project. Users only want the tabs below the location bar because that's how Firefox and IE use to do it. However, now Firefox even puts the tabs above the location bar (but not in the window chrome like Chrome does). Safari still uses the old way, and I haven't used a recent version of IE in a while, so I can't speak to that.
 

Re:This

[macshit]

If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.

Hmm, on the other, I've noticed that the most recent FF (7.0.1, but I think the changes started in 6) is significantly faster than chrome, and uses less memory on average! I used chrome until recently, but have now switched to FF because of this (my work machine only has 1GB of RAM, so I'm verrrry sensitive to browser bloat).

That isn't to say that FF isn't a bit too complicated / bloated / whatever, but the FF devs have been doing some very good work...

Of course, obviously so have the chrome devs, and I think the competition is very healthy. I suspect one factor in the recent FF improvements is the fire lit under their posteriors by the success of chrome...

Re:This

[geekoid]

It wasn't ignored, it was considered and turned down. The they told people about ti so they wouldn't be strung along.
It's a very professional way to handle it. most companies would have strung people along.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should RTFA and not the retarded summary. The googler commented that they weren't listening to feedback on a closed bug due to that fact ITS A FUCKING BUG TRACKER and not a design discussion forum. He was trying to help people avoid wasting there time and point them to proper areas for discussion, which the bug tracker is not, but hey keep not reading and spreading further BS, THIS IS SLASHDOT!!!! (We don't read)

Comment 188 by pkasting@chromium.org, Today (3 minutes ago)
One more note here for the benefit of Slashdot (hi!) and anyone else who's not clear on this issue or how our bug tracker works.

We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time.

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback, or that we used to be listening on this bug but decided to stop. The issue is that our bug tracker is specifically about tracking what we consider to be bugs, not a general forum for feedback and debate on our design decisions. That means that in general (this bug included), we can and will decide not to address particular requests, and when we do, commenting on the closed bug is not going to make us change our minds. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to lock things down in the bug tracker precisely to prevent things from spiraling out of control or misleading people into sharing their feedback here instead of where it's helpful

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

We don't promise we'll change our minds, but we're not hostile to you expressing your point of view. This is just not the correct forum to do so.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Firefox has the option of having the tab bar above or below the URL bar, I don't see why Chrome couldn't have a similar option, it wouldn't add any bloat if done correctly.

Re:This

[Frosty Piss]

No, it's like a company making a decision about what to do with their product. One that is given away fro free, I might add.

It's also about a company being up front about the decision instead of leading you on for fear of hurting market share.

Quite right. And, rather than a "car analogy", I like to use the "Chihuahua analogy":

A lot of noise from a small but vocal minority who seem to think their needs transcend those of all others.

I like the tabs at the top. And I like "swell" UI design by UI specialists. But who am I...

By the way, my little Chihuahua friends, FireFox beckons you.

Re:This

[steveg]

Firefox improvements?

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors

But it's not your cabinet. And if you really want hinged doors the carpenter will give you the blueprints and working tools to do it yourself. Not all carpenters will do that, with Micro-Softwood and Applebark you get what your given.

Re:This

[arth1]

Oh, you're paying Google for Chrome? If not, your analogy is dead wrong.

If you believe you're not paying Google for Chrome, you're not dead wrong but dead stupid.
Google doesn't operate as a charity. You pay by feeding them information and by advertising, of which you get no share -- or, rather, your share is the browser.

Just because someone else pays in part for goods and services doesn't mean you should be ignored. Without users, no product is viable.

Re:This

[digitig]

How could it possibly not add bloat? It would need extra code to handle the user preference and the variant layouts. That's exactly what bloat is, extra code to handle loads of extra options and functions. Yes, this is only one option, and wouldn't make much difference in itself, but how many other things might users want to configure? Sooner or later either Google are going to have to say, "no", or there will be a notable performance hit. If there's a performance hit then Chrome loses one of its main benefits, and as soon as they say, "no" we get exactly this sort of howling about ignoring the users. Google needed the courage to take a stand and say "we are marketing on speed rather than confugurability" and let the market decide whether that's a viable market position.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

billcopc: With the latest 64-bit Firefox nightly builds chrome loses its speed and stability advantages. so the point is moot.

Wait, I take that back, I think chrome still benchmarks well, but in general navigation the difference is not even noticeable, not like it used to be.

Re:This

[digitig]

Speak for yourself! But next time I'm designing a web form I'll remember to put a pop-up keyboard on screen so you can use that to enter your data.

Re:This

[Kozz]

I'm sorry, but a browser is not a piece of art.
It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it.
Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

On the other hand, have you ever got a carpenter to make a high quality piece for you, even if you didn't agree with all the aesthetics, and the price was free? You received no less than what you've paid for, I figure.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

However, you're paying your carpenter for a service. If he refuses to do what you ask, then you find another carpenter, as you are paying for the service. If you don't like the options that your free browser provides, then get another free one that does. Google may be "quirky", at best, but it is their product, they're offering it up to you, and you can take it or leave it, as suits your needs.

Re:This

[psiclops]

Not making a change that someone requested != openly ignoring them.

Re:This

[Capt. Skinny]

It's not like that at all. Hiring a carpenter would be analogous to hiring a developer to write a custom web browser for you. If that were the case, then yes, customers would have reason to gripe. But Google's response is more like a cabinet manufacturer that offers its wares on the open market (a la Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). Customers can gripe all they want, but if it's not a bespoke job then you have to choose from what's available.

Even in a free market economy, consumer choice among vendors is limited to those vendors who choose to enter the market.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it will mean more code, but the extra code would have to be optimized code, therefore the bloat should be pretty much unmeasurable. unless you are REALLY anal retentive.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Google do not work for you, they manufacture a product that you consume or not as you choose.

This is more like a car manufacturer saying that their 2011 metro town car will come with reverse hinged doors, despite a number of people stating they prefer standard door hinges the manufacturer is exercising their right to make the product the way they want, you as the consumer can exercise your right not to use their product.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Chrome is based on WebKit, just like Safari. Google might as well take an extra page from Apple and go "La la la... we can't hear your opinions... we can only hear praise from the sheeple."

Re:This

[smellotron]

It's a sad day when basic UI customizability is referred to as "bloatware"

One man's "basic customizability" is another man's "pointless option". The problem is, add the union of every man's "basic customizability" options to the list of supported features, and you have a Thundercougarfalconbird. They made a judgement call on the importance of this particular option, and all you have to do is use someone else's free-as-in-beer browser to show them that they made the wrong call.

Re:This

[jon3k]

The only people who would find this "bug" are people who wanted the feature. Not the millions of other users who are perfectly content. Also filing a "bug" isn't really the appropriate forum. These guys are busy trying to solve ACTUAL bugs. Honestly, try to go convince anyone developing a web browser today to relocate their tabs. Good luck!

Re:This

[bhagwad]

Bullshit. I LOVE the tabs over the location bar. I think only those who really care complain. The rest of us don't raise our voice because we're happy with the way it is.

Re:This

[digitig]

Yes, it will mean more code, but the extra code would have to be optimized code, therefore the bloat should be pretty much unmeasurable. unless you are REALLY anal retentive.

Er -- non sequitur alert. Optimised code can still be bloat. And although one extra option might not make a significant difference, there's an indefinitely large number that users are likely to ask for. If they did them all then it will be serious bloat. If they refuse, despite users asking, how would that differ from what they are doing now? If people want options they can use Firefox. It's not coincidence that Firefox is a lot slower.

Re:This

[shutdown -p now]

The problem is, add the union of every man's "basic customizability" options to the list of supported features, and you have a Thundercougarfalconbird.

You don't need to add the union of options. You need to design the basic options such that their combinations cover as much ground as possible.

Also, the notion that "most people don't change options" is not as simple as it sounds. True, your typical user will only tweak one or two - but, as in that ancient MSOffice usability study (where most users were found to only use 20% of all commands available to them), the important corollary is that different users use different few options. Thus, with every new one you remove under the guise of simplifying the product for the majority, you're actually slicing off a part of that majority - until, at some point, the remainder is less that what you've lost.

Anyway, this particular case does not really concern me, as I've always preferred tabs-above (ever since it became possible first, which was in some ancient Opera version - as usual when it comes to browsers), and so Chrome makes perfect sense for me and I'll keep using it. Unfortunately, I can't help but think that one day, the option that I want to

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

question is, is that a problem? I don't really care if a carpenter out there does not make hinged doors. he may be used for only sliding doors then, or potentially have no costumers at all. not really my problem.
when chrome becomes not good enough, I will move to the next browser. there is always chromium which is open source.

its still their product, and it likely still makes sense. tabs on top is very usefull for me since its just an up movement of the mouse, not an "first up, then down a little bit".

yes it sucks they aren't listening to users too much, and yes, I do think they should give the option if its not too hard to implement. but having been in a community of a small game, i have noticed that quite often, its only very few people complaining about a feature very vocally.

chrome has a few things it seems to want to be the best at.
being speed, which it is quite good at.
simplicity, really, who wouldn't get chrome up and running without any problem whatsoever.
and a bit of customization with extensions.

still, I think I can safely say that google cares about the first 2 the most. chrome gained quite a lot of people because it did those 2 well. I know a lot of people that would probably never be able to use a different browser then preinstalled, still, they move to chrome (google has the luck of a great page to advertise its browser on). its just extremely simple to get going in.
firefox is ok as well, but still, updates and so on to keep track off. its often easier with chrome.

Re:This

[macshit]

Firefox improvements?

Er, did you read my comment? Firefox has gotten vastly faster and more memory efficient in the last few releases (specifically, FF versions 6 and 7), to the point where it's clearly better than chrome (at least for my usage).

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

What irritates the fuck out of me in chrome is that every time I open GDT as a separate window at work (2 head system), it picks some random ridiculous geometry. Half the time I have to shrink the window from the top edge because the window is somewhere around 120% the height of my monitor. If I open and close it rapidly, it remembers the geometry just fine, but a few hours later I'll inspect something and GDT will open so tall the highlighted node won't even be visible.

Here at home (single monitor), I just inspected the textbox and GDT opened just slightly taller than the monitor (I can see about half the statusbar at the bottom of the screen through the taskbar).

I use chrome for developing because webkit is fucking anal when it comes to screwed up HTML. I've had pages where a typo'd tag screwed everything up but FF or IE would just quirksmode it right even with a strict doctype.

Re:This

[sjames]

It's not immoral, unethical, or even evil.

Which is why it's merely contemptible rather than despicable.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I understand the terms of service when I install it. I'm not paying for it even if they do mine data from my web use. I know that when I install it. I don't pay for it.
 
And frankly, I like the tabs across the top. So go fuck yourself.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I don't like about Google, above all else.

That's what I love about Google. They hire the smartest people they can get and let them decide what to do. They don't treat decisions as popularity contests.

Re:This

[mr_shifty]

Tabs are better and more user friendly on top.

Since I find them worse and less user friendly on top, I think you are misinformed.

And seriously, if tab position is your determination for what browser you use, then you are pretty useless.

What a simpleton.

Well, that is an articulate, logical, and well-reasoned argument, so clearly you have won this round and are 100% right.

Good day, to you sir!

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

That only holds if you went to the carpenter and asked him to build a cabinet for you, and (s)he agreed.

What happens with Chrome is that the carpenter makes cabinets and gives them away. If you don't want one, you don't have to take it.

Plus, you have the source-code to Chromium anyway, so if you *really* want to move the tabs, you can. If enough developers really don't like the way it works now, they will issue a patch. But... why the hell is a non-story like this on Slashdot? slow day?

Re:This

[Lexx Greatrex]

I'm sorry, but a browser is not like a carpenter either.
Services provided to you by a carpenter are governed by contract law. A browser is free. The supplier of the browser has no contractual obligation to you. You have no obligation to them either. Choosing a browser is more akin to drinking at a free water fountain. If you don't like the taste of the water then don't drink it. You certainly have no right to demand that a free water fountain serve you Evian.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like that at all. Hiring a carpenter would be analogous to hiring a developer to write a custom web browser for you. If that were the case, then yes, customers would have reason to gripe. But Google's response is more like a cabinet manufacturer that offers its wares on the open market (a la Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). Customers can gripe all they want, but if it's not a bespoke job then you have to choose from what's available.

Even in a free market economy, consumer choice among vendors is limited to those vendors who choose to enter the market.

Actually, since Google gives Chrome away for free, it's more like a very eccentric, rich cabinet-maker who makes well-made professional cabinets, then lines them up outside his shop with signs on them that say "Take as man as you like". When people come into his shop and try to give him design suggestions he listens to them, but reserves the right to incorporate their feedback or not has he sees fit.

If you feel SO strongly about cabinet door design, feel free to make your own cabinet, or go to another cabinet-maker who is more receptive to your ideas. Or heck, go buy all the tools you need, and build your own cabinet. The plans for a basic cabinet are freely available elsewhere.

Wow. This metaphor actually kinda works...

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to upgrade that 486, huh.

Re:This

[epyT-R]

this tool-as-art trend is what's ruining a lot of good software nowadays. for tools, asthetics are not as important as functionality. in this particular case, moving tabs around is a reasonable request.. someone at google is just too lazy to refactor his code to include the feature (probably because he designed it around the assumption of not having it).

Re:This

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

To be fair, this is not a carpenter doing a job for a single person. To change this would change it for everyone, not just for the vocal minority who post on the thread. Perhaps Google has evidence that more people prefer it the other way, e.g. focus groups, etc?

Re:This

[Rennt]

Not matter how badly you want configurable tabs, the lack of them is not a bug. This bug was closed over 12 months ago. Complaining about a lack of a feature in entirely the wrong channel until the developer locks it, and then moaning about it on slashdot? Now THAT I would characterize as 'contemptible'.

Re:This

[mattventura]

Is this the same "design and artistic consideration" that has gone into Gnome 3, Windows 8, FF4, etc?

Your post also fails to explain why looking like you have 3 browsers open is a good thing. Why does that matter? Tabs have been a part of UI for years and years. Having multiple "browsers" open (even if they are in the same window) is reminiscent of the IE6 days where that was the only choice.

Re:This

[mattventura]

But with others (maybe not MS and Apple, but others) they give you settings. Firefox lets me have tabs above or below the location bar. You can't complain there.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

While I understand wanting to maintain their direction in product development, simply telling the user base their opinions do not matter is rude. ... to bulldoze ahead without taking any pulse is to do what Microsoft have done. See how well it has worked for them?

I don't know - that attitude has worked pretty well for Apple.

"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."
- Steve "You're holding it wrong" Jobs

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometime call a cabinetmaker a carpenter and see how long it takes him to correct you.

Re:This

[smellotron]

You don't need to add the union of options. You need to design the basic options such that their combinations cover as much ground as possible.

Well, if you cover "as much ground as possible" you're still going to deny the whims of some users. Which is what Google is (quite reasonably) doing in this case. Rearranging a core component of the UI itself is not a "basic option" for a web browser the way (for example) cookie management is. The users who are asking for customization in this aspect because "it's just one checkbox" are asking for the Thundercougarfalconbird.

Unfortunately, I can't help but think that one day, the option that I want to

Is this what happens when you shutdown -p now when posting on /.? Oh dear!

Re:This

[Sancho]

Yeah. There's obviously something wrong with Firefox, because too many users complain about the speed. But it's not reproducible, and plenty of people don't have the problem.

Re:This

[Sancho]

But almost all of Chrome is open source. I think you lose some of the default plugins and tracking. So in a sense, they are operating as a charity--providing most of the code they wrote as an open source project (you don't get Flash player, and I think you don't get the PDF viewer.)

Re:This

[spmkk]

"...there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF...a huge complicated mess..."

Anybody else see the utter irony in this (arguably true) statement, recalling that Firefox was introduced as a solution to the problem of feature creep (as a lightweight alternative to Netscape, which had turned into a "huge complicated mess")?

Re:This

[Sancho]

At the same time, most people use the mouse with their right hand or thumb. The left hand is free to rest on the keyboard, ready to do things or use left-handed keyboard shortcuts. Personally, I never click tabs unless I'm reordering them. The vast majority of the time, I ctrl-tab. That said, I never click on the location bar. I always ctrl-l or cmd-l and start typing--the keyboard shortcut saves time because I'm going to have to start typing anyway.

So strictly speaking, you're right. I click tabs more often than I click in the location bar. But for me, they're both minimal.

Re:This

[Sancho]

There's admission that a large number of people want the feature. I don't know if that's a large percentage of their userbase or not. They might obviously say "no" to feature requests with only one or two users, but this many?

The question is where to draw the line.

Re:This

[hedwards]

It's technically possible that there's some corner case or extension that causes it, but I haven't seen that on the 4 or 5 machines I have access to over 4 or 5 different OSes and not even on my Nexus One. So, I suppose it might be possible, but I do have to wonder what sort of hardware and software combination folks are running that it becomes an issue.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, have you ever got a carpenter to make a high quality piece for you, even if you didn't agree with all the aesthetics, and the price was free? You received no less than what you've paid for, I figure.

Google's products are only free if your privacy and personal information have no value to you. If you are happy bartering with the currency they demand, that's fine, but don't pretend there's no cost involved.

Google and other information traders have purpose, but that purpose isn't to be a charity. They wouldn't give things away if they didn't gain something of value in doing so.

Re:This

[Nick Ives]

Chrome devs have been quite vocal that if you don't like the design choices they're making with Chrome then you should go and use something else.

Google doesn't lock in our data and offers services for free (our eyeballs being the product, obviously, as they make money from advertising). If you don't like Google, don't use them.

I generally refrain from posting in Apple threads because, as much as what they do annoys me, nobody forces me to use their stuff and so I don't. I appreciate that this entire story is about the location bar, but that's just the editors trolling.

Re:This

[jgoemat]

Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.

If you prefer car analogies, you should use them better. It's like a new car company starting and making great cars, but only offering leather seats. Many people aren't used to them but most grow to like them. Then another car company switches their default to leather seats because most people prefer them, but they still offer fabric as an option. Then a small number of people complain online because the new company doesn't offer fabric like the old one does... And you really agreed with the previous post?

It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it. Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

That's moronic on several levels. First, this quirky carpenter just stole more customers last month from your "custom carpentry" guy. Oh, and the old mean spirited carpenter (IE) took some too. Second, it's not like a carpenter doing custom work for you. It's like one of the big 3 national cabinet manufacturer only offering bow knobs on their cabinets. You just love everything about their cabinets but you prefer round knobs. They are nice enough to have a forum to submit requests for cabinets online, but they decide not to offer round knobs. So people go online and whine about them "stifling dissent".

[...] at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome [...]
...
If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.

No, 500 people starred the bug, out of 70 million. 500 is one out of 140,000. That's 0.0007% of users that cared enough to find the bug and click a button. 188 comments were there. Several were duplicate posts, a few were developer comments and a couple were against it so let's say 180. More people were injured by lightning in the US last year (241) than cared enough to post a comment to that bug.

One of the developer comments was that many UI design professionals would say that options aren't always a good thing (I think they have a point) and that it is explicitly not Chromium's design philosophy. That is like a painter. They specifically want a consistent user experience, one of the reasons they streamlined it, don't have a menu bar and don't let plugins add bars. I've seen family where nearly have their screen is taken up by toolbars, and they like that. Are you saying that Chrome should allow Farmville to install toolbars on people's windows if 500 grandmas want it?

Second, I think you are under-estimating the changes required. Hit SHIFT+ESC in Chrome, or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and open your task manager. Chrome has a browser process and a separate process for each tab. The tab process owns the address bar. They did this for security and stability reasons. Putting the tabs from other processes under the address bar owned by another process is not that easy to do. I agree 100% with their philosophy on this, I've lost work in Firefox several times because Youtube crashed in another window. When that happens in Chrome I just lost that tab or other flash ones. I've had Javascript running in one tab hose the whole Firefox UI before, never happened in Chrome. If the tab processes managed tabs for other processes and it locked up for some reason, you would not be able

Re:This

[macs4all]

Well... Chrome is based on WebKit, just like Safari. Google might as well take an extra page from Apple and go "La la la... we can't hear your opinions... we can only hear praise from the sheeple."

Except you're dead wrong.

When Apple changed where the Tabs were on Safari, the userbase spoke up. The Tabs were promptly moved back to where they had been.

Say what you will about Apple; but they actually have a pretty good track record of listening to their userbase.

I think it is Microsoft you're thinking of when it comes to ignoring their users. But this was over-the-top arrogant of Google. Yes, it's their product and all; but when your entire userbase complains as one and you ignore it, that is a sure sign of a company who has seriously lost touch with who it is that put them where they are, and who can just as easily put you down like a dog.

Re:This

[xtracto]

Yup, that is the result of Google *using* their users for its own profit. Because chrome users, google docs users, and all other google's product's users are not the clients, Google can screw them without second thought. As long as Google's clients (the advertisers) are happy, everything is fine.

Another example (and the reason I use Office Live instead of Google Spreadsheet) of Google's arrogance is the lack of "text cell span" which has been asked by several people.

Just recently I came across yet another issue with one of Google services, which had the same response (users can ask all they want but Google does not care). Ultimately, Google is nowadays being more blunt in following their focus of "advertisement company" by removing several projects (labs, code search, etc).

Re:This

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hey, if you could bundle this up into an extension, you could sell it to all the whiners on that comment!

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I don't like about Slashdot, above all else. Did you even visit the forum in question? Yet you're happy to accept the word of someone with an axe to grind who posts a whine about it to Slashdot.

Well guess what? Even Google get bored of having the same tired old arguments forever. A vocal minority should not expect to get their own way just by virtue of being vocal. Tabs are fine where they are; there is no compelling reason to change that. If you chose the Google browser, you chose that UI. Why whine about it now? It makes perfect logical sense having an address bar per tab; there is an address per tab, after all. And just because the poster says there was "no noticeable dissent" doesn't mean there weren't people saying it was fine - it's just that most of those people don't give enough of a shit to post on that forum because they have what they want already. Duh. Find me one forum thread anywhere with the topic "things are fine as they are; don't change anything". Talk about perceptual bias.

The Google forums are not there for Google to be dictated to by a bunch of whiners. They are there to help Google improve the product for everyone. Sometimes conversations go nowhere without you getting your own way. That's life; get over it, or at least find a facet of life that actually is unfair, and focus on that.

I mean, I know you Gen Yers are just looking for a chance to bitch at someone, but Google's browser having tabs where you don't want them is a serious issue now? Their actions are "comtemptible?" Do you even know what that word means? I suppose you think closed-source software is "evil" too? Sure, you have anger - they lied to you in school, life isn't fair - but why not find a more laudable place to project your anger, like Wall Street? Do you see Wall Street having forums where people can suggest how they improve their activities for the good of the community?

Re:This

[pugugly]

That's pretty much where I'm at - I can believe it's not *as* fast as Chrome, but it's negligible, and I've never had stability problem even with copious extendage used.

And I've been using since 1.0 on numerous computers and OS's.

Pug

Re:This

[AmiMoJo]

Actually it's like a web developer making a browser the same way they make a web site. They have complete control, and updates are "forced" on users when they edit it. Okay, it isn't 'like' that, it is that. but you see my point.

Think about the design decisions they have made. Getting rid of the address bar: How many web sites use typed URLs for navigation rather than the page name and some links? They want to develop Chrome like they would develop any other web app.

Re:This

[digitig]

Why? It does everything I want just fine. Actually, it's a 2.0GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor and does everything my employer wants just fine, because it's my work computer.

Re:This

[digitig]

No, there's admission that a very small number of people (as a proportion of their userbase) are known to want this feature.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes a lot of sense. Back to the basement and the model glue huffing for you.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because it's IMPERATIVE that a window covers the whole screen, even when another application overlaps something over one of the edges.

Seriously, another application puts something on your screen where it shouldn't put anything, then you complain to a different application. How is that logical? If you get DirectTV and then the signal goes down because you removed the antenna, do you complain to DirecTV?

Re:This

[datavirtue]

The same reason your girlfriend starts bitching and making demands after she moves in.

Re:This

[datavirtue]

No, users define feature creep. All software starts out lean and nimble. Then users start sending email, or people start viewing competing software products as metrics.

Re:This

[Sancho]

You should try reading past the first sentence.

Re:This

[amicusNYCL]

It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it.

You know, I think it's a lot more like the carpenter only making hinged (the more popular variety), and refusing to make "custom" doors. I'm pretty sure we're seeing a small vocal minority demanding these things from Google. I've never heard a single complaint from anyone I know (literally) complaining about the tab placement in Chrome. If someone has such a major problem with that and just can't adjust to anything that fits outside their view of what a browser should be, then they should be using Firefox with however many extensions it takes to make it just what they want. Asking Google to make changes like these doesn't help everyone who uses Chrome who by some cosmic miracle is not completely terrified by the current tab placement.

As a developer, I really hate it when customers try to dictate the features in my software. I designed it a certain way, and by some strange quirk of fate I actually used intelligent reasoning and logic in my decision-making process, and then some clueless customer comes along who would like it to work differently because they don't want to adjust to how it already works. We got burned big on that when we relented and agreed to implement a certain feature which ended up having an extreme negative impact on performance because it was contrary to the original design goals. Sure, that one customer got the feature they wanted, but now the entire thing is slower for everyone. As developers, we need to know when to say "no" to change requests. It might irritate a small percentage of users, but it's for the greater good. Sorry if the minority doesn't like that.

Re:This

[gknoy]

I'm far more frustrated by the fact that I cannot find a way to install GWT 2.3 (Google Web Toolkit) from their website, nor from their Eclipse plugin repository. It all wants to install only the latest version, and there isn't a browsable FTP folder for backwards support anywhere. This is really troublesome when installing GWT on a new development machine, or on someone's machine that hasn't needed it installed until now, when there's a deliverable due soon.

I can get like 85 past versions of Putty, but if I need to maintain a consistent version of my main development library, I'm screwed. Thanks, Google. I really hope that Android SDKs aren't this hard to get a hold of.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should try uninstalling all the thousands of plugins that have it bogged down? Either that, or you might try uninstalling/reinstalling Firefox, or simply reformat and reinstalling everything from scratch, because it sounds like something has infected your Firefox install.

Re:This

[shaitand]

It's no big mystery. There are a few problems. The first is the plugin-container process crashes and locks the browser. The second is that it leaks memory badly. The third is that people leave tabs to open with the browser and so have to wait for them to all load. The fourth is really the first, people use a homepage that requires plug-in content to load.

Re:This

[shaitand]

"No, 500 people starred the bug, out of 70 million."

I think you will find that is actually a pretty good sample. Especially since the pool who know what a bug tracker is and that it is possible to comment or star on one isn't anywhere near 70 million.

Re:This

[shaitand]

you don't need to convince them, they already offer the option to do so.

Re:This

[amicusNYCL]

Until very recently I used Firefox exclusively for development because of Firebug. I recently switched to developing in Chrome because the developer tools have finally matured to the point that I don't need Firebug any more, and Chrome is much faster and more responsive at running my applications and doesn't use as much memory to do so. Firefox has taken up the same position as IE as being just another browser to test, while Opera is still my browser of choice.

Re:This

[amicusNYCL]

I used to develop using the latest Firefox build with only Firebug active on an XP laptop that's about 4 years old. Firefox routinely takes up the most memory of any running application, even though I'll only have 1 or 2 tabs open to my application, and it frequently becomes unresponsive if I'm switching between programs or if I leave it minimized for a while.

I don't know what the cause is, but the end result is that I am frequently waiting for Firefox to respond so I can continue with my work. That's why I switched to Chrome for development, every time I go back to it it's already responding, it runs my application noticeably faster than Firefox does, and it doesn't monopolize my memory.

Incidentally, neither IE nor Opera show the same unresponsiveness on the same machine. Firefox is the only browser that takes more breaks than I do.

Re:This

[digitig]

The point is that they can say, "no" to as many user requests as they like. Google is not a democracy governed by all of its users.

Re:This

[steveg]

OK, I'll buy that the backend may have gotten better.

The UI has been degraded proportional to whatever improvements have been added to the back end. And the UI degradation happened first.

I'm still using Firefox mostly, mainly because the other options have been going downhill as well, but I'd call the net change negative.

Re:This

[ewibble]

you are either very fast at doing what you need to do, or your Firefox is a lot slower than mine. I takes about 4 seconds for Firefox to and 3 seconds for chrome (but less plug-ins for chrome, 17 tabs open if firefox 1 in chrome). Not a particularly fast computer probably 2 years old.

I also run Firefox on a computer I bought for $30 second hand start-up time although I haven't timed that is probably under 10 seconds.

Re:This

[ewibble]

I have heard though some who knows a developer working on speeding up Firefox that the main problem is plug-ins slowing it down

Re:This

[darnkitten]

I'm sorry, but a browser is not a piece of art.

I would respectfully disagree. We live in a world of tools-as-art. We have such a variety of choices in almost everything that decisions for most consumers comes down to a question of aesthetics. Phones do pretty much the same things, so many consumers chose the iPhone, because it was attractive. The same goes for browsers. We have multiple browsers, all of which do substantially the same thing. Differences in functionality generally are important to only those who use those particular functionalities. Ubiquity-as-a-factor aside, most of the people I know who have specifically chosen a browser, have done so for aesthetic reasons: think of how many people on /. said, "I don't know, but Chrome just looks blazing fast," when it was first released. We really can no longer separate the artistic aspects of design from the functional, the ergonomic or the customizability aspects--consumers expect all of them.

A tool, online or offline must not only work, it must also be a work of art.

Yes, I'm looking at you, GIMP.

Re:This

[arth1]

I see the problem not so much that the developers won't do it, but that the developer refuses to LISTEN. All customer input is good input, even if you don't like it. Closing a thread and basically telling the customers to FOAD and that their opinion is worthless isn't good for business.

I'm not one of those who wants tabs on the bottom, but I fully understand that they want to voice their opinion about it, whether they get it or not.

Re:This

[amicusNYCL]

It looks like their opinion was sufficiently voiced. They wanted to move the tab bar, Google didn't. There's really only so many arguments you can give to moving the tab bar and it doesn't take several hundred replies to do that.

Re:This

[pspahn]

Just dock GDT. Lower left corner, little rectangle icon.

Re:This

[macshit]

No clue what you're talking about here. The FF UI is fine.

[Chrome has some interesting new ideas here and there—the "new tab page" is a neat concept, though not so well done in chrome— but it's mostly a wash.]

Re:This

[billcopc]

It's fast if I don't install a gazillion plugins. I'm not oblivious to the fact that my browser is bogged down by all the stuff I've added to it. Firebug is probably the biggest offender, as it feels the need to parse stuff even when the editing pane isn't open. It's particularly noticeable when I have a few script-heavy tabs open, as switching between them takes a few seconds - not super long, but enough to be irritating if I'm jumping back-and-forth a lot during development. It's those 5 seconds each time that easily add up to a half-hour or more everyday.

What doesn't help my case is the plugins I do use, they're all developer-y things that mess with the content in some fashion. I've got one that turns any textarea into a CKEditor, for prototyping purposes. Another one parses the document for non-linked URLs, heavy Regex action there. HTTP sniffers, cache control, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey; these are all non-trivial extensions, most of which are pure Javascript. There's just no way that can be fast, even on a beastly workstation.

Re:This

[billcopc]

That's part of my problem. I'm still on 3.6 because I really didn't like 4.0, and I haven't had the time to try the newer releases yet. I rely extensively on my browser for my day job, it's not something I can trash on a whim, so testing involves running a VM, spending a day trying everything and finding workarounds for the stuff that breaks or add-ons that haven't been updated.

I wish it had an option for removing the X

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it had an option for removing the X from tabs (other than the one you're currently on maybe) for those of us who use the middle mouse button to close tabs

Re:I wish it had an option for removing the X

[smellotron]

I wish it had an option for removing the X from tabs

I recently discovered that Opera has this feature. It's bliss! OTOH, maybe I leave too many tabs open at once...

Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[crow_t_robot]

...along with adblocking and noscript.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[Anonymous Coward]

Adblock Plus works just fine in Chrome. And Notscripts does a wonderful job of blocking unwanted scripts, similar to Noscripts.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[Bucky24]

I second this. I've been using Adblock Plus in Chrome for a few weeks now and it's amazing the difference it makes in pages. Works very well.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://adblockplus.org/en/chrome ?

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[PwnzerDragoon]

*cough*

Adblock Plus and NotScripts for Chrome. Both work great over here.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't work like you think due to lack of real support in the webkit.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[Fwipp]

Heaven forbid you download an extension from the official chrome web store to address your needs.

Re:Push this on the queue of broken dreams...

[crow_t_robot]

You are aware that the chrome extensions don't have the full capabilities of the firefox extensions because the support doesn't exist in the webkit, right? Right? In essence, they are crippled.

Google way or the highway

[Muerte2]

The more I read about Chrome's design process the more I hear, "it's the Google way or no way at all". I don't have a problem with the tabs being on the top, but it seems like it would be very easy to have an option where you want the tab bar. Several of the comments had valid use cases for why you'd want tabs under, but Google isn't interested in adding it as an option?

Re:Google way or the highway

[Anonymous Coward]

Dur Apple is closed, dur dur. They aren't open like google. Dur hur dur.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Anonymous Coward]

Every option you add is another option to maintain.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code

Code your tabs however the hell you want. Open source doesn't mean people automatically do what you want.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Guspaz]

It's not so easy to do so. You're adding a ton of complexity with these kinds of things, because not only are you cluttering the options page with tiny little toggles, but you're causing a ton of extra code to try to handle the tab bar being in a different place, and you're breaking a whole bunch of assumptions all over the place (be it in code or themes) about where the tab bar is, what it is expected to look like, etc.

For example, Google has been working on an option for quite some time to move the tab bar to the side of the browser. It's been experimental for a long time, and last time I gave it a try, quite some time ago, it caused a whole load of problems. It's not a simple "flip a switch" kind of change. I can very much sympathize with the Chrome team if they don't want to undertake a whole lot of work to implement and support a new feature like this if they don't think many users would take advantage of it.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Anonymous Coward]

... and this is the beauty of the open source nature of Chrome. If enough people want a feature, one of them will do it themselves.

If it's not already done, then you can bet it's a lot harder than your assumptions make it out to be.

Re:Google way or the highway

[tylernt]

It's not a simple "flip a switch" kind of change.

Sounds like poor software design to me. TCP/IP didn't suddenly break when 802.11b came out; things continued to "just work" because of the nice OSI layer system.

Properly designed and implemented, it shouldn't matter one lick to the other layers (like the rendering engine, or the theme engine) where you move the tabs to.

Re:Google way or the highway

[syousef]

Every option you add is another option to maintain.

That's easy then. Add no options. While you're at it since every piece of functionality has to be maintained, take away ALL the functionality. You now have the perfect zero maintainence app. It does nothing.

Re:Google way or the highway

[mattventura]

The only problem is, Mozilla is like this too now. Everything they do, the community hates, yet they just won't stop making their shortsighted decisions.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Namarrgon]

Clearly a line must be drawn somewhere. Chrome is Google's, so Google gets to choose where to draw that line.

Chromium, OTOH, is open-source, so it's yours to do with as you please.

Re:Google way or the highway

[BradleyUffner]

It's not so easy to do so.

But somehow Microsoft managed to do it with IE.

Re:Google way or the highway

[tlhIngan]

The more I read about Chrome's design process the more I hear, "it's the Google way or no way at all"

Nothing wrong with that. I mean, it's the Apple-ification of Google. Just like Apple copied aspects from Android (the notification system was clearly inspired by Android), Google realizes that the Steve Jobs way does have certain benefits as well.

Win-win, everyone copies winning ideas!

Re:Google way or the highway

[Anonymous Coward]

802.11b did not put IP on top of TCP.

The Chrome UI is split in two parts, with the outer part (frame, tab switching) belonging to the UI process, and the inner part (back, next, reload,home buttons, URL bar, page content) belonging to the browser process, with different tabs having different browser processes. That's how Chrome manages to have one tab crash while the rest of the browser continues working.

Switching this model inside-out would require major changes.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Guspaz]

Really? I don't see an option in IE to move the tab bar around, although I didn't particularly look all that hard either.

Re:Google way or the highway

[BradleyUffner]

Really? I don't see an option in IE to move the tab bar around, although I didn't particularly look all that hard either.

It's an option if you right click on the tab area.

Re:Google way or the highway

[Guspaz]

Sort of; the default seems to be to put them beside the address bar, and the option is to move them below; in either configuration, all the empty space above the address bar is wasted and unusable.

Microsoft's value/effort ratio might have been a bit different, though. On a 1280x1024 display, IE9's default tab bar has room for only *two* tabs before they start shrinking. That makes the option a lot more useful than in Chrome, where you can have 5 tabs before they start shrinking, and moving it wouldn't change that much (might add one extra tab)

Good 'ol Stanford snootiness alive at Google.

[sethstorm]

Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"

Wow. Talk about arrogance on their part.

Locking the comments doesn't mean the issue goes away.

Re:Good 'ol Stanford snootiness alive at Google.

[geekoid]

No, and they no that. They are locking it because it's a done deal, and people who search for it show up and don't thinking there is activity on the bug.

You people just like to complain instead of think. The alternative was to say nothing and string them along.

Invalid Bug.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a "bug" if it's by design. They said from the start that it was by design. Close the bug as invalid and move on.

Re:Invalid Bug.

[bmo]

This.

I switch between Opera and Chrome, and both are the same with the tabs above the location bar.

And Firefox would be nearly the same if the menu bar wasn't above everything else.

I fail to see the problem. It's not a bug.

--
BMO

Re:Invalid Bug.

[shutdown -p now]

It's customizable in Opera. They've changed the default a while ago to match Chrome, but you can still have it either way.

Re:Invalid Bug.

[jonwil]

It may not be a bug if its "by design" but that doesn't mean the design is fixed and can't be changed as a result of users submitting enhancement requests...

Fortunately

[mvar]

There are quite a few alternative browsers out there. Although those who complain about this change will probably adapt to it in a week or so

Re:Fortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Change? What change? This has been the way Chrome has worked since day one.

The only change is that the Chrome dev team finally got fed up with a useless bug where users kept moaning about a conscious design decision that has been there forever, and a butt-hurt user submitted it to slashdot.

People actually care?

[Anonymous Coward]

People actually have an opinion on a trivial, insignificant change?

The tabs are on top?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I've been using Chrome exclusively for months, and until I noted this /. post I never noticed that the tabs are above the location bar. I guess that's where they belong.

Re:The tabs are on top?

[Grishnakh]

I just switched to Chromium recently, and I certainly noticed it, but I really don't care. I don't see how it's a big deal. I would like a little more configurability to be honest, but so far I'm just happy to have a browser that doesn't slow to a crawl and experience intermittent hangs when you have a lot of tabs open, unlike Firefox.

They seem nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I prefer my tabs where they currently are in Chrome, I really hate the attitude of the Chromium developers towards their users on this and other issues. They've no interest in giving users the browser that they, the users, want. Instead they give them the browser that they, the developers, think the users should want.

Re:They seem nice.

[pspahn]

They've no interest in giving users the browser that they, the users, want.

It's a fair point, but then again, they have already given users the browser they want.

When I switched to Chrome, I wasn't pestering Google Devs to gimme gimme gimme. They had an idea, manifested it, and now we have a more competitive browser market. They even poured some advertising money into it so that John and Jane Doe might actually realize how much of the internet they've been missing by using older versions of IE.

It's their browser, their agenda, their rules. If it wasn't for the developers of Chrome having this sense of ego, users would be dealing with simply another browser that mimicked what others do and further stagnating the progress of modern web standards like HTML5/CSS3.

Feature request... Not a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think creating a defect is the proper way to go about presenting an idea... Typically bugfixers are not the developers anyways.

Breaking news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor UI tweak not coming to open-source browser, even though several people would rather prefer it did!
Thank you, /., for your continued dedication in keeping us up-to-date on the leading edge of tech.

I know getting on the front page of Slashdot is the only way to get Google to do anything, but Jeebus, at least save it for something of even remote significance.

Re:Breaking news!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Minor UI tweak not coming to open-source browser, even though several people would rather prefer it did!

That isn't the story.

Re:Breaking news!

[Anonymous Coward]

They told some users to stop bitching about something in the design. Good.

Why did this even make front page?

[T-Mckenney]

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but why in this world does this merit being front page? I find this to be on the level of simple bickering. This is more suited for a forum post or something a long that line.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google-like typing detected

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[T-Mckenney]

u mad, bro?

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[bipbop]

Posting "u mad, bro?" should get your Slashdot license revoked.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure it's quite front page worthy, but it shows how much Google really doesn't care what Chrome users want; they know better than the users. Mozilla has been on the front page of /. for doing the same several times with Firefox, why not Google?

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[mandelbr0t]

So that we can have a contest to see who can come up with the worst analogy. There's some pretty bad ones here. I find it rather entertaining.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, that is exactly what Google's response to this article is (ie: the bug page has been updated to say "it's not that we don't listen to feedbag, it's just that this is a bug tracker. Feature requests go in the feedback forum."

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[T-Mckenney]

Google-like typing detected

Posting "u mad, bro?" should get your Slashdot license revoked.

Posting a comment with total bias and intent of flaming should get you auto-trolled. I have no sympathy for stupidity.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[AmiMoJo]

"News for nerds". Browsers are pretty important to nerds, and Chrome is one of the more popular ones.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[shaitand]

The 500+ comments on the story suggest that others felt the lack of openness in the project was newsworthy. Many feel that attitude (and not the minor feature) even justifies forking. Sorry that you disagree.

I work differently I guess. If I don't think a story is interesting I move on to the next one.

Re:Why did this even make front page?

[T-Mckenney]

The 500+ comments on the story suggest that others felt the lack of openness in the project was newsworthy. Many feel that attitude (and not the minor feature) even justifies forking. Sorry that you disagree.

I work differently I guess. If I don't think a story is interesting I move on to the next one.

I can understand that, really, I can. However, I think this is also subject to the bandwagon effect. The fact that the bug has been around for at least a year, has been flagged "Won't Fix" for around a year, and been discuss internally/externally for the same length of time, makes this a prime candidate for people just looking for a fight and a reason to make Google out to the bad guy once again. Its not just Google either, Its been Apple, Microsoft, IBM, etc, etc. People just look for a reason to Bitch and complain. That is why I don't think it should be taken into such seriousness to merit front page status. Its just begging for a flame war to begin over something as simple as swapping a toolbar.

Is Chrome open source?

[countertrolling]

Then fork it.. I mean if you really insist on using Chrome... Personally I stick with Seamonkey, the all inclusive browser, and not much bigger than Firefox anymore

Re:Is Chrome open source?

[TxRv]

Chrome isn't, but Chromium, from which Chrome draws its source code, is.

The user is never right

[Neurotrace]

Google is blatantly ignoring and degrading their users, Mozilla is forcing their users to install a new version more often which seems increasingly less stable, is everyone losing sight of the user?

Re:The user is never right

[Anonymous Coward]

degrading their users

Really? I think you might want to look that word up in a dictionary.

Re:The user is never right

[hedwards]

Good news is that Opera still cares about the users. The bad news is what the fuck is Opera?

Re:The user is never right

[Sancho]

They didn't ignore the users. They addressed the users. They just didn't implement the requested change. They explained why not, and also why they were locking the bug.

Words have meaning.

Re:The user is never right

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "user" you speak of?

What actually happened:

[Issildur03]

Overwhelming feedback: 187 comments.
Google revealed their view on the community: One developer said, specifically: 'Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'

The issue was set to WontFix in September 2010, but people are still complaining about the design decision.

Re:What actually happened:

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, "no dissent"? Tabs on top of the address bar makes way more sense than having them underneath. I mean, duh: the address bar's contents are dependent on the tab. Why would the tabs be underneath, other than "Mozilla Firebird 0.2 did it that way so now everyone has to do that forever!"

Re:What actually happened:

[badboy_tw2002]

Can you sensationalize your comment a bit so I can get angry about it? I really want to get angry about it!

Re:What actually happened:

[Golden_Rider]

Also, "no dissent"? Tabs on top of the address bar makes way more sense than having them underneath. I mean, duh: the address bar's contents are dependent on the tab. Why would the tabs be underneath, other than "Mozilla Firebird 0.2 did it that way so now everyone has to do that forever!"

two random reasons why "tabs at the top" is a bad idea:

- placing stuff at the top of the screen is a bad idea, because that area of the screen is often covered by other stuff (like e.g. the menus of a RDP session) or is in an area which makes menus pop up if you go near there with the mouse

- tabs should be close to the web page you are looking at, because tabs are used OFTEN, definitely more than bookmarks, so they should be easier to reach with the mouse. Why would you want to place the tabs as far away as possible?

Re:What actually happened:

[bunratty]

I immediately edited the Wikipedia article on Chrome to include this outrageous controversy, but my edit was reverted by deletionist fanbois who insist on removing any material that offends them! Can you believe it!?!?

Re:What actually happened:

[shaitand]

It sounds like you are seriously over thinking the "meaning" of the positioning. There are things like terminal windows that put something in that location of the screen and it is further from where your mouse hovers on the content. That is more than enough justification for having AN OPTION to reposition the bar.

Re:What actually happened:

[Anonymous Coward]

two random reasons why "tabs at the top" is a bad idea:

- placing stuff at the top of the screen is a bad idea, because that area of the screen is often covered by other stuff (like e.g. the menus of a RDP session) or is in an area which makes menus pop up if you go near there with the mouse

That's one really creative definition of the word "often" you're using there.

- tabs should be close to the web page you are looking at, because tabs are used OFTEN, definitely more than bookmarks, so they should be easier to reach with the mouse. Why would you want to place the tabs as far away as possible?

That's one really creative definition of the phrase "as far away as possible" you're using there.

Re:What actually happened:

[Grishnakh]

The only thing that makes sense about having tabs under the address bar is that, personally, I click on the tabs a lot more than I click on the address bar, the icons on the address bar (I use mouse buttons to go forward and back), or the menu bar. So if the tabs are at the bottom, it takes slightly less time to move the mouse pointer there.

However, you're right, visually it doesn't make much sense.

Personally, I can use them either way; I really don't see why people are so upset about it. If anything, they should be more upset by the lack of a menu bar, though this seems to be covered with a little arrow icon next to the wrench icon on the address bar in the Chromium version that I'm using.

Re:What actually happened:

[Grishnakh]

I should also add that if I had to bitch about anything in the Chromium UI, it's the fact that each tab has its own little "X" taking up space on the tab and reducing the space for the web page title. This seems like a far bigger annoyance than the tabs being on top of the address bar.

Re:What actually happened:

[jedwidz]

Thank you for at least trying to form a coherent argument why Chrome has it wrong, rather than just grabbing a pitchfork.

No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is so-called "UI designers". They have had a horrible impact on every software product they've gotten involved with, whether it's web sites, browsers, email clients, or even entire desktop environments (GNOME, I'm looking at you).

Up until about 4 or 5 years ago, UIs of many of the major projects were designed and implemented by real programmers. These people made far more sensible trade-offs. They'd almost always choose practicality, productivity and usability over appearance. Now, this meant that there weren't as many rounded corners and gradients, but at least we had consistent UIs across applications, and they were reasonably efficient to use. We had proper menus, for instance, that made it very easy to see what an application could do.

As we all know, the situation has changed. Now we have a lot of failed web designers not being able to find work designing web sites, so instead they've tried to get involved with app development. This has not gone well. The UIs of programs like Firefox, and all of GNOME 3, have been trashed by these people. They've even had some impact on commercial software, like the horrid UIs that recent versions of MS Office and IE have.

We need to give these people the boot. It's one thing when they're making icons, but it's a completely different issue when they're deciding how the UI should be designed and implemented. None of them, across a wide range of software products, have been able to put together a usable UI. None of them.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[sakdoctor]

But ... but ... the usability studies say so!

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[AK Marc]

There are entire degree programs on UI design. But a few users will demand that things be arranged the way they want. And for many things, the vocal minority gets a larger voice than the silent majority. Ignoring whining users isn't a bad thing. In fact, it shows a team dedicated to a unified UI vision that would be superior to UI by untrained users (you end up with the car from the Simpsons).

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Guspaz]

Speaking as a programmer, programmers are not designers. They should not, unless they have demonstrated an ability to do so, design UIs. Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software like emacs or vi: greatly productive for a small number of advanced users, completely unusable by almost any computer user apart from those.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[I(rispee_I(reme]

In a similar vein, look at the reaction to google hiding the link to cached search results in that stupid preview popup.

Not only does it add an extra click and load time to every view of a cached page, it also breaks when scripting isn't given free reign.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

Real programmers use ed.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

"a unified UI vision that would be superior to UI by untrained users"

Why does this remind me of every political nightmare of the last century?

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you are dumb.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Unity in your rant. Same deal.

But yes I agree. I've done battle with these people before. One of their biggest problem is the *focus group*, which invariably consists of people who've never used the program in question ever before. They seem to optimize for this group *at the expense* of people who are experienced with the application and use it at an expert level. Experts fundamentally want very different things - they value productivity and scriptability, for example. But features this group wants are ripped out to cater to the day-one beginner who sits in that focus group and bitches about something that will only be an issue for the first three days of using the app.

There are other problems, but that's certainly one.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Sebastopol]

I 100% disagree with you. Emphatically. Having been in the CAD development world for 20+ years, programmers are THE LAST PEOPLE who should be designing user interfaces. The vast majority of programmers have no idea what usability means to a general audience, and even worse sense of aesthetic. The worst offenders are programmers who think they know better without ever having met a customer.

Now is an artless programmer better than a bad UI designer? That is debatable. But in my experience, the people who should develop the UI are the users and the trainers, together, and then provide a spec to the development team. With that feedback, even a mediocre programmer can make life a lot easier on the users.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but the programmers rarely have any idea how to actually use the software. Especially when it is a large modular project, and each programmer may only have a slight idea what the entire application actually does. Sure the lead integrator has a clue, but they are usually way too busy to put any thought into a UI design, let alone collect feedback from the people who use it; they often delegate to another tertiary programmer (intern, co-op) who knows even less.

I've seen this in 3D animation, CAD/CAM, medical software, automotive UI, factory and assembly line flow control, local government utilities control systems, etc.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[digitig]

Real programmers enter the program using a line of toggle-switches on the front panel.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[geekoid]

Yeah, that Apple is well known for crappy UI~

Please, the problem is most self proclaimed 'UI Designers' aren't.

"Real programmers" make horrid UI designers.

The change you see is because of programmers making UI decisions.

I am a 'real programmers' I have also studied HID, and UI; however I would rather a professional who has studies UI and HID design the interface.

NO, I don't work for Apple, nor do I currently own any of their PCs

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software ... greatly productive for a small number of advanced users, completely unusable by almost any computer user apart from those.

Lusers may someday gain knowledge and understanding, and become advanced users. The greatly productive software will be waiting for them when they reach that level.

Crapware with a crippled UI will remain crapware forever.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Thought I'd also mention that Google Employee "Kelly F" has been called out in that thread for setting her reply (paraphrased, "We haven't gotten rid of the cache, just hidden it and made it difficult to access") as the "Best Reply" in that support thread.

This, in spite of her post being marked "42 of 142 people found this answer helpful." - A much lower helpfulness ratio than other posts in the same thread.

I'm more amused than bothered her deceit- just thought it bore remark since it would otherwise be easy to overlook.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[frankgod]

As someone who's designed a few UIs I have to say that putting the tabs at the top is brilliant. The very top of the screen or window is a spot that is easy to find with your eyes and easy to get to with a mouse. With the tabs there I can scan all the tabs I have and switch between them more quickly. It's also a more efficient use of screen space. I can think of two reasons to prefer the tabs below. Either you don't use tabs much or you are used to other browsers that have the tabs below. Both problems will be resolved as you use Chrome more. I applaud the developers for doing the right thing and ignoring the stupidity of the crowd here.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[im_thatoneguy]

I agree completely, a majority of the best tools come out of users who have a workable understanding of programming who solve real problems with mediocre software.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Raenex]

Ah, so that's what happened to the cache results. That sucks.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Rob the Bold]

Speaking as a programmer, programmers are not designers. They should not, unless they have demonstrated an ability to do so, design UIs. Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software like emacs or vi: greatly productive for a small number of advanced users, completely unusable by almost any computer user apart from those.

Whether designing an interface or not, all programmers should read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Norman. And that goes double-squared for UI specialists.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Now that the cache results have been made unusable, I anticipate Google eventually going, "No one uses the cache, so let's get rid of that functionality for the sake of usability."

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[shish]

at least we had consistent UIs across applications, and they were reasonably efficient to use

Speaking as someone who used linux circa 2001, ahahahahahahahah haha ahahahah, hahaha, hah.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[rapidreload]

And this is why some people whine when I and other prefer certain commercial alternatives to free and open source software, simply because of the user interface. They just don't realize how important the ability to use a piece of software efficiently and easily is. People WILL pay for ease of use and well thought-out design.

It's the Achilles Heel of FOSS. Most projects don't have a dedicated UI designer, and programmers aren't good usability designers. Good GUI design is HARD. It's the reason why those low-grade armatures at Canonical who couldn't get a job at Apple, still can't get Unity working efficiently without requiring more clicks than necessary and ruining workflow.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[RobbieThe1st]

Yeah, I agree.
Hell, I hate the "shiny web2.0" websites as well - give me nice plain HTML, a few images and some CSS. Rollovers? Kind of anoying from a mobile tablet/device. Flash? Usually unneeded and wasteful. JS? Occasionally good, usually not.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[insertwackynamehere]

This post makes no sense. You trashed a whole lot of things generally assumed to have been "designed" by programmers (GNOME and Firefox) and then act like it's designers who are at fault. Everything you have said just points more to the fact that designers SHOULD be designing UIs and that you just work with shitty software and/or designers in real life.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[jedwidz]

Well, it took me about five seconds to find the cache link in its new location. I don't think it's a bad change overall, since the cached page and the preview are (presumably) the same thing. It also unclutters the main results - the only per-link boilerplate I get now is the inane '+1' button.

If I had scripts blocked for google domains (or in general), I might be a little annoyed. But I also appreciate that if I disable scripts, I shouldn't expect everything to work. In Google's case, I don't block their scripts because I use their site heavily and trust it. It'd be a bit of a double standard to distrust Google's JavaScript but still trust their cache.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[I(rispee_I(reme]

I should mention that many users find Google's popup web previews on mouseover to be very obnoxious, and disable scripting just to avoid them, since Google does not provide an option to permanently disable them in search results.

Now, there's no way to avoid the popups without also making the cached search results inaccessible.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[mysidia]

You wind up with a UI that isn't very powerful or efficient, but instead caters to the lowest common denominator.

It's software for goodness sake... you should be able to configure it/taylor the layout to your liking and choose some things based on preference.

We had customizable toolbars down pat in the late 90's... I don't understand this sudden desire by some software companies to try to return to an inferior "one size fits all" approach to user interaction.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[mysidia]

Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software like emacs or vi: greatly productive for a small number of advanced users, completely unusable by almost any computer user apart from those.

There is nothing wrong with the design of Emacs or Vi. These applications were efficient and powerful for their intended users, and extraordinarily successful, considering how long ago they were written, and how popular they still are. Think about that... there's nothing wrong with the concept of having an editor that caters to admins or advanced users.

Although, quite honestly... Vi/Emacs were easier for humans to work with than other unix editors that had preceded them. You could legitimately argue that they followed the design conventions of applications at the time, and Vi/Emacs was not significantly harder to use or did not require significantly more skill to use than other basic software tools at the time.

Windows was not around at the time. You could say that IN TODAYS TERMS.... the average computer users at the time would today be considered advanced, in that basically all users were utilizing text-based user interfaces, and most users had to deal with a command line --- user interface conventions change over time, and older user interfaces (over time) get harder to use for the new average user, because the average computer user is getting dumber and dumber, as the average computer user's intelligence tends towards the average ordinary person's intelligence (the more and more people are using computers)....

For their time Emacs/VI were advanced applications, and you did need to actually read the documentation or go through the tutorial. Simpler editors with handholding were available.

You should probably know that the target audience of these applications was NOT today's average computer user. Today's average computer user would have great trouble even using Pico, or any editor where commands are not input by a mouse.

I imagine you could today make a great number of criticisms about how the Pine mail reader is so hard to use.... although, there was a time 20 years or so ago, that the average computer user had to be able to utilize mailx, Pine, or a tool with a similar user interface

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[mysidia]

Real programmers use butterflies

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[mysidia]

I 100% disagree with you. Emphatically. Having been in the CAD development world for 20+ years, programmers are THE LAST PEOPLE who should be designing user interfaces.

I would say you're another person who's come up with the potential error of a "one size fits all" approach. It's quite fair to say programmers who don't have any experience using CAD applications should not be doing the design of the UI of a CAD application off the cuff.
If they can't see how a CAD application is going to be used, or what tasks are common, it is unlikely the result of a programmer design will even be reasonable.

The user interface is an expression of the application requirements and what the application can do. A vague general sketch of the user interface should be worked out before any code starts getting written, so that the programmers understand the objective and ultimately how the pieces are to fit together.
UI details can always be changed later. The importance is that all the needed commands/elements are accounted for, and the basic logical structure of what the UI can do is modeled properly before code is being written.

However... CAD applications are highly specialized. A programmer is unlikely to be familiar with using them; coming up with a reasonable design of a totally foreign kind of application is extremely hard -- this requires research. And I don't mean "asking a user for a specification". Individual users don't know how to properly specify aspects of an application -- it may work if there is just one user (however).

An understanding of the objective is required by a person designing a UI, and an understanding of the most common use cases is required by a person designing a complex UI.

General purpose applications such as web browsers or word processors are a different animal, totally different from CAD software. A programmer should be intimately familiar with the generic requirements to have a web browser, having used other products that already exist.

The detailed requirements still require research. A user interface designer is not in any better shape.

Without consulting with a broad selection of the users, the design is not likely to meet with their needs/wants by coincidence.
Ask one user and you'll be catering to someone's personal tastes, instead of actually having a design that most users are happy with.

A few users' "preference" will be suboptimal for large numbers of other users with slight variations on usage.

So asking just some users does no good, research would imply involvement of a large number of users, which is hard.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Chromium for a while and I have always disliked the tabs at the top of the window. It breaks the UI conventions of the underlying operating system by removing the title bar. I will admit, it saves a few precious pixels of viewing area on a low-vertical-resolution monitor. But anywhere else, that trade-off is not worth it to me. There is less space to "grab onto" the window to move it around (between monitors, for example), requiring more precise mouse movements. If you are inside of a remote desktop, then the RDP controls will block the tabs bar. If you have any kind of custom dock that pulls out when you touch the top edge of the screen, then it will open up every time you try to click on a tab. And the title bar does have another function, you know -- to show you the title of the page/window! In Chromium, the title of the page is only visible inside width of the tab, which is ever-changing. As you open more tabs, less of the title is visible, so you don't know what any of the tabs are anymore without clicking on them. The favicon is still visible, until you open a few more tabs. Then all the tabs are identical gray boxes. This is the way my browser looks *every fricking time* I spend a couple of hours on Wikipedia, or any other site that has lots of interconnecting hyperlinks.

I think Firefox gets this right, even by default. Don't fuck with my title bar. Don't shrink the width of the tabs until they are unrecognizable. Just make the tab bar scrollable or make a multi-line tab bar. And at least they have the decency to give me some fucking UI options if I don't like the default configuration. Sure, this adds some complexity to the application, but I believe the real strength of Chromium is in the rendering engine, not the shitty, barebones UI. If Chromium forks to add UI options, I'll use the fork. Otherwise, it's Firefox for me (and maybe Chromium on my underpowered netbook).

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate those that tell me how my desktop should look or feel or those that treat me as an "untrained" user just because I am part of a group that wants some specific thing that's unwanted by them. Most of those that request a change in the UI have a good reason to do so and I don't think you can find many requesting ridiculous things like address bar on the bottom of the page or other nonsense like that.

Ignoring whining users IS a bad thing especially when most of your users are to some degree computer geeks. And if Google does not like some of the requests, they should not do it BUT they should give people the chance of buliding an extension for that behaviour. In many cases they say NO but there is no other way to implement feature X through an extension either.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmers are often users, too (especially for open-source projects). Both programmers and UI designers are a special type of user, though, one that's been using the software for a relatively long time and doesn't necessarily consider all the typical use cases. But expert users are users too.

As a programmer with limited aesthetic design skills, I wouldn't want to design a UI. On the other hand, HI comes up with some pretty stupid designs sometimes and sometimes they need to be told "that's stupid". Just like programmers designing UIs in a vacuum is a bad idea, HI operating out of textbooks and only consulting other HI people leads to a distorted view.

And sometimes, programmers know the *most* about how a product feature is actually supposed to work. HI sometimes designs things without fully understanding the entire workflow and edge cases. That's OK in most cases, provided they work with developers so the spec can be fixed immediately not after they already designed a bunch of stuff around the faulty workflow. Just saying. Don't ignore the programmers' opinions just because they're programmers.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know who designed nano, or I guess pico for that matter.

It's saved me a crapload of time because all the important functions are displayed clearly, and then I can change ~/.nanorc to use auto-tab.

It's probably my most-used editor at home, just because it launches instantly and I don't have to think too hard about it.

Of course, once I get a better WM, I can just have a bunch of KWrite windows up, or gedit or whatever. I guess.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[PetiePooo]

Speaking as a programmer, programmers are not designers. ... Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software like emacs or vi

There's a big difference between a CLI and a GUI. Please don't confuse them.

Vi and emacs were designed to be used at a teletype. An 84-key (or less) keyboard with no cursor control keys. No mouse. Refresh rate limited by the modem baud rate. And for that type of environment, they shine.

To say vi or emacs have any relevance to today's GUI interfaces is a huge stretch. I too speak as a programmer, and while I agree that not all programmers are designers, not all programmers are programmers either. A good programmer writes what the end user wants, whether it be an easy to use GUI or a well designed engine underneath that UI. The interface is just another part of translating requirements into a working implementation.

If you want a GUI version of vi, I'd suggest WinVI32. Or notepad. For those of us that prefer CLI, don't knock our choice of editor.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[DaFallus]

If you're already going out of your way to disable the popup preview scripts, then you should know about extensions like Gcache for Firefox or Cache for Chrome.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[datavirtue]

I maintain a decent sized project myself (one man) and have found that the UI must be completely revamped as the project grows and new features are added. A great deal of time is spent messing with the UI even with a GUI builder feature. The thing is, is just isn't about looks and placement, it is about intuitiveness and workflow logic that become the overriding factors in UI design. Frankly, it gets overwhelming as a project grows. User interfaces are a tough nut to crack, it takes a specialist and working with users on a constant basis. The state of my UI, although by no means terrible, is really making me nervous now as I see it change from being an asset to a liability in terms of user satisfaction.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

What world are you living in? If you let programmers make UI decisions you end up with GIMP.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[sonicmerlin]

Yeah I seriously don't understand why people are complaining about this. I haven't read the complaint thread but I love having the tabs at the top. It just makes things feel... less cluttered and more open. Most importantly is that regardless of the acceleration of your mouse, because the tab reaches the end of the screen you'll never accidentally jump past it.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[FredFredrickson]

This. I can't see my tabs when I'm on remote desktop because the remote desktop bar covers the tabs completely. I can't maximize the window. This is a pointless decision. Give us options!

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[rufty_tufty]

vi is easy (and fast) to use. However it is not easy (or fast) to learn.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Altus]

if the tabs don't terminate at the top of the screen then they are no easier to hit with a mouse there then they are anywhere else. Putting tabs in the title bar greatly reduces the users ability to move the window.

If you use tabs a lot then chrome is even worse, it shrinks the size of the tabs until you can't see whats on them.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Sebastopol]

"A vague general sketch of the user interface should be worked out before any code starts getting written,"

Agreed, especially if the intent is to PROVIDE a UI (as opposed to command-line apps that become UIs). The best people to spec that are the users and the teachers and the professionals use who use the applications. Grandma can provide as much useful input to a UI as Nerdy McNerdstein over in the compiler group.

"So asking just some users does no good, research would imply involvement of a large number of users, which is hard."

Again, I completely disagree. Asking "some" users (whatever that means, let's assume, oh, 20) will greatly help. Asking many (oh, >1000) will also help. Any kind of feedback is useful. Simply dismissing feedback means you aren't listening to your customers at all. I don't think that is a successful business plan.

"A few users' "preference" will be suboptimal for large numbers of other users with slight variations on usage."

Which is exactly why programmers shouldn't design UIs, in general. Thanks for making my point. I think you are trying to say here is that democratization of features makes the whole product worse. That sounds like Apple. Looking at open source GUIs by comparison, I believe Apple does a better job. But that would seemingly run counter to my initial argument, if it weren't for the fact that Apple does respond to overwhelming user feedback (iOS5 notifications).

"General purpose applications such as web browsers or word processors are a different animal, totally different from CAD software"

I don't see how they are totally different. Word Processors and Web Browsers are quite complex, and can have as many tool bars as CAD software (I'm looking at you, MS ribbon). I think browsers should be simpler, but that is my opinion.

"A programmer should be intimately familiar with the generic requirements to have a web browser, having used other products that already exist."

Programmers are a very, very small %age of users of web browsers and word processors. I don't see how limiting feedback on UI design to just programmers will make a better product. This is a good argument that more people know how to use a word processor or browser than CAD software, and I could devil's advocate myself and say that I don't think that automatically qualifies them to make good judgement calls on UI design.

I think I get your drift: I understand that "focus group" attempts to wag the dog often fail horribly, look at Microsoft. But you can't blow off your user base and assume the ivory tower programmers know what is best. Some users will need to be told how to use something, but a good UI design teaches inherently, and that is why there is value in UI design as a discipline orthogonal to programming.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[The Dawn Of Time]

You live in a weird world if you think the UIs of old were "usable" in any sense of the word. I'm not surprised to come across such retardation here on Slashdot, where a vocal chunk of you think computer reached its nadir in the 70s... but it still gets me that you actually might really feel this way against all available evidence.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Yes, or Scroogle. Or, I suppose, just let the stupid thumbnail popup load and hit the cached link.

The point is not that there's no way to fix it, it's that it requires extra work to return the Google results to their former, nonbroken state.

Extending the browser to fix bad websites/designs is, in general, a poor solution, as it requires a change to be made on the user end for every person who wants the fix, and ends up requiring the user to keep track of a laundry list of extensions, browser version compatibility, etc.

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[fatphil]

You've made the fundamental mistake that everyone makes. No matter how more logically sensible (the buttons operate on or change the contents of tab, and therefore are subordinate to, or contained in, the tab; likewise, tab switches are now much easier due to Fitz' law, etc.) and therefore on paper *right* the UI designers are, that doesn't make the users *wrong* with their preferences. People often prefer suboptimal interfaces. De gustibus non disputandum est. Familiarity is often vastly more important than functionality.

The stupid thing is that while the arrogant UI designers can have their hissy fight with the dumb users, the whole thing could be fixed by some back-room programmer making it configurable without the other two parties even noticing. Where is that masked programmer to secretly save the day?

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Inthewire]

Apex?

Re:No, the problem is "UI designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

+1. Exactly!

It seems that most people here hate the new MS Office UI, I however don't mind it at all - took a little getting used to it, but once you got away of thinking in the OLD way, it's easier to use, and not just for me, but I've now seen how easy it is to use for the non-regular user, which can only be a good thing.

Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for Google, it's a stupid idea anyway.
No one is forcing you to use chrome.
I'd act like an asshole too if I made some software and people start complaining about all kinds of shit when I don't even care whether they use it or not.
I know you'll say Google is a company and bla bla bla, but what is really different?
They are releasing a free browser and saying they don't want to change the way it looks.
All these people complaining just means that chrome is so much better than all the other browsers that they use it despite this annoyance.

Re:Good for them

[shaitand]

"when I don't even care whether they use it or not"

You might not care but Google certainly cares. If the browser doesn't gain enough market share it is useless to them.

"They are releasing a free browser and saying they don't want to change the way it looks."

No they are releasing a project as open and claiming they want to build a community around it. Now they are saying that the feedback from that community isn't considered at any level. This has little to do with the feature in question and everything to do with Google's statement that community feedback isn't considered.

Re:Good for them

[psiclops]

Now they are saying that the feedback from that community isn't considered at any level.

citation needed

Usability

[KiloByte]

Generally, the less you have to move the mouse, the better. If the tabs are between the text and URL bar, you save 60ish pixels of movement compared to Chrome's arrangement every time you touch a tab, which tends to be a lot. On the other hand, you type into the URL bar at least an order of magnitude less often.

There are other misfeatures that Firefox copied from Chrome, but fortunately all of them can be reverted as an option. Chrome lacks that configurability.

For example:
* when I close the only tab, the browser shouldn't crash. I did not ask for the window to close, nor did I select "Quit" from the menu, I merely closed a tab. No other MDI program works that way.
* special-cased hiding of "http://". What's the point of that? It doesn't do so to "https://", "ftp://" or "gopher://" URLs...

Re:Usability

[vgerclover]

Generally, the less you have to move the mouse, the better. If the tabs are between the text and URL bar, you save 60ish pixels of movement compared to Chrome's arrangement every time you touch a tab, which tends to be a lot. On the other hand, you type into the URL bar at least an order of magnitude less often.

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen. By having tabs on top with the window maximized, you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

Re:Usability

[Zironic]

"* special-cased hiding of "http://". What's the point of that? It doesn't do so to "https://", "ftp://" or "gopher://" URLs..."

The reason would be that for 99% of the use cases of typing and sharing URL's, the HTTP is implied and unnecessary.

Non HTTP addresses are however non-standard and as such need to be declared explicitly.

Re:Usability

[KiloByte]

In my recent browsing history, 80% URLs are https.

Re:Usability

[Hotweed Music]

I use the URL bar a lot in Chrome. Instant is awesome. 60 px is nothing to cry about, seriously.
The tab thing is a small nitpick that takes exactly 1 misuse to find a solution to -- not all products have the same functionality, what kind of backward world do you want to live it?
Since it doesn't do so to the others, and "http://" has no useful information wouldn't it make sense to exlcude only that?

I think you just WANT to hate Chrome.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

tabs on top makes sense:

There's a hierarchy: tab > location bar > web page contents

the location bar is different for each tab, so location goes below the tab. the web page content is different also, so it too goes below the tab, and below the location bar.

There will never be a case where there will be multiple tabs for one location. So why would the location bar be on top?

Re:Usability

[shutdown -p now]

The reason why tabs are above the address bar is that it plainly makes more sense.

Consider dialogs with tabbed pages in any OS/DE that you've seen - Windows, OS X, KDE, Gnome, they're all the same. Any widgets inside the tabbed pages control are those that "belong" to the currently selected page. Pages may duplicate widgets, but then the currently displayed widgets represents parameters that are in effect for that particular page. Any widgets outside the tabbed pages control are those that don't belong to any page, and represent parameters that are common to all pages.

Now, back to our browser tabs. The address bar shows the address that is open in the current tab - it changes if you click from tab to tab. Therefore, it is something that "belongs" to a tab. Therefore. it should be "inside the tab page" - which in this case means visually underneath the tab bar. It's that simple.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

* when I close the only tab, the browser shouldn't crash. I did not ask for the window to close, nor did I select "Quit" from the menu, I merely closed a tab. No other MDI program works that way.

At what point does it crash? The browser simply closes.

You closed the last thing in the window. Thus, that window has no further reason to be open. What's your suggestion? Ignore the order to close the tab? Seems sort of stupid, you asked for the tab to close, did you not? And that'd be inconsistent if suddenly you couldn't close a tab by the same means you close any other tab just because it's the only one there. Open a new tab after closing it? But you didn't ask for a new tab, you asked for that tab to close. Leave a blank window? Why? The window's purpose is now complete. There is no further data in it. What happens if you have multiple windows? Should they all stay open if you close each of their last tabs? And if so, why?

Sometimes, interface decisions need to be made. Sometimes, you won't agree with them. And sometimes, you won't agree with them and they STILL won't be wrong.

Re:Usability

[Zalbik]

In my recent browsing history, 80% URLs are https.

Good for you. Unfortunately, the plural of anecdote is not data.

I'm guessing that maybe, just maybe, Google might have a little better statistics on the browsing tendencies of users than you.

By your logic, we should put the tabs right in the middle of the screen. After all, the user's mouse tends to be nearer the center of the screen rather than at the top, and the less mouse movement the better.

In the vast majority of UI's represents a "folder" of conceptually related data. Putting the URL above the tab breaks this concept. It puts data specifically related to the tab being viewed outside the context of the tab.

It's a stupid idea, and Google should be applauded for just saying no.

Re:Usability

[Guspaz]

The opposite is true. If you put the tabs at the top of the screen, the user can just jerk his mouse upwards, and the top of the screen will limit movement, making it quicker/easier to get to the tab bar. If you put the tabs below the address bar, now you need a precise movement to get there. Either you're going to overshoot it and move the mouse back down, or you're going to move the mouse slower to get the precision to stop there.

For your first example, your browser isn't crashing, it's closing gracefully because you indicated to it that you do not need any tabs (or the browser). In what scenario would you need to keep the browser open without any tabs? If you have a single tab open and want to go to a different tab, you can do so. If you genuinely want a new tab in that scenario, CTRL-T, CTRL-TAB, CTRL-W. Yeah, not as convenient, but considering how rarely you'd want to do that anyhow, I'm not seeing a big issue.

For your second example, what's the point of showing http:/// in front of the URL when virtually all web traffic is going to be showing just that anyhow? Considering it's the primary protocol used, why not make it the default case, and make less commonly used protocols the special case that show the protocol in the URL to indicate that something different is going on? It saves space and lets me see more of the URL.

Re:Usability

[vux984]

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen.

Only when the window is maximized, and you aren't running OSX...

you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

Even chrome maximized on windows... the top pixel or two aren't part of the tab, so you have to bring it back down a couple pixels. The amount of effort between that, and moving it down enough to get into the address bar is inconsequential.

Doubly so since I pretty much never run a browser full screen on my 21" multi-monitor desktop, and only occasionally on my 13" laptop...and its a mac so we're back to OSX menu bar there.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen. By having tabs on top with the window maximized, you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

Which is actually a huge loss, not a gain, for me. I usually maximize windows when I'm using them, and then to un-maximize I move the move to the top of the screen, not needing to worry about my x-coordinate, and double click the title bar. Unfortunately, Chrome has no title bar. I either have to move the mouse to the top right of the screen to hit the middle "Restore Down" button (which is skinned in Chrome, so it is not nearly the same size as every other window I use. The "Restore Down" button in Chrome's starts further left than nearly all 3 of those button on a standard window on my system), or I get to play the fun game of trying to aim at the tiny 'v' between the tops of two tabs. If Chrome just had a 1px tall bar at the top that acted like a standard title bar, I would be happy, but instead it just gets in my way.

Re:Usability

[SmilingBoy]

Even chrome maximized on windows... the top pixel or two aren't part of the tab, so you have to bring it back down a couple pixels.

Wrong. You can hit the top and click and it will change to the respective tab. At least in Win 7 which is what I have at the moment.

Re:Usability

[geekoid]

" the top pixel or two aren't part of the tab, so you have to bring it back down a couple pixels. "
I don't find that to be true at all.
I just tested it. Mouse all the way to the top, and clicking changes tabs.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't I just read an article about Google going to https for everything for signed in users?

Re:Usability

[Grishnakh]

Doing a lot of banking or something?

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

* when I close the only tab, the browser shouldn't crash. I did not ask for the window to close, nor did I select "Quit" from the menu, I merely closed a tab. No other MDI program works that way.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fjccknnhdnkbanjilpjddjhmkghmachn

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Control-tab/control-shift are much more convenient to go between tabs a lot quicker than using a mouse

Re:Usability

[johanatan]

You should really just learn to use CTRL+TAB and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB. You'll thank me later.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people who use Chromium/Chrome have operating systems where the default arrangement is to have a taskbar at the top of the screen, thus they have the "small area in XY" problem _anyway_. Why on earth they haven't moved to a left or right side taskbar in this age of 16:9 monitors I'll never understand.

Re:Usability

[Broolucks]

If you really want to save time, navigate with the keyboard, not with the mouse. And if you really want to use the mouse, put the tabs at the bottom, to minimize movement from the task bar to the tabs.

MDI programs might not close themselves when the last document is closed, but it would be sensible behavior to do so. I'm often annoyed that they don't.

Hiding http is not really useful, but it saves some space in very common cases and it's pretty obvious that it's there. So who cares?

Re:Usability

[KiloByte]

Why on earth anyone would buy a 16:9 monitor I'll never understand.

Re:Usability

[KiloByte]

I do, depending on whether I have my hands on the keyboard or the mouse. Still, Ctrl-Shift-Tab is so uncomfortable I mispress it like half of the time. I guess it might be good to look into eLinks-like keybindings.

Also, I press Ctrl-W far more often than clicking the "close tab" button, but if, like me, you always click links with the middle rather than left button, there's a lot of tab closing being done, so even being the less-used way, "close tab" button is probably the button with most use.

Re:Usability

[KiloByte]

Bug trackers on two different projects, Wikipedia, Google, etc. Plus, I use HttpsEverywhere.

Heck, the only non-SSL websites I visit regularly are Slashdot, CNN and some comics.

Re:Usability

[KiloByte]

Would be great if it worked. "Note: On Linux and Mac, the following functionalities aren’t supported: [almost everything]".

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod this man up! This is absolutely *huge* - perhaps all you "gamer guys" out there have no trouble accurately clicking tabs in succession, but many of us lack that coordination. Chrome's current tab system allows for a much more streamlined tab-based browsing session.

Re:Usability

[johanatan]

Left hand can do CTRL+TAB and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB even if right hand is on mouse (assuming that you're right handed).

Not sure how to help with the CTRL+SHIFT+TAB. Maybe take piano lessons? [or re-bind, yea] :-)

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a really cool story, bro. Did you have a point or are you just mentioning that you're a special snowflake?

Re:Usability

[petermgreen]

The reason would be that for 99% of the use cases of typing and sharing URL's, the HTTP is implied and unnecessary.
The http:// is nessacery when writing html (otherwise the link will be treated as relative)

Further without the http:// it's not always obvious (either to humans or to software that autolinks urls) that something is a url rather than say a local file path.

I'd say that is more than 1% of usecases right there.

Re:Usability

[ardeez]

>Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen.

My Taskbar is at the top of the screen you insensitive clod!

Otherwise you'd be absolutely right.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

By having tabs on top with the window maximized

Anyone else rarely maximize their browser windows?

Re:Usability

[metamatic]

Now, back to our browser tabs. The address bar shows the address that is open in the current tab - it changes if you click from tab to tab. Therefore, it is something that "belongs" to a tab. Therefore. it should be "inside the tab page" - which in this case means visually underneath the tab bar. It's that simple.

Yup. If there's anything that's in the wrong place, it's the bookmarks bar. That's the same whatever tab I'm in, so logically it ought to be above the tabs. Not that I want it there--I think it would look ugly.

There are so many stupid reasons given in that bug thread. "The tabs end up under my GNOME menu"? That's a window sizing bug with GNOME, not a reason for applications to avoid using the top of their windows. "It interferes with where I put my sticky notes"? Put them somewhere else or use something more efficient for your to-do list.

Re:Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply not true unless you run the browser maximized and full-screen all the time.

Putting the awesome bar above the tabs is simply going to lead people to believe that somehow all those tabs live inside that one, displayed URL.

Re:Usability

[Altus]

I think most peoples actual issue is that the tabs are in the title bar of the window. I am not sure that so many people actually care about which is on top as long as there is a title bar above them

Re:Usability

[shaitand]

Demonstrably harder and more time consuming? It's fairly effortless to 'aim' for the period at the end of your post with the cursor let alone a whole tab. Moving to the top of the screen is also not a single movement. Since the cursor is hovering over the content I'm focused on which is the bottom fifth of the screen a single 1-1.5" push on the cursor will put it anywhere from the tabs to the location bar. I actually have to scoot my fingers back and give a slight extra push to reach to the top of the screen.

Re:Usability

[shaitand]

The only data related to the tab is the content in fact they are synonymous tab=page. The location bar is for changing the content.

Re:Usability

[shaitand]

"The address bar shows the address that is open in the current tab"

Except when it doesn't. The address bar is for replacing the tab content with new content not figuring out what page you are on.

Re:Usability

[shutdown -p now]

Even if you type something into it, it is changing the parameter (current location) that is specific to the current tab, not a global one. So everything I wrote still applies.

Re:Usability

[dffuller]

The location bar is for changing the content.

On that particular tab.

With tree-tabs!

[Arker]

Seriously, this extension is a must: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

I have always liked google and I still do, but their browser is not for me.

And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.

Re:With tree-tabs!

[suutar]

Oooh, I like this. Thanks for the pointer!

Re:With tree-tabs!

[mr_shifty]

and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome

They're pretty close to doing just that. It's already almost too late. Unless someone forks FF 3.6.

Re:With tree-tabs!

[m50d]

And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.

Nah, they've been trying and failing for years to fix the memory leaks, which should tell you something. I once read here that firefox contains four different implementations of malloc(). If you want to build a new browser, better to use the far cleaner KHTML codebase (which is why safari and then chrome have done that). If you want a cleaner, faster version of firefox, try using Seamonkey (yes, really).

Re:With tree-tabs!

[Arker]

Your last suggestion makes no sense. You do realise that both use Gecko, and that Firefox started as the cleaner, faster fork of Seamonkey?

I have used several khtml based browsers as well as Opera and while they have their place, nothing matches firefox for the simple fact of having abundant, truly powerful extensions. Things like tree-tabs, no-script, linky, adblock, and greasemonkey are what make firefox so useful. Not gecko vs. khtml country. Hell, figure out a way to use khtml but preserve the extensions and you're in business so far as I am concerned. Gecko schmecko.

Re:With tree-tabs!

[theCoder]

I always figured that 3.6.x is a (secret) fork of Firefox. After all, there have been nearly as many releases of the 3.6 branch since 4.0 came out as 4.0-8.0.

Also, tree style tabs are awesome, especially with widescreen monitors. It's too bad Firefox makes that extension so hard to install. Because it's not officially reviewed, it doesn't show up in the normal addon search on Firefox. But it's got to be the most popular unreviewed extension there is!

Re:With tree-tabs!

[m50d]

Your last suggestion makes no sense. You do realise that both use Gecko, and that Firefox started as the cleaner, faster fork of Seamonkey?

It makes no sense, but it's true: if you want a cleaner, faster but basically the same firefox, Seamonkey does it.

Re:With tree-tabs!

[Arker]

I remember memory leaks, but I havent seen it happen in some time.

Of course having a bunch of tabs open, and history on, firefox takes a lot of memory. Don't get me wrong. And I do have it customised, with 'restart firefox' returned to the file menu for instance - there is a reason for that. But the old-school memory leaks (where the browser just sitting open with one small page would eventually grow to consume all available resources) appear to have been fixed some time back.

Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to thin

[unity100]

Thats good for 'open' software, isnt it.

no

Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"

i call these people assholes. because, thats the term used for that kind of behavior.

anyway this assholery has just persuaded me not to use chrome ever. and i had some complains with firefox too.

Shilling for Google?

[sethstorm]

N/T

Re:Shilling for Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you can get paid to argue with idiots on the Internet? Where do I get in on that?

Waste of time

[Cinder6]

I would much rather they work on more outstanding bugs (not that this is even a bug--it really is working as intended) than spend time and effort on something as trivial as this. I prefer tabs on top, but my browser of choice (Safari on OS X, though I use Chrome elsewhere) doesn't do it that way. Would I like them to change it? Yes, but it won't happen. Apple briefly tried it with the Safari 4 beta, and reverted it back. Oh well.

In Safari, I'm much more happy with new features like Reading List, Reader mode, and sandboxed plugins, than a silly UI non-issue. Same with Chrome and its respective feature set.

Bookmarks Location

[JonBuck]

I'd settle for being able to dock my bookmarks on the left edge of the window. The current menu-tree is cumbersome for me.

"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent..."

[SensitiveMale]

on that specific bug tracker thread. Just because 99% of the people replying in THAT thread doesn't mean that 99% of all chrome users support that position.

Personally, I love the tabs being on top because that is where I think they belong. Everything under the tab belongs under the tab. The address bar, navigation buttons, print button, actual web page, and everything else belongs to that specific page and should be under a tab. If the tabs are on the bottom then the tab's container holds the address bar, navigation buttons, print button and everything EXCEPT the actual web page. Silly.

Tabs belong on the top. Now, I wouldn't care if google made an option to allow the user to move the tabs to the bottom.

But to whine about google's "arrogance" by not doing what you want them to do shows real arrogance.

Fine the way it is, but why not support both?

[podom]

I use Chrome. I like the current placement of the tabs above the location bar very much. I and most people who agree with me would never have thought to comment on this "bug" because we don't consider it a bug. If 99% of people (for the sake of argument) like the status quo, should you really be up in arms because a company ignores the 1% of people who complain?

On the other hand, perhaps an option to change the arrangement for those who want the tabs below...

Re:Fine the way it is, but why not support both?

[jmottram08]

You dont support both because Chrome is trying to be a 0 configuration browser. A chrome browser is a chrome browser, plain and simple. Its a platform for other things, and platforms need to be as uniform as they can be.

TBH i agree. Tabs are better on top so i can throw my mouse to the top of the screen fast, then come down just a bit to switch tabs. The only argument is that the "options" menu isnt based per tab, its a global action, so maybe that shouldnt be "under" each tab, but that is a technicality at best.

Re:Fine the way it is, but why not support both?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, perhaps an option to change the arrangement for those who want the tabs below...

I am a chromium committer. Doing anything in the UI requires supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, and the views system used on Chrome OS. Maintaining side-tabs on four platforms is not a small amount of work. It is one more thing to support and test. The tabstrip code is fairly gnarly as it is:

http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/tabs/tab_strip_model.cc

Adding everyone's pet feature ensures that we have no time to do anything except chasing bugs in code so complex that no mortal can understand it.

They took my vertical tabs!

[taybay]

Typing "about:flags" in Chrome used to show an experimental option that placed tabs vertically on the side of the browser. That option (and my vertical tabs) mysteriously disappeared a few days ago after I'd been using it for many months. I'm guessing this might have something to do with it. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Re:They took my vertical tabs!

[The MAZZTer]

To be fair it does come with a warning:

WARNING These experimental features may change, break, or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust. Jokes aside, your browser may delete all your data, or your security and privacy could be compromised in unexpected ways. Any experiments you enable will be enabled for all users of this browser. Please proceed with caution.

Re:They took my vertical tabs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has an addon Tree Style Tabs that puts them on the side. Configurable to turn off the auto-collapse option.

Re:They took my vertical tabs!

[geekoid]

No, Chrome is BROKE?! Google is evil for changing an experimental feature! whaa whaa whaaa.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[vgerclover]

Fork it, you are still free to do it. That's why it is still open software. Other than that, they have a vision on what the browser called Chrome should be, of which Chromium is the dev version.

anyway this assholery has just persuaded me not to use chrome ever. and i had some complains with firefox too.

You still have Opera, IE and Safari...

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the address bar that makes this decision so bafflingly stupid. The address bar does not "belong to that specific page"; it is a mechanism for leaving the page to go elsewhere. Nobody is going "Holy shit, I'm reading this page and have no idea where I am; let me check the address bar and find out." Even if such people existed, they'd be better off looking at the title bar which is still above the tab!!!

Reason for Being

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs on Top is the soul thing that made Chrome interesting. It was 'THE' innovation that justified the release of a new browser. They can't allow it to go away without losing their identity. I suspect there are technical and 'paradigm' reasons involved as well.

One thing I noticed from the comments that I read from that thread, in the majority of cases it's not really the tabs at the top that bother them, it's the fact that they broke UI conventions and therefore do not play nicely with the other software. Except that it's their fault for breaking custom, why should Google put in a fix to make the other software work?

I find it interesting that I'm typing this from FireFox with my tabs ABOVE the URL bar. (And it only makes sense that way.) However, they are below the menu bar and the title bar. So my app still has the familiar "top handle" and therefor plays nicely with the other apps on the screen, but still keeps the URL safely on the tab it belongs with.

Re:Reason for Being

[shaitand]

"Tabs on Top is the soul thing that made Chrome interesting."

That's kind of a silly assertion. Dramatically improved rendering speed is what made Chrome interesting. Without that improved performance it's kind of a limp noodle compared to the alternatives.

Seriously???

[elfuzzo]

At the risk of sounding like a tool... Wow, so many people demanding the UI be changed just because they're used to of being a different way in another browser... I can appreciate the remote desktop argument & such but seriously... first world problem much?? It's a free browser - if you don't like it, stop complaining so much and use what you're used to...

Sense of Entitlement: n,

[TxRv]

definition: a 'Sense of Entitlement' is an unrealistic, unmerited or inappropriate expectation of favorable living conditions and favorable treatment at the hands of others.

Example: Complaining about UI design changes in a browser you got for free.

Visual and Informational Hierarchy

[Cl1mh4224rd]

I use Firefox, but I actually prefer the tabs above the address field. A tab is just a container and the address field contains information that's directly associated with the other content within the tab. The same goes for the back and forward buttons; their state is dependent on the browsing history of a specific tab.

Still... giving people the option to switch shouldn't be something that's denied with a heavy fist. That's just poor PR.

Re:Visual and Informational Hierarchy

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the tabs on top, it makes sense. But with firefox, tabs on top breaks the f6 functionality. Super annoying, but Mozilla won't fix it.

It's my build I can cry if I want to

[utkonos]

So what? This is non-news. Chromium is open source. Chrome is a closed source build of Chromium. Google can do anything it wants with Chrome, and I see no problem with that. If you want to have tabs below the location bar, great! Write a patch to Chromium, or quit whining. The point of free software is that the user is free to change the software in any way that she sees fit.

Re:It's my build I can cry if I want to

[Anonymous Coward]

It is probably not trivial to do this, as Chrome puts every web page, which includes the address bar into a separate thread and container. There is enough interaction between a web page and the address bar that it works well to create a address bar for each web page.

Re:It's my build I can cry if I want to

[utkonos]

Think outside the box (literally). The tab can just be flipped upside down. Just a cosmetic change, and make the other tabs look like they are being partially covered by the foreground tab as it is now. The wide bottom edge of the tab would become the wide top, and the narrow bottom would be connected visually to the page you are viewing.

Anyway, saying something is non-trivial does not change the argument of it being free software and the user being free to change it as she sees fit.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, what? Since when has it been required that an open source project accept and implement every feature request from users? I don't care how many people commented or voted on the issue. Ultimately it's the developers who get to decide what features make the cut, and what features are not worth their time. Not a bunch of petulant lusers whinging over pixel placement.

Go ahead and fork Chromium if you want tabs below the address bar. Then you can deal with the whining from 150 people who want you to change some other trivial detail.

Re:fork chromium

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, a non-profit that will jump to meet any feature request that gets more than 180 users to whine on an internet thread. that'll stay non-bankrupt for a really long time!

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Cl1mh4224rd]

If the tabs are on the bottom then the tab's container holds the address bar, navigation buttons, print button and everything EXCEPT the actual web page. Silly.

This issue isn't about allowing tabs to be placed at the bottom of the browser window; it's about allowing tabs to be placed below the address/location bar.

It's still there

[insidious777]

"Google ... today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue."

That's ridiculous; closing a bug doesn't silence anyone's opinion. The dissenting opinion on that bug will now stand forever, for all to see.

Google didn't silence dissent. If anything, they immortalized it.

Re:It's still there

[LBArrettAnderson]

Do you think Google doesn't know that? How can you read the summary and think that that's Google's official reason for closing the thread? That was commentary in the slashdot summary. The point was not to silence the dissent, but to say "we made a decision. And it's final, so don't try to convince us to change our minds." Have you ever looked in the Chrome options/preferences menus? They are so simple. The decision was probably made to keep them simple. Having another option would also add bloat to a very streamlined browser.

Forking developers!

[ProzacPatient]

Fork It. Fork It Hard.

Re:Forking developers!

[Guspaz]

Forking over inconsequential nonsense hurts the opensource ecosystem by spreading developers and duplicating effort. Everybody loses as a result. Forking should be reserved for important stuff.

Re:Forking developers!

[ProzacPatient]

However if the community as a whole gets upset enough with Google's refusal to listen to it's users then the true beauty of open source comes to life when developers can fork a project either for specific needs or the good of the community as a whole.

Waiting for the fork...

[dragonk]

Because when the leadership of an open source project doesn't do what you want, nobody is stopping you from doing it yourself. Someone fork it, i'll use it.

Not for long... Goodbye, Side Tabs.

[earls]

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99332

Re:fork chromium

[Anonymous Coward]

kill yourself

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[jmottram08]

bluushit. The address bar is where you are, it is what you are looking at. People rarely use it to go anywhere, as in one page to another, but they do glance at it to see where they are. If people want to go to new place, 99% of the time they are opening a new tab or clicking a bookmark, not typing over the current address.

Support is not overwhelming

[Anonymous Coward]

If the stats are right and Chrome has 20%+ of the browser market share, then I wouldn't really call 1000 posts on a bug about the design to be overwhelming feedback. Obviously a huge number of people accept Chome exactly the way it is.

The source for the Chromium web browser is available, if there was really this Overwhelming support for this feature, why haven't we already seen a fork, or a patch to implement this change?

Has anyone submitted a patch to Google?

For the record I happen to love having the tabs above the address bar.

Re:Support is not overwhelming

[mattventura]

And there are plenty of people who hate it but are not vocal enough to post about it. Then there are the people who will just use a different browser, or the people like me who need a new browser but now definitely won't use chrome because of not only this feature, but also the way google treats its users.

Got to respect them for not pandering

[wisnoskij]

While I disagree I respect them for having a vision and going for it, ignoring the inevitable complaining when they have a good reason for doing so.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[jo_ham]

Can I make a joke about people "holding it wrong"?

I know of a similar large company that likes to do things a particular way, and it's *never* described as "being respected for having a vision and going for it", in fact it's almost universally reviled.

Options are good things, usually.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[rec9140]

google is wrong, on both counts, their action, and the design.

The tabs Go UNDER the address, period. Stop. Done.

This seems to be a trend in developers, open and outright disdain for users seems to have grown of recent with the newer crop of YOUNGER developers and the me generation types. Look no farther than KDE and the KMail developers.

  I change things all the time that I think are not the correct way, similar to this, because user input has determined that for the USERS its in the wrong spot, for example. The users have spoken, LISTEN! Period.

If you release in to the public, then you take the responsability to ACCEPT USER INPUT. You can disagree, and the users will leave your program in the dust. No the attitude that "its free software, take it and like it or do it your self!" Does not wash any more, not when your aiming for your average Jane user v. other developers. Put your 'tude and your ego down, and be prepared to get told your every thing under the sun but nice. Welcome to PUBLIC software release. And for the record, yes, I have some very not so polite remarks for several developers of KDE and KMail, and a few other projects.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[wisnoskij]

Free/commercial has nothing to do with this argument.

A developer simply has a far broader perspective of their product then any user and just blindly accepting user input is not a good idea.

I have been in control of software products before and users for the most part are simply looking out for their own personal best interests. They will tell you straight out and with perfect honesty how their favourite class should be super powered to the detriment of all others or how some particular strategy should be super powered.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[Chuck Chunder]

The tabs Go UNDER the address, period. Stop. Done.

Why?

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[Tacvek]

If there is one thing Apple has shown it is that more options is not better. The iPod has always been regarded as among the best dedicated portable media players, and it has an extremely small number of users configurable options, and fewer features too[1]. All the other MP3 players had more options and more features like FM radios, more formats, etc.

Or consider Windows Mobile vs iPhone. Windows Mobile 6 had far more options hands down. I mean it literally had a scaled down version of the Windows Registry. Once again Apple comes in with a Streamlined system that sacrifices options and features in exchange for a vastly improved UI, and once again they revolutionized an industry.

The best software designers try very hard to limit the number of options. As a general rule, it is actually better to have several competing apps each with zero options, but which just work, than to have one app that can be configured to look/act like all the rest, but does not work as well.

[1] Ignoring the iPod Touch, since that is not an iPod at all, but an iPhone without the cellular modem.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[jo_ham]

That was my point - it's being praised here because Google is "standing up to whiners", but when Apple does it they're "creating crippled, inferior products for sheeple".

Good UI design and feature set choice is hard work.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[SilentChasm]

The tabs Go UNDER the address, period. Stop. Done.

http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-tabs-above-below/

Chrome, Opera and Firefox seem to disagree. Mozilla even has a nice little list with the reasoning for it:

1. The conceptual model: the address bar and controls apply to the current tab.
2. App tabs: like Chrome, Firefox 4.0 will allow you pin small regularly-used tabs to the tab bar. The address bar and other controls will be removed for these web applications.
3. Tab-based UI: Firefox 4.0 will show windows such as downloads and the bookmarks organizer in tabs. It makes no sense to have the address bar and other controls visible.
4. Notifications: some error and warning messages now appear below the address bar.

The part in bold is what I think really decides it. Putting everything related to that specific tab (the url, notification dialogues, etc) under it makes more sense, especially with the themes most browsers have now that have inactive tabs in the back with the current tab's edges extending down to connect with the rest of the page specific things.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[dunkelfalke]

And this is the reason why I kept using Windows Mobile until a year ago, later switching to Android without switching the phone. I like to have the options and to use them, too.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[rec9140]

Free v. paid software has a lot to do with it. Those in the free arena take the stance "you got it for free, tough..or provide the code." WRONG. Yes commercial vendors take the stance pay up! But free software tends to have this problem more than commercial

Your exactly right users have THEIR BEST INTEREST at stake. Duh! Thats why you the developer need to sift throught this to determine what is good and bad. You may have decided previously that tab relocation is a bad idea, developement issues, etc... When the USERS OVER WHELMINGLY state they want this, then its YOUR JOB TO FULFILL THIS REQUEST, period. Users=customers, regardless of cost of software, and the adage, The Customer is ALWAYS RIGHT.

You bet this makes for nightmares. Doing things I disagree with, as trivial as making something bold v. regular text. How stupid is that? Well the users whined, so it was changed, whining goes away. Yes, some changes are not so easy as 5uS code change, but 100+ users, have an issue. Sorry Charlie, time to listen and offer the option.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[rec9140]

Hence why I do NOT user ANY of those programs. I use Konqueror and the tabs are in the CORRECT LOCATION. Click between tabs and the URL location changes to match the tab, don't see the problem. Thats what should happen.

Their view is in essence, that the tabs are sort of mini browsers with the main window a container for them all. That may be fine, but thats not what I like, and others seem to agree that thats their preference. So there needs to the option to use it either way. A few 100+ vocal users means there is more who don't post and just tolerate issues like this. So its a situation needs resolution.

Tabs were added as a new feature and they appeared under the URL location. Then some one decided that it needed improvement and should be mini browsers in a container, thats fine, if you want to OFFER THIS OPTIONAL "improvement." Then users can select to use your vision of improvement, or return back to the correct normal mode. Your improvement to the UI is not always an improvement to all users. When you change things from the way they were to start to something else, regardless of if it may or may not be better, some users will not like it, and you need to accomodate them when they voice their displeasure, not just blow them off.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[nyctopterus]

I know of a similar large company that likes to do things a particular way, and it's *never* described as "being respected for having a vision and going for it", in fact it's almost universally reviled.

I'm tempted to think you are being ironic, because otherwise you've completely lost the plot. Apple not "respected for having a vision and going for it"? A company with the tens of millions of rabid fans "almost universally reviled"? Please tell me you are joking.

I've come to the opposite opinion on options. I think often they seem like good things initially, but actually result in death-by-a-thousand-cuts type complexity in design and use.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[wisnoskij]

"YOUR JOB TO FULFILL THIS REQUEST, period. Users=customers, regardless of cost of software, and the adage, The Customer is ALWAYS RIGHT."

No they are not always right, and simply because you made something does not mean that you owe the world from then on.

Commercial and free software both can do what ever the hell they want. Maybe they want to listen to the users and implement some of their ideas or maybe they do not even read anything written about their software, either way at the end of the day they are the only ones who are responsible for the software, the only one(s) who actually have a reason to want to the best it could be overall, and that is why they should have the ultimate decision.

The user/customer is unqualified, he has a skewed perspective, and on average he is just a stupid ass.

"Thats why you the developer need to sift throught this to determine what is good and bad."
but if "The Customer is ALWAYS RIGHT." then it is all good and all should be implemented even if it is inconsistent.

Re:Got to respect them for not pandering

[jo_ham]

I'm talking about slashdot specifically, but I probably should have specified.

Keep

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep chrome as is! I like it!

Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[rrossman2]

But the tab on top is fine with me, in fact I prefer it. It just works better for me.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[Anonymous Coward]

But the tab on top is fine with me, in fact I prefer it. It just works better for me.

Nope. There are about ten actual users ranting on this bug. Chrome had 160,000,000 users last May. If even one percent of users cared about this, and one percent of those commented on the bug or in the forums, we would see 16,000 users asking for this. We see ten users.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not in the minority. You're just in the silent majority.

Or alternatively the silent majority may be the people who just don't give a shit.

It's a classic trait of minorities to believe themselves to be majorities. Emperor's new clothes and all that.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, I doubt that.

Of the three people that I know that prefer the tabs to be relocatable, all three of them couldn't even use a search engine to find a recipe for something common. It tends to be the minority of people these days that "need things to look just they way they like" without even considering what things do.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[jones_supa]

Sure, why not. I think it's more logical that way - the address belongs "inside the tab". Currently I use tabs on left though (is it still a "beta" feature BTW?).

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[martas]

It seems from the other comments that you (and me) are actually the majority -- it's just that the people in that one thread were a self-selected group that wanted tabs on the bottom... And whoever wrote the summary apparently doesn't understand the difference.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority?...

[wisnoskij]

It is the only way that even makes sense.
Because the address bar refers only to one individual tab so it should be shown inside of that tab or it is simply confusing and does not make sense.

Seriously?!

[Sebastopol]

Can someone explain the pros and cons of this? Seems like troll food.

Re:Seriously?!

[Anonymous Coward]

read the bug reports, its the first fucking link in the summary dipshit

Re:Seriously?!

[SilentChasm]

From what I can tell:

Tabs on bottom:

• shorter distance to go to get to tabs when moving mouse from page content
• the way it used to be

Tabs on top:

• Page specific things such as address bar are visually under the tab, making it seem more connected to the page content, since the address bar and buttons do tab specific things
• Not needed things like the address bar can be hidden without moving the tab bar placement such as when using things like the add-ons manager in firefox.
• It's the way most browsers do it now.

Chrome OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome isn't "just another window". It's an operating system prototype. At the very top of your screen is your application manager. Makes sense.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's about allowing tabs to be placed below the address/location bar.

Which is exactly where they don't belong. Like the OP said, the address bar belongs to the tab, so it should be below the tab.
Realistically tabs shouldn't even be a part of the browser, but part of the windowing environment.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Guspaz]

If you're going to refuse to use a web browser because they won't complicate their code base to satisfy an infinitesimally small number of users, I believe you'll find your solution here:

http://gcc.gnu.org/

It's called Fitt's Law.

[Joshua Fan]

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen. By having tabs on top with the window maximized, you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

That's the name you were looking for for this concept. People unaware of this law shouldn't be designing UIs.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

What title bar?

Um, no, I dissent.

[Rix]

Leave my tabs where they are, please. If you want to use Firefox then use Firefox.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of these people aren't asking for the tabs to be moved ,they're asking for the option to place the tabs where they want them. They're not trying to force one design on everyone, rather trying to give users the right to choose. How is that at all a bad thing?

Stupid

[vga_init]

Issues like this are stupid. Projects ought to adhere to design principles. There is a clear rationale for why the tabs are on top and not below the address bar; chrome developers made this design choice deliberately since the very beginning. The same goes with other aspects of chrome's design.

I can understand that if chrome is not a suitable browser for your personal use, that you would prefer to use a different browser instead, but what I don't understand is why all the bitterness and hostility? That's just stupid.

A good compromise would be for users who desire an alternative UI to create their own web browser using components from chrome that they desire, such as WebKit and V8.

Re:Stupid

[shaitand]

I haven't seen hostility over their willingness to implement the feature or not (although anyone with an aesthetic 'rationale' for tab placement needs a serious priority change) the hostility is the justification they've given and the tone with which they've delivered it.

What is silly is rejecting a large quantity of potential users (for every one who could comment on an obscure bug tracker there are millions who wouldn't) by refusing to allow a simple configuration option when they like your fast rendering and javascript engine.

Infinite flexibilty vs usability

[Sebastopol]

This issue is a perfect example of the gap between Apple and Droid. You people are flaming each other about a fairly small usability feature. This is right up there with complaining about not being able to change icons. This is why Droid is a mess right now (from bugs, to security, to low customer satisfaction) and iOS is dominating. I know giving up software flexibility is the worst sin ever, but sometimes you need to just except small things you can't change (like the size of your caps lock key or the color of your keyboard cord) and focus on the things that matter, like getting work done. Speaking of which, why am I procrastinating right now? Oops!

Re:Infinite flexibilty vs usability

[Sebastopol]

Oops, meant "accept", not "except". Totally changes the meaning. Ha.

slashdot is fading into irrelevance

[at_slashdot]

Really, this is the post that it should interest us? Is this the matter that geeks lose sleep over?

How about slashdot not changing the design to satisfy users? I'm sure that users are not happy with couple of options that the slashdot designers chose, I know I am not, does it really need a post though? Is somebody who posted the bug that's butthurt by its closing? Damn...

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Tabs belong above the location bar.
Placing them below the location bar is an artifact of legacy browser design before people had a clearer conceptual understanding of what browsers do.

This, more than anything else, is why I use Chrome.
Change it and Chrome becomes just another dumb browser, I might as well be using Firefox.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[shaitand]

"Since when has it been required that an open source project accept and implement every feature request from users?"

I think saying that community comments have absolutely no impact on whether they CONSIDER a feature is a far cry from implemented every user feature request.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if we're going to look at it from a "what belongs in a tab" point of view, what about my bookmarks? Surely my bookmarks aren't part of the web page, and there aren't separate instances of my bookmarks for each tab, is there?

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[sirambrose]

I think google still made the right decision. Users expect the address bar to behave like a tab specific widget. It has different contents on each tab. If the user starts editing the address and then switches to another tab, they expect their changes to be restored when they switch back. Putting the address bar under the tabs clearly shows the relationship between the tabs and the address bar. For users that haven't used tabbed browsing before, the layout in chrome is more intuitive.

Chrome could include an option to change the location just because 50 people complained about the default on a bug, but that approach to design often leads to a crowded preferences dialog that is difficult to find anything in. Chrome often provides better default behavior that can't be reproduced by any combination of firefox settings. For example, Firefox has several different preferences that control tab behavior, but no combination of the preferences can produce chrome's behavior.

Chrome opens new windows as tabs in the foreground, but tabs explicitly opened by the user load in the background. I believe that I can use 'open in a new tab' to open a new web page in the background even if the page author requested it to load in a new window. Last time I used Firefox, using 'open in a new tab' on a link that the page author wanted to open in a new window didn't do anything at all. The behavior in Firefox doesn't make any sense to people who don't know the difference between a regular link, a link with a target attribute, and a link that uses javascript to open a window. I believe that the Firefox developers closed the bug about fixing 'open in a new tab'.

I've had it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck this shit, I am switching back to Firefox. Seriously.

I like Chromium, I really do. It's ten times faster than Firefox. Honestly, I don't care that much about proper Noscript and Adblock, so I used Chromium anyway. It's just *that* much faster. What I do care about are these fucking tabs being at the top of my god damned screen. It's awful and I've hated it since day 1. I figured they would eventually listen to the users and fix the design flaw. I never imagined they would be such arrogant pricks about it.

I will pare down the number of plugins on my Firefox installation and hope for the best. If someone makes a fork of Chromium that includes this feature, I will use it. Otherwise, I'm done.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[man_of_mr_e]

The address bar *DOES* belong to the page. Switch tabs, and you see that the location in the address bar changes.

The address bar contains, for example, the certificate information for the current page, so you can be sure it's not a phishing site.

Also, in chrome, the tab *IS* the titlebar for the page, so it's not "above the tab". Chrome has no titlebar for the app itself.

Finally!

[Cyko_01]

some Google hate on Slashdot! I thought this day would never come.

Re:Finally!

[DedTV]

It's more hate against some dick who works for Google, not Google itself. It's a common tale when some nobody looks down and sees that badge around his neck and thinks "I am one of the chosen of our great overlord. I shall use that power to subjugate the meek." Not something that goes over well with Geeks who grew up playing D&D and reading things like Lord of the Rings as it tends to trigger their "Epic Hero" response.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[shaitand]

"Now, I wouldn't care if google made an option to allow the user to move the tabs to the bottom."

Virtually no dissent doesn't mean everyone wants them on bottom, the request is to add an option to move the tabs so dissent would be being opposed to there being an option at all.

This wasn't about showing that they aren't implementing this particular feature. It was about the developer stating that community feedback isn't a factor in their development and censoring further comment.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything under the tab belongs under the tab.

I'd buy that if the bookmarks (a global application level thing) weren't also inside the tab. Chrome still has a mixup of items, it's just a different mixup than the "other" layout.

Do I really care either way? Nah, not really. I hated the tabs outside everything at first and, honestly, I put off using Chrome for a LONG time because of that. But now I'm over it and I've gotta rather used to it.

Thomas Dorris

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Chuck Chunder]

Can you explain precisely what behaviour makes them assholes?

Deciding not to implement a request?
Telling people the request won't be implemented?
Closing the bug with a final statement so people don't continue to waste their time?

It seems to me that software writers should be free to chose what features they implement. People are then free to choose to use the software or not. I don't see what people are getting angry about. The only thing I can think of that would cause the anger is some (misplaced) sense of entitlement.

When you have freedom of choice and freedom to fork just how entitled does someone have to feel to view Google submitting to the wish as the only acceptable outcome?

absolute nonsense

[ebcdic]

For 99.9% of users, the performance of Firefox is just fine. It doesn't crash, it runs fast. Only some tiny minority experience the problems you suggest, and they can bugger off and use Chrome and no-one will even notice. For the vast majority of users, UI changes are much more significant.

Re:absolute nonsense

[Grishnakh]

So I guess that's why Firefox's marketshare numbers are plummeting, while Chrome's are rapidly rising? According to the stats, pretty soon Chrome will be more popular than FF.

http://betanews.com/2011/10/01/google-chrome-usage-rises-as-firefox-and-internet-explorer-fall/
http://www.drbill.cc/2011/07/02/ie-numbers-falling-but-so-is-firefox/

Your comment reminds me of Obama supporters.

Re:absolute nonsense

[Tacvek]

I doubt the fmigration away from firefox is based mostly on performance, but based upon other things, like the insanely frequent updates, which are very visible and annoying. (Slow startup times as the updates get installed, and losing add-on compatibility). In contrast Chrome updates almost as often, but I rarely ever notice, except when visible changes are made to the new tab screen.

I personally use both browsers almost equally, and it is actually rare when they are not both running at the same time. I fully expect that over time I'll end up using Firefox less and less, and I would definitely recommend Chrome over Firefox to IE refugees.

Re:absolute nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

What? The only Obama supporters left are the lobbyists who he's ceded control to.

Re:absolute nonsense

[Grishnakh]

I wish you were right, but sadly, you're not. Just go to any Democrat discussion board, and you'll find that he has a strong and loyal legion of followers who make up any excuse possible to cover for him and his actions. Whereas these people back in Bush's reign were loudly complaining about all of Bush's policies, now that Obama has adopted these policies (and made some even worse), these same people are loudly defending him and these policies.

One guy even has a daily comic series about the situation here:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Bug tracker for bugs, not design change requests

[DragonWriter]

From the last comment (#188) posted to the bug by a Googler:

One more note here for the benefit of Slashdot (hi!) and anyone else who's not clear on this issue or how our bug tracker works.

We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time.

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback, or that we used to be listening on this bug but decided to stop. The issue is that our bug tracker is specifically about tracking what we consider to be bugs, not a general forum for feedback and debate on our design decisions. That means that in general (this bug included), we can and will decide not to address particular requests, and when we do, commenting on the closed bug is not going to make us change our minds. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to lock things down in the bug tracker precisely to prevent things from spiraling out of control or misleading people into sharing their feedback here instead of where it's helpful

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

We don't promise we'll change our minds, but we're not hostile to you expressing your point of view. This is just not the correct forum to do so.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[geekoid]

Yes, lts leave it open and string people along about a feature that was marked 'WontFix' a year ago.
That way they can be strung along! That's much better.

Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this news? It isn't a design flaw, just a bunch of whiny nerd throwing a hissy fit at Google for not bowing to their every need.

open souce anyone?

[jampola]

We are in the era of open source, so with that, if you dont like the direction they're taking, here is the source, http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/, now less complaining and more coding!

Chrome developer's response

[jlebar]

For those who don't RTFA:

One more note here for the benefit of Slashdot (hi!) and anyone else who's not clear on this issue or how our bug tracker works.

We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time.

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback, or that we used to be listening on this bug but decided to stop. The issue is that our bug tracker is specifically about tracking what we consider to be bugs, not a general forum for feedback and debate on our design decisions. That means that in general (this bug included), we can and will decide not to address particular requests, and when we do, commenting on the closed bug is not going to make us change our minds. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to lock things down in the bug tracker precisely to prevent things from spiraling out of control or misleading people into sharing their feedback here instead of where it's helpful

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

We don't promise we'll change our minds, but we're not hostile to you expressing your point of view. This is just not the correct forum to do so.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[kryptKnight]

Your opinion is fascinating, but not relevant. If you'd read the bug report you'd know that people aren't complaining on the basis of aesthetics. The problem is that a tab is only big enough to display the favicon and a small number of characters for the page's title, the more tabs are open the fewer characters can fit. This behavior constrains the usefulness of the title tags and there's a lot of websites that haven't adapted to handle it.

Note: I'm posting this using Chrome so don't interpret this as a Google bash, I'm just acknowledging that these people have a point.

Re:open source* anyone?

[jampola]

And I should learn to proof read my posts. Open Source*, not souce. Apologies, its very late(early!) :)

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah there's some Google forumish things for Google products discussions.
I've yet to see anyone from Google reading or caring about them =/

Why I Stay With Firefox

[oakwine]

Liked Chrome when it first came out. But back to Firefox. The fox had one major glitch session for me but fixed within 24 hours. Tabs position easily selectable. Doesn't make me much difference really. There are lots of browser choices. When devs have their heads wedged, just go run an alternative.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Chuck Chunder]

I think saying that community comments have absolutely no impact on whether they CONSIDER a feature is a far cry from implemented every user feature request.

Consider? The word used was "reconsider". They have already looked at the community comments so far and considered it.

Exactly when (and how) would it be acceptable for them to give a final "no" in your opinion?

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Twinbee]

I think you misinterpreted that. They didn't mean there was 'no chance' when they said that. They implied that whatever chance there was, that it wasn't going to change by users adding more comments where they were not meant to. It's a bug tracking forum, not a feature suggesting place. (See Google's latest post in the link where they say hi to us Slashdotters).

Disappointed Expectation of Openness

[kripkenstein]

How is this that contemptible? It's not immoral, unethical, or even evil. It's a painter saying no I like my painting with purple grass,

I think the reason this annoys so many people, is the expectation of openness. Google has an open bug tracker, and Chromium is open source. So people assume it is open in all ways, like say the Linux kernel is: The Linux kernel is not only open source, and has an open bug tracker, but it is also openly developed as a community open source project.

But Chromium is not a community open source project. It's run by a corporation, Google. It isn't developed completely in the open, and decisions are made from within Google.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course (although I personally do prefer fully open projects to partially open ones). But the problem is that the amount of openness that Chromium does have, leads people to assume it is fully open when it isn't, which ends up annoying a lot of people.

Re:Disappointed Expectation of Openness

[Chuck Chunder]

I think the reason this annoys so many people, is the expectation of openness. Google has an open bug tracker, and Chromium is open source. So people assume it is open in all ways, like say the Linux kernel is

These people clearly can't be paying much attention to Linux Kernel development process. Linus will reject stuff that he thinks is fundamentally wrong (and often be far less polite in the process).

Re:Disappointed Expectation of Openness

[kripkenstein]

Linus rejects stuff, sure. But the point is that the project is developed in an open community manner. That doesn't mean some things are not rejected.

...And?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been clear on this from day one. This is a core design decision of the browser, along with minimizing customization and therefore complexity. As far as UI changes go, this one actually makes SENSE. Why would things *outside* the tab change based on which tab is selected? You only want it because you're used to it. That's a perfectly valid reason to want something, but they don't have to give it to you.

The flip side is that they put in everything anyone ever wanted.... and then you'll complain about bloat and slowdown. Software design is hard and... guess what... the customer is not always right.

By all means, continue to blog and exclaim your desire for this feature. I'm not implying that consumers should just take whatever they're given and like it. But to expect Google to change course on something they've established as a core element of their software is ridiculous. The step of closing down comments was meant to make this point... THAT was the bad decision, since I don't see how this will do anything but piss off those who want the change. Instead of comments on this bug, they'll have endless filing of duplicates.

There's so many viable alternatives at the moment... take your business elsewhere. "But other than this Chrome is perfect!" you might say. I'll point again to what would happen if Chrome added that "just one more thing" that EVERYONE wants... You get Netscape Communicator (suite) at its worst bloat. It's fast, lean, and good BECAUSE they've kept the features and, yes, even the customization, to a minimum.

Just use opera

[Anonymous Coward]

no more problem like these anymore:
http://www.opera.com/

Tabs on top are good

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit your bitching and actually try it out for a while. Much better to shove the tabs up in the titlebar area than to eat upwards of 32 pixels of vertical screen space (more if you use larger fonts) for tabs and only tabs.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's the point. It's WRONG that the tabs are under the address bar, since the address bar's content is *part of the tab*. Having a static address bar that doesn't change when you switch tabs to a tab that's at a different URL would be really silly.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Chuck Chunder]

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the address bar that makes this decision so bafflingly stupid. The address bar does not "belong to that specific page

Indeed, it belongs to the tab. Which makes having it inside the tab incredibly sensible.

This is most obvious when switching between tabs. With tabs situated under the URL bar and above the webpage clicking on a different tab would change content both above (the url field) and below (the page content) the tab. You have switched tabs but something outside the tabs containment area has changed. That is clearly inconsistent, breaks the metaphor and really is "bafflingly stupid" (despite being somewhat conventional).

Bah Chrome

[stinkyj]

I dumped chrome because users can't configure location of cache either. I liked it, but that was a dealbreaker for me. Otherwise great browser!

Re:Bah Chrome

[marcansoft]

Use symlinks. Yes, they exist in all three major OSes.

People love to complain

[FyberOptic]

How can this even be a controversy? One of the biggest draws of Chrome (interface-wise) is the tabs on top, and borderless interface when maximized. If you don't like how it looks, why would you have ever started using it to start with? Anyone using Chrome recognizes that changes to the UI are very limited in general. It's always been this way.

Firefox, Opera, etc, mimic this tabs-on-top method as well, which would seem to indicate that the majority of people prefer it. And those who don't, who probably should have never started using Chrome to begin with, can use one of these perfectly acceptable browsers instead and configure it how they want. Problem solved.

Back when I used to suggest Opera to people, some of them would say that they didn't like the interface, despite the fact that it was heavily configurable, and so they simply didn't use it. There was no controversy. They used something else which they liked better. This should be no different.

Re:People love to complain

[shaitand]

Some people use Chrome for rendering performance.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[rec9140]

google is still WRONG. Period. And this is just making it worse, much worse.

Users communicate in what ever form they happen to have handy, proper or not, too bad, so sad. You STILL HAVE TO LISTEN to the USER INPUT REGARDLESS how it comes to you forum, bug tracker, email, note tied to a brick|rock, etc..

again, put the arrogance aside and LISTEN to the USER INPUT no matter how it gets to you.

Too much whining!

[kevin_j_morse]

No one is forcing you to use it. Even more ridiculous is the fact that this option has never been there and never will be.

The more I think about this the more I can't believe it.

My best analogy is as follows, Google is a person standing on the street giving out free ham sandwiches to try and draw people into their restaurant. The whining users are people who want the free sandwich but won't eat it unless the ham is replaced with turkey.

If you don't want the ham sandwich then walk down the street and there's several free turkey sandwiches waiting for you. They just might not be as awesome!

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[psiclops]

When i type a new address and hit enter it doesnt direct all of my tabs - just the tab that the bar is contained in.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

I would disagree that they are wrong - if it's meant for bug-tracking, it should be used for bug-tracking.

This is clearly not a bug but the way it was designed.

There may not have been much dissent because those of us who prefer it the way it is aren't complaining.

Apparently there are other places to discuss and give feedback if you don't like the way it was designed. They say they'll listen to feedback.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[psiclops]

if you click on a bookmark, it will not load that location on all of your tabs.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Chuck Chunder]

By "listen" do you mean "follow"?

It seems to me they did listen to the feedback but had good reasons to disagree with it.

I guess no one uses Windows 7...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I would be pretty disappointed if the tabs were moved from the top of the window. In Windows 7 I can have another window over top of my browser and be working, and see Gmail Chat 'flashing' when someone is chatting with me, right through the top of my work window (because they're semi-transparent in Windows 7).

If Google moved these I'd lose a pretty useful alert that is a big part of my daily workflow.

This and plenty of other bugs

[Theovon]

I filed a few Chrome bugs, and all I got in response were arguments from developers. Now, that isn't to say that I wasn't wrong, but they just seem uninterested in listening, even to well-reasoned arguments. I don't know what motivates them, but whatever it is, I don't care, because that's when I decided not to use Chrome.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was about the developer stating that community feedback isn't a factor in their development and censoring further comment

The original poster even commented that there's no option to put a feature request in the BUG TRACKER. And yet they went ahead and submitted their wishlist idea in the BUG TRACKER, as something that worked in IE.

Maybe, just maybe, the original poster should have taken a hint and figured out that bugs go in the BUG TRACKER, and that their wish to redesign the application does not qualify as a bug.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Qzukk]

Maybe not, but clicking on the bookmark opens that site on the current tab, so then again, maybe so.

Boo hoo hoo.

[Seyren]

It's not a bug. Why was it posted to the bug tracker? They could have just Googled a little bit and found the suggestions page.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

again, put the arrogance aside and LISTEN to the USER INPUT no matter how it gets to you

They listened to the input, then they marked it WontFix. You (and your lot) haven't given an explanation of why moving the tabs below the URL bar makes sense in any way other than your limp wrist wearing out if you have to move 10 more pixels. You want customizable? Use Firefox. What, performance isn't that hot? Huh, I guess having to code your UI in javascript and XML so people can customize it might have a drawback. Who'da thunk? Oh, you wanted them to create and maintain an option that a hundred-some-odd users wanted in native code for the next several hundred versions of chrome, when it would mean one variation would require a real titlebar while the other would not?

In this slashdot thread, there are very good arguments for change (eg this page's title does not fit in the tab, bookmarks could theoretically be outside of the tab - then again clicking a bookmark button changes the active tab, most of the wrench icon features should be outside of the tab). You've given none of them.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Rich0]

Yup - I work on FOSS projects and I'd lock a bug if it turned into an open forum - I don't need more bugspam for something that isn't a bug.

If you're going to ask for a new feature at least be nice enough to offer a patch along with it...

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[mandelbr0t]

When users fire input at you from all directions (and especially criticism), it makes it very difficult to concentrate on, say, writing code. Having a bit of order in how users provide feedback is a sane development practice.

Surprise, Surprise.

[Shinu]

"And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. ... [T]he Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life." -Steve Yegge, from his "leaked" G+ post

No surprise, amirite? That is seriously on the mark for how I feel about it. I mean, come on; there's actually no way to entirely disable the url autocomplete in the browser. I find that highly obnoxious. It's not a "bug," so every single instance of users taking issue in the Chrome/Chromium forums is characterized by developers a) ignoring the elephant in the room and giving them solutions to a different problem, which only partially solves the autocomplete issue, or b) merging the topics with those that deal with said "different problem" and marking them as resolved.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

you can turn off your bold tag now.

Fork it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Chromium open source? If you dont like the way it is now, fork it and do it the way you want it done.

If enough people want it changed one or more of them will find the time.

Surprise, surprise.

[seandiggity]

Chrome is not very customizable. Why is this news all of a sudden? Next thing you know, you'll be asking Apple to change something in Safari.

Software freedom isn't all about licenses, this is one of the reasons we have choices like Firefox out there. If you don't like the UI that Google or Apple has wrapped around free software, then there are plenty of alternatives. Or do you really think those companies are more likely to listen than Microsoft just because their products rest upon a F/OSS core?

Perhaps it would have been useful

[valdezjuan]

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

Maybe it would have been useful for pkasting@chromium.org to actual link to the forums (perhaps one specifically for UI/Design issues...) or the mailing list instead of just the slightly snarky comments.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[retroworks]

Damn, that's exactly what I was going to say.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Sancho]

The comments from entitled commenters are exactly why companies aren't more forthcoming about their decision-making processes. Companies that are silent on such matters don't get bad press. If the bug report hadn't been locked and no one had explained that this was a feature that would never be implemented, the current hubub wouldn't have happened and the only people likely to notice or care would be the 187 people who commented on the bug report. Now Google's on the front page of Slashdot again doing something that has the appearance of being closed (in reality, most open-source projects reject bug reports, and a good portion of them reject patches that implement desired functionality. How many times was Xen rejected from the Linux kernel? Years, though it was admittedly finally accepted.)

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Sancho]

Bringing up the title bar is an interesting one, because the title bar is almost completely useless on Chrome. From the perspective of a flowing design, it definitely belongs on the tab. However the tab is too small for the title to be useful.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[DarkstarG]

Although I can understand your point... People should still have the option. Google is basically tell everyone to fack off, it's my way or the highway. What I don't understand is how complaining about something is arrogant but telling everyone to fack off isn't...

Only Safari has tabs below the location bar

[raynet]

This sounds like a non-issue as Opera, Firefox and Chrome all have their tabs above the location bar, only Safari has the tabs under it: http://www.inside.org/~raynet/slashdot/2120255/

Re:Only Safari has tabs below the location bar

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can change it with Firefox, in fact, you can change pretty much the entire UI.
Actually, since I started using Firefox, I've *never* used the default UI.

Re:Only Safari has tabs below the location bar

[shaitand]

by default, the request is for an OPTION to move the tabs which at least Firefox has.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Threni]

> You STILL HAVE TO LISTEN to the USER INPUT REGARDLESS how it comes to you
> forum, bug tracker, email, note tied to a brick|rock, etc..

1) They've listened. They just disagree
2) This is the WRONG PLACE because it's a bug tracker, but it's not a bug.

Do you understand?

This 'customer is always right' stuff might sound good to you, but it's wrong and irrelevant.

Left

[bill_mcgonigle]

And seriously, if tab position is your determination for what browser you use, then you are pretty useless.

For me it is. Chromium won't ever be anything more than a toy for me without Tree Style Tabs. My screen is wider than it is tall and I can understand hierarchy.

I keep using Firefox despite its speed issues so I can navigate tabs effectively.

Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent.

[Tim C]

I don't use Chrome so I can't comment on that, but in Firefox having tabs on top means that you can't read the title of the page. That's at least an annoyance (and occasionally a problem) if you have multiple tabs from the same site open. Fix that and I'll agree that tabs on top is better.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

/thread

I prefer the tabs at the top.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a dual monitor setup and I frequently drag tabs between monitors. In fact I'm doing this more and more often. I much prefer the tabs being at the top where they're easy to grab.

This already been done with Type Ahead Find

[meiao]

Apparently leaving comments open on this bug has given some of you the misimpression that adding comments is going to influence us to add the feature to Chrome. (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150#c195)

Love the tabs!

[DjDanny]

Personally, I LOVE the tabs being right at the top. ok, so it's non-standard, but it gives you that bit extra screen real-estate.

Last time I saw Firefox, you were half way down the screen before you even GOT to the tabs, let alone the page content.

Hold on...

[Syberz]

People are flipping out because they want the options to put the tabs elsewhere but Google said "No" because they want to focus on other stuff? That's it? Wow...

Tabs on LEFT

[mrbluejello]

The funny thing about all of this is that I've configured my Chrome to have the tabs on the LEFT, and it's far superior to either of the options people are bickering about!

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[drinkypoo]

The problem is that their stance is stupid. Everyone else and their mom uses the bug tracker for feature requests, because the bug tracker has reporting tools (or at least stores the data in a way that is easy to report upon with a reporting tool) and it will let you know how much interest there is, who is interested, et cetera.

Google's ability to track interest in features

[DragonWriter]

The problem is that their stance is stupid. Everyone else and their mom uses the bug tracker for feature requests, because the bug tracker has reporting tools (or at least stores the data in a way that is easy to report upon with a reporting tool) and it will let you know how much interest there is, who is interested, et cetera.

Are you saying that Google doesn't have tools to do that kind of analysis on the discussion forums they host that they have stated is the proper place for this kind of request?

I've always gotten the impression that tracking that kind of information on any services they host (as well as anything they don't host that is publicly visible on the web) is pretty much Google's core competency.

Google isn't everyone else and their mom.

Re:Google's ability to track interest in features

[drinkypoo]

Are you saying that Google doesn't have tools to do that kind of analysis on the discussion forums they host that they have stated is the proper place for this kind of request?

I'm sure they do. Do you trust that they use them?

Google isn't everyone else and their mom.

They're not gods, either.

Re:Google's ability to track interest in features

[DragonWriter]

I'm sure they do. Do you trust that they use them?

I have no less reason to trust that they would use them to gauge interest in design change requests on discussion forums that they host for expressly that purpose than that they would use them to guage interest in design change requests on their bug tracker if that bug tracker was, instead, identified as the primary venue for such requests.

They're not gods, either.

I'm not sure how that's relevant, since you just acknowledged that they have the only capacity that is relevant in this context, but expressed distrust that they would choose to use it for this purpose.

So they don't need the omnipotence of gods, just the capacities they already have. And if you don't trust them to mine the forums that they hold out as the place for feature requests to guage interest in such requests, why would you trust them to do that on their bug tracker if they assigned that as the place for those requests, and what relevance does whether or not they are "gods" have to any of that?

If you don't trust Google to use the capacities that you admit they have to guage user interest in feature requests, what possible difference could it make which of the forums they host they request people use for those requests?

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[Anonymous Coward]

So because it's open software, they need to be your bitch?

As others have mentioned, fork it or move elsewhere you dick.

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is not my mommy and daddy. I'll discuss anything, anywhere I want as long as I am not inciting hatred or violence or making threats.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[shaitand]

Most open source projects don't ignore feedback as a matter of policy either. it's one thing for a project to hear you out and decide to go their own way. It's quite another for them to boldly claim that they ignore your feedback from the get go.

Bug report vs. advocacy

[Kelson]

I can think of a number of "bugs" in Firefox, Gnome, Red Hat & other projects that have gotten the same treatment.

Like anything that's ever been closed with a WONTFIX.

...really? This??

[WorLord]

If I were a Google developer, I would WANT anyone who thinks this is a deal-breaker to use a different browser.

I wouldn't care which, just so long as it wasn't the one I was helping develop.

Re:Wow. locking feedback, telling people what to t

[shaitand]

"See Google's latest post in the link where they say hi to us Slashdotters"

And you don't find the snarky stfu and go away tone of that and the previous post to be inappropriate? Also, a bug tracking forum is the normal place to make a feature request.

Dislike Google interfaces

[jweller13]

I very much dislike Google, not google.com, UI's. Gmail's interface is clunky and functionally inept; besides the fact that it goes down about once every couple weeks. Chromes interface is so very unintuitive and minimalist as to be incredibly frustrating. Don't get me started on Youtube. I get used to the interface and where things are then they change it and I can't find anything. I get used to that then they do another unannounced change. They seem to do this every few months or so.

Contempt for users: the new trend in UI design

[JDG1980]

Between Chrome, Firefox, and Windows 8 (Start screen), it seems that the new trend in UI design is contempt for users, especially advanced users who want customization options. The UX "professionals" are dead-set on the notion that there is One True Way of doing things, that adding options just confuses people, and that users need to get with the program whether they like it or not.

Cached link re-exposed using Stylish (chrome &

[ApodicticAce]

Google Cached links re-exposed using Stylish (in Chrome & Firefox)

Here's your simple recipe:

1) Get Stylish, the CSS modifier plugin/extension for Chrome or Firefox
      Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe
      Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

2) Make this one-line script/style (Click Stylish's icon -> 'Manage installed styles' -> 'Write new style' & name it "Expose Cached+" if you like):

.vshid{display: inline !important;}

3) Save
4) Enjoy

For bonus enjoyment you can make the Cached link really stand out with this:

.vshid{
display: inline !important;
color: red !important;
text-shadow: 1px 1px 4px #ff0000;
text-transform: uppercase !important;
font: italic bold small/1.4em Comic Sans MS, sans-serif red !important;
}

Voila Cached happiness returns :) (as well as 'Similar')
Enjoy!

p.s. I thought I'd gone nuts when the cached link disappeared and looked in the source and it was still RIGHT THERE but hidden! by the css ... a little digging into css tricks lead to this recipe -- the extra emphasis bit was made me feel even better now that the cached links REALLY STANDS OUT.
  I hope gives you as much pleasure as it gave me ... & Big thanks to Stylish's Jason Barnabe!!

# google cached link links missing disappeared gone lost
# solved solution fixed fix answered answer
# bring back google cached link links
# solved solution fixed fix answered answer google cached link links missing disappeared gone lost

Re:Bug tracker for bugs, not design change request

[alexo]

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback

"Never" is a strong word but I found that Google very rarely listens to user feedback.

Some cases in point:
Removing saved locations from Google maps (Alternatives: Bing maps, Yahoo maps, Mapquest).
Google toolbar breaking form functionality in FF (Alternative: SearchWP).

Congratulations on the beautiful comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations on the beautiful comments www.yurdanyapi.com