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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[geekoid]

The problems is you.

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

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

[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.

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.

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".

[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".

[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".

[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.

"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.

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: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.