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.

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]

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

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.

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?

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".

[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".

[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".

[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.

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.

"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

[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...

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...

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.

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: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.

Finally!

[Cyko_01]

some Google hate on Slashdot! I thought this day would never come.

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: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: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.