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

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

[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.

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.

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: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

[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

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.