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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.'"
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 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.
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.
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
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.