Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Gets Rid Of App Launcher In Chrome 52, Browser's Mac Client Gets Material Design (9to5mac.com)

Posted by msmash on from the good-riddance dept.

Google has finally removed App Launcher that it bundles with the Chrome browser for Windows and Mac with the release of Chrome v52. The Mac client, in addition, now embraces Google's Material Design approach, and comes with new icons and flatter and transparent interface. 9to5Mac documents more changes on Chrome for Mac and Windows: Besides a new flatter, sharper, and transparent design, Material is also a "huge engineering feat," especially for Chrome OS and Windows. Chrome is "now rendered fully programmatically including iconography, effectively removing the ~1200 png assets we were maintaining before," Google noted. "It also allows us to deliver a better rendering for a wide range of PPI configuration."

3 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. We are spirits by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    in the material world.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  2. Hipsters must die by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    a new flatter, sharper, and transparent design

    So you can't see anything, you can't find anything and you can't do anything, except by accident - and only if it's not what you wanted to do.

    But fuck all of that, it doesn't look cluttered because everything is within a plain glass squint of mid-grey. Yay! Chocamochackacockasuckalattes all round! WITH SPRINKLES!

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Dumb boast by GrahamCox · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Chrome is "now rendered fully programmatically including iconography, effectively removing the ~1200 png assets we were maintaining before,"

    This is dumb. Utterly dumb. What they should have done is used vector assets, such as PDF, or if that's too "non-Google" for them, SVG or anything similar. Coding images doesn't make sense - you have to maintain that code and it's a complex effort for anyone to alter what's rendered. Compare that with simply swapping out a resource created in a vector art program.

    Forcing the material design on Mac users is equally dumb, there's no point making the browser consistent with other platforms the users isn't likely using, but to make it fit in with the ones s/he *is* using. And having hard-coded the image assets, there's now no easy way to simply swap out one set of resources for another to allow that to be done easily.

    Chrome will never be installed on my Mac.