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Google Gets Rid Of App Launcher In Chrome 52, Browser's Mac Client Gets Material Design (9to5mac.com)
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."
in the material world.
#DeleteChrome
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."
Why not use OS X's built-in widgets for tabs, arrows, etc.?
Is it more important for your browser to be consistent with the other apps on your desktop, or to be consistent with the browser across different kinds of platforms? The answer won't be the same for everyone, but what we're seeing now is the endpoint of process that Microsoft feared with Netscape back in the 90s: the marginalization of desktop operating systems as platforms.
Back in the 90s if your browser looked dramatically different from the way other Mac apps looked, users would have howled in protest. Now most people would agree that it's more important for a website or app to look consistent across different devices and operating systems. For many users it wouldn't matter very much whether they're using Windows, MacOS or Linux, were it not for the fact they're locked into MS Office.
So there's nothing "wrong" with OSX's built in widget set, except that it serves Google as a browser-centric company better to standardize the experience across host OSs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Try this out for yourself. Get a piece of paper and a pen. Draw a large curve across the paper. You've just executed the programmatic function draw_curve().
Compare that to what it looks like when you enlarge a bitmap which has a few pixels roughly approximating a curve.
> Whether you call it stretching or scaling, you're still enlarging a bitmap
It's NOT enlarging a bitmap (or doesn't have to be). It's *drawing* the object at the appropriate size. The graphics libraries have functions like draw_curve().
Google "vector graphics". Drawing a line at a 20 degree angle does not result in the same pixels as scaling up a smaller bitmap which also approximates a 20 degree line. It is the same at 0, 45, and 90 degrees.
... what we're seeing now is the endpoint of process that Microsoft feared with Netscape back in the 90s: the marginalization of desktop operating systems as platforms.
Microsoft is not quite free from blame though, with their incessant changing of the look and feel, marginalisation of the desktop in favor of phones and tablets, and the dual-metaphor horror that is metro... I'm not saying they should have stuck with a single style, but nowadays there is no consistent language anymore for controls, thanks in no small part to Microsoft messing around with them so much. So yes, applications can now pick their own look and feel. No one is going to notice anymore.
All they need is a simple settings option which lets you change how you want the app to appear. Material design, Windows 8 Tiles, Windows 7 Aero, bubbly Windows XP, rounded corners Mac OS, do you want drop shadows or not, whatever. There is absolutely nothing preventing Microsoft / Google / Apple / etc. from letting the user pick how they want their computer desktop to look. The computer doesn't know the difference. To it, it's just a window with graphical elements overlaid on top of it.
It's like the designers at these companies are on a power trip, deriving satisfaction from knowing they can force everyone to bend to their will.
When the summary says "removing the ~1200 png assets we were maintaining before", that means they got rid of the PNGs. In other words, now they are NOT using png anymore. You fool.
Backspace taking you back a page was one of the stupidest default key configurations in the history of computing.
I assumed they meant they use SVG or some vector format. I would say drawing the icons to scale based on vector data counts as "rendered fully programmatically". A bitmap has to be redrawn or scaled or otherwise processed for different screen sizes and pixel depths. I suppose they could be creating every icon with a graphics context, some complex mathematical formula and a bunch of lineTo, bezierTo, stroke, fill, etc, etc. I'd hate to maintain it though.
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
Just what do you think vector graphics are if not a set of coded instructions on how to draw on a screen?
As I'm the chief architect, technical director and main code monkey for this, I do know what vector artwork is.
There's still a big difference between encapsulating the graphics commands in a file as written by an illustration app and just writing lines of code to do the same thing.