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Chrome 65 Arrives With Material Design Extensions Page, New Developer Features (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 65 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions in this release include Material Design changes and new developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome 65 comes with a few visual changes. The most obvious is related to Google's Material Design mantra. The extensions page has been completely revamped to follow it. Next up, Chrome 65 replaces the Email Page Location link in Chrome for Mac's File menu with a Share submenu. As you might expect, Mac users can use this submenu to share the URL of a current tab via installed macOS Share Extensions. Speaking of Macs, Chrome 65 is also the last release for OS X 10.9 users. Chrome 66 will require OS X 10.10 or later. Moving on to developer features, Chrome 65 includes the CSS Paint API, which allows developers to programmatically generate an image, and the Server Timing API, which allows web servers to provide performance timing information via HTTP headers.
When will this epoch of stupid retarded hacks called "designs" be over?
It's getting increasingly more difficult to track unique users due to a proliferation of plugins and shit like that, we need some new functions and API's to allow better and more accurate tracking of users to deliver targeted material. Without this we're sliding back into the spam-approach dark ages. Browser makers need to step up and provide this enhanced functionality or nobody will like the end result.
We've just got too many cycles lying around huh?
There are new features in Chrome?
Oh my! The poor folks at Mozilla working on Firefox now have more to do in their quest to make Firefox more Chrome-like than Chrome itself.
Yeah, it really sucks to be a simpering follower.
Material Design is hideous, unintuitive crap. The fact that one of the biggest companies in the world hasn't got a clue on user interface design speaks volumes about the state of modern computing. Go and see how many user INTERFACE design jobs for PC (or even Apple) software companies there are - virtually none - because most people haven't got a clue about interface design, and don't understand what they are doing.
Hence Windows 10, 'flat' design, Windows 8, 'The Ribbon', Android (utterly awful user interface with virtually no affordance and virtually no visual feedback to anything you do, and just plain designed wrong), and so on.
And still it does not allow a user to set the "use the desktop site" as a permanent setting for every page. So when you use Chrome on a tablet with a decent sized screen you still get the crappy mobile pages until you go into settings for every single page visited and change the setting to use the desktop site.
Exactly how hard is it to make that setting apply globally and not page by page?
Don't forget the few last versions of macOS. I'm on 10.9 and it looks better than the flat crap in 10.11.
#DeleteFacebook
Nerd does not like change, news at eleven.
Yeah no. Nice try Google.
Dear slashdot mods, maybe you might want to actually _read_ the changelogs and not regurgitated PR bullets. There's quite a bit of crap in this release.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+log/66.0.3356.0..66.0.3359.10?pretty=fuller&n=10000
Who am I kidding. You hate anons.
B'cos change means good automatically, right ? You must have liked windows 8....
Material Design is hideous, unintuitive crap. The fact that one of the biggest companies in the world hasn't got a clue on user interface design speaks volumes about the state of modern computing.
I've run into this in every engineering gig I've ever had, and you'd think the bean counters would figure this out by now.
The biggest single reason Apple's market cap is bonkers is because of the iPhone. And the biggest reason the iPhone was such a success was because the phone *was* so easy your grandma could use it. (aside: even my 14 year old can smell the feature creep in iOS since Jobs died). Hence, great UX = bonkers market cap. It's not the *only* reason, but it's the *biggest* reason. iPhone hasn't been the fastest, most feature-rich phone in awhile, and it hasn't mattered one fucking bit.
The problem is: good design is like pornography, you'll know it when you see it. You can't farm it out to engineers, you can't create design documents that people can blindly follow and magically come up with good design. Every time I've implemented a stellar design (using intuition and experience, mostly) my boss wants me to come up with documentation so I can 'teach' the other developers how to do it. Cannot be done.
In my experience, engineering disciplines can be learned by artists: rigor, discipline, logic. They're hard habits to acquire for nonlinear thinkers, but not impossible. Teaching art to someone who thinks like an engineer? Good fucking luck.
That said, material design sucks. It's obvious to anyone with an inkling of art history it was created by a bunch of engineers, and only adopted because of the massive groupthink and FOMO that surrounds web development.
Just more marketing crap makeup on the same new-fangled and barely-usable UI/UX stuff we've been handed for the last decade. No thanks google.
"Google's material design mantra" is the reason their mobile apps get harder and harder to use every time they are updated.
Seriously.
Material design is quite fine. It may not be that opinionated, but then again, the importance of design is to get out of the way and not be particularly artsy.
Consider that they have unified design across all products and platforms and have released the specs to the public for others to use which they have without compromising their individual brands. Ask while maintaining consistency of the framework. That is a pretty incredible feat. MD is quite timeless, quotes Bauhaus and most modern UI principles alike and caters to touch interfaces. I don't know of any other design framework that manages to do this. And last but not least MD is considered a work in progress which is a very honest approach to it's ambitions IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
God I hate "flat design". Skeuomorphs exist for a reason.
It only came out 4 years ago, it is newer than Windows 8.1. Once again Macs are being unnecessarily going into the scrap heap. If Google discontinued Windows 7 and 8.1 support there would be a uprising.
Since they are making a change to the material design of Chrome, does that mean it will now be called Brushed Aluminum instead? Perhaps Oil-Rubbed Bronze?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
... maybe you might want to actually _read_ the changelogs ... There's quite a bit of crap in this release.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+log/66.0.3356.0..66.0.3359.10?pretty=fuller&n=10000
Saw this in the changelog, had a smudge on my glasses, read it as "soul". Never been happier to have to clean my glasses.
[Merge to M66] Enable Sole integration by default
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
On the new CSS Paint API:
WHY? WHY LORD WHY? The whole point of CSS is that it allows styling without resorting to client-side scripting that can allow unbounded execution and destroy the user experience! Why on earth would you add a mechanism for arbitrary scripting to CSS? So now instead of having reliable and reproducible styling with bounded performance costs, you introduce a means for arbitrary code execution and the associated halting problem!
The browser nutcases that have taken over the W3C need to be stopped. They do not have our best interests at heart. We need fewer ways for web page makers to control users' browsers, not more. In their rush to make web developers happy, the Chrome team has completely thrown the end user under the bus.
The ribbon interface has a bunch of research backing it up. Go read it. It solved the issues it intended to solve: complex, deeply nested menus. If you remember, everyone was complaining about the menus being too complex. Microsoft tried to fix it and now everyone complains that it's not what they're used to. Nostalgia is a poor excuse to keep something the same.
Everything else, on the other hand, I agree with you. Show me the studies which say any of the other interface designs improve usability. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any.
Don't get me started with fucking Google's hamburger menu (and everyone now copying them). Changing the icon of a menu item when there's a plug-in error is completely stupid. A person looking to use the menu will no longer be able to find it because its icon is no longer there. Whoever came up with that should be fired.
Can someone explain to me what "material design" actually is? I've read the linked page (yeah, I know, heresy) and still have no idea what it actually is. Specifically, how would I judge whether my UI is following "material design", whatever that is, or not?
That said, material design sucks. It's obvious to anyone with an inkling of art history it was created by a bunch of engineers
It was? From reading the guidelines, it seems to have been created by the sort of people who dreamed up third-wave feminism and intersectional social justice and developmental studies and a whole pile of other things for which the most appropriate collective noun I can think of is "wank". It's just a huge pile of wank that tells you nothing about how to actually design a usable UI. Just wank.
Do you have tarpaulin grommets in your ears and wear a beret?
If the answer is yes then you already know.
If the answer is no then you're a square old daddy-o and just wouldn't get it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."