Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly, And People Are Very Angry (zdnet.com)

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Every major user interface (UI) redesign project is a hit and miss game, and Google's new Chrome UI appears to be a colossal miss. Designed with mobile devices in mind, the new Chrome user interface style was officially rolled out in September this year, with the release of Chrome version 69. Not all users liked the new UI, and this was clear from the beginning, with some users voicing their discontent online even back then. However, those users who didn't appreciate the new lighter-toned Chrome interface had the option to visit the chrome://flags page and modify a Chrome setting and continue using Chrome's older UI.

But with Chrome version 71, released earlier this month, Google has removed the Chrome flag that allowed users to use the old UI. As you might imagine, this change did not go well, at all. Chrome's new UI might have been developed with a mobile-first approach in mind, but the UI is problematic on laptops and desktops, where its lighter tone and rounded tabs make it extremely hard to distinguish tabs from one another, especially when users open multiple tabs. Since being able to distinguish and switch between tabs at a fast pace is an important detail in most of today's internet-based jobs, many users have been having trouble adapting to the new UI both at work and at home, especially if they're the kind of people who deal with tens of tabs at the same time.

Comments

Getting tired of this

[93 Escort Wagon]

Not specific to Chrome, but - why does "mobile first" generally seem to consistently result in "crappy everywhere"?

Re:Getting tired of this

[mwvdlee]

Because "mobile first" seems to imply the current "everything white" UI trend.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also designed for people to use in one hand with their thumbs, which doesn't translate well for power users that insist on using a full keyboard and mouse

Re:Getting tired of this

[mfearby]

Possibly because the idea of a right-click (or other keyboard shortcuts) don't exist for mobile (apart from a long press in place of a right-click, I guess), so therefore a "mobile first" strategy often means making things less convenient for desktop experiences (where the developers wish to share as much code as possible and not fork the UI for the desktop).

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

white on white with white edges like apple hardware.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Tomahawk]

"mobile first" because the majority of users are mobile. I guess it simplifies stuff internally in the codebase.

Still doesn't explain why it's needed, though. Like, on mobile you actually don't see the tabs at the top of the screen...

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is extra retarded on devices running on battery power.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Misagon]

The colour does not matter much on LCDs, but on OLED screens, brighter colours not only consume more battery, they also wear out the screens faster.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Calydor]

Using a full keyboard includes using the period key at the end of sentences.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Power users scare the p*ss out of the powers that be.

Re:Getting tired of this

[rainmouse]

Yeah it's painful, especially because all white is sooo great for power usage on mobiles. :(
I don't know a single mobile website that's not vastly improved by forcing mobile browser to use desktop version.

Re:Getting tired of this

[AmiMoJo]

Thing is Chrome isn't mobile first at all. It's very much desktop first, with the mobile version lacking features in both the UI and in the core app (no add-ons!)

The UI has all the usual desktop trappings like hover animations (pointless on mobile). In fact the only major change was that they made the tabs a bit more rounded and use a bar to separate them instead of a kind of fake "stacked cards" effect. It's not at all difficult on the eye and hasn't affected usability at all.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

white on white with white edges like apple hardware.

And also 50 shades of grey because fuck the users

Re: Getting tired of this

[MidnightBrewer]

If youâ(TM)re a power user used to keyboard shortcuts, colors donâ(TM)t really matter. Mouse users != power users.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, maybe because essentially any "mobile"/"smart"/"IoT" stuff is actually crap?
Just as in WWII people call "nazi" or "Germans" as synonym even if perhaps not all Germans were actually nazi's...

Re: Getting tired of this

[angel'o'sphere]

Mouse users != power users.

Haha.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Spacelem]

I for one don't like the "everything white" UI trend. I'd much rather the UI elements were dark, so they didn't use power on my amoled display, and didn't blind me when I'm reading my phone in bed in the dark.

Unfortunately Google Chrome has no option to change it (unless you're lucky enough to be on a website that sets the colours) and I have no idea where you'd go to directly tell Google your opinion on the matter.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? You believe someone using a friggin' keyboard and mouse constitutes a "power user"?

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

why does "mobile first" generally seem to consistently result in "crappy everywhere"?

Because it panders to the lowest common denominator, which means it sucks for every other purpose.

They become these stripped out interfaces for idiots on tiny little screens, including apps that no longer wish to be resized but expect to be full screen. Or, also in the case of Google, making Google News so it only has one column.

Sorry, but I've got 4 monitors on my desktop machine, I run a lot of tabs and windows, I want information density, and I really can't stand an interface which has been simplified for a mobile device which assumes I'm looking at only one thing on my screen ... I'm not using a fucking mobile device, I'm using a desktop. The acres of white space they leave to allow people's fingers to fit sacrifices utility for people not on mobile devices.

Mobile first basically takes everything we've learned about UI design, and tosses it in favor of someone swiping right.

We essentially reduce all interfaces to something a 4 year old can use, and in the process we make it useless for actual work.

UIs are now about marketing, not function.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the internet and you're anonymous, you can say "piss"

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

mobile is sexy. desktops are boring.

Re:Getting tired of this

[cheekyboy]

A msg to YOU CEOS and underling UI coders ;

Your work is shit, you are shit, you are useless and all your work will be undone in a few years, ufck you.

Just boot a 2010 Mac, and look at OSX 10.6 , oh wow, so pretty, so nice, so cute, fucking sweet ass bitch.

All these modern shit, made by simpletons newbies is crap. Might have been ok in 1998 with crap hardware.

Re: Getting tired of this

[b0s0z0ku]

The majority of users running DESKTOP Chrome are mobile? Allah forbid that there would be two versions with two interfaces, one for mobile, one for not. This is just Scroogle Scroogling its sheep ... I mean customers.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.focus&hl=en_US/

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a shame Google's Chrome is the only browser out there, if only there was a choice.

Re:Getting tired of this

[TheDarkMaster]

My guess is that the new guys have no idea how to make a proper interface. And to complicate things they discard the current interfaces (products of decades of improvements) because they are "obsolete" for them, not "shiny and new".

Re:Getting tired of this

[tsa]

Indeed. And some websites stubbornly and consistently show only the mobile version on mobile devices, even on the iPad (looking at you, FaceBook). Very annoying.

Re:Getting tired of this

[jon3k]

Agreed, it's using flat interfaces where you cannot spare a few pixels to create bevels to more clearly visually distinguish between elements. I realize that flat interface sure LOOK pretty, but the usability is objectively worse than the last generation of software applications with distinct, three dimensional controls and consistent set of toolkit widgets.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to do Nelson, better do it right:

HA-ha

copy paste YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOifa1WrOnQ

Re: Getting tired of this

[cheekyboy]

oh google is such a small company, they cant afford one more person to do stuff.

or to even have more testers...

This isnt a project as big as Autocad , google are just lazy shits, and over paid.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

A msg to YOU CEOS and underling UI coders ;

Your work is shit, you are shit, you are useless and all your work will be undone in a few years, ufck you.

Just boot a 2010 Mac, and look at OSX 10.6 , oh wow, so pretty, so nice, so cute, fucking sweet ass bitch.

All these modern shit, made by simpletons newbies is crap. Might have been ok in 1998 with crap hardware.

Funny you should mention that. I was working on an iMac of that vintage with a hard drive problem. After fixing it I set it up for my wife to try out. She had never used a mac before, and is used to more "modern" UI's. She loved it! And her reaction read like your post. I'll have to show her the post when I get home.

Re: Getting tired of this

[argStyopa]

?
Not disputing your fact at all, but if this difference results in any meaningful shortening of the life of a screen, them oled's as a tech are rubbish.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

Agreed, it's using flat interfaces where you cannot spare a few pixels to create bevels to more clearly visually distinguish between elements. I realize that flat interface sure LOOK pretty, but the usability is objectively worse than the last generation of software applications with distinct, three dimensional controls and consistent set of toolkit widgets.

I still design with Skeuomorphism. While not in fashion, we are pushing on figurative buttons and I've seen precious few buttons in the real world that are flat, shadowless monochromatic tiles.

The trick is to make it fairly subtle. And if the customer demands trendiness, I can make the design flat and lifeless as they wish. I suspect that Skeuomorphism will make a comeback, as the flat tile concept is so damn limiting, lifeless, and boring.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Might have been ok in 1998 with crap hardware.

HAHAHA You're joking right? With the bloat of the way programs are written these days? You couldn't even load a single website on a TOP OF THE LINE Computer from 1998. Especially something like Slashdot where they have 20 tracking scripts. All CPU cycles would go to tracking the user, and if you used chrome, your 256mb of ram would be used before you got a tab open to try to load the page.

--Highdude702

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome, Linux/KDE. define "a bit more rounded" Because when Chrome updated, It made the tabs strait up boxes, square, with a pipe between them '|' incase you didn't know what that is.

--Highdude702(mods)

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Run no-script and ignore all those tracking scripts.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Op savd byts nd of stry

Re:Getting tired of this

[DaMattster]

Not specific to Chrome, but - why does "mobile first" generally seem to consistently result in "crappy everywhere"?

Yes, I hate this move to mobile first as well! Not everyone uses their smartphone for every fucking thing in the book. I use my smartphone for GPS, calling, texting, music, and the occasional movie only. Any heavy productivity I do on my laptop or desktop. Mobile first attempts to make a square peg fit a round hole.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the internet and you're anonymous, you can say "piss"

He clearly meant "puss".

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. And some websites stubbornly and consistently show only the mobile version on mobile devices, even on the iPad (looking at you, FaceBook). Very annoying.

Oh, look, a power user. Ever tried changing your useragent?

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. And some websites stubbornly and consistently show only the mobile version on mobile devices, even on the iPad (looking at you, FaceBook). Very annoying.

Just change the user agent of the browser to a desktop and be done with it.

On an Apple device, I have no idea if you can do that though.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like "not invented here" but for time - "not invented recently" therefore must be redone.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the deal with all the hate against "hindu-chimps" on slashdot lately? One thing would be offensive humour, I'm all for that. But these remarks aren't funny, they're just bitter.

Re:Getting tired of this

[dfghjk]

"The trick is to make it fairly subtle."

There is no such thing as making Skeuomorphism "fairly subtle". You are using the term improperly.

Skeuomorphism is the literal imitating or mimicking of materials, it is not the implementing of subtle visual cues that provide visual complexity. It is the fake woodgrain or yellow lined notepad, not the shading of a UI widget.

Skeuomorphism is abhorrent and must die a painful death. Reducing "flatness" is not a "comeback" for Skeuomorphism.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think it's pass.

Re: Getting tired of this

[datavirtue]

That long press and other assorted hidden UI features suck balls. Total anti-pattern when required to perform a nessesary action.

Re: Getting tired of this

[datavirtue]

Google doesn't have customers, it has users. Real companies with customers have a customer support phone number you can call to get help with the products.

Google"helps" the products and owes them nothing.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

The best CPU were not too bad, faster than a Raspberry 1 maybe, but the browsers have been requiring SSE2 for a coupe years (for the javascript interpreters/compilers)

Re:Getting tired of this

[jlowery]

It's what happens when marketing is allowed to drive technological change. "Oh, look! There $$$ to be made if we can convince everyone to switch paradigms! Let's all write articles about how neat it is!"

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

My mobile phone has a dark UI everywhere and it looks way more slick and modern than that dated, blinding white crap. Then again, I run a custom ROM with Substratum, not some garbage provided by a manufacturer, carrier or Google.

Also, for anyone "angry" with the changes to Chrome, you do have options. Use Vivaldi instead. Vivaldi is so flexible that it not only allows you to change the color of the browser, but you can also set up a schedule to have it change colours throughout the day.

Re: Getting tired of this

[thegarbz]

Define meaningful. OLED degrade when used. On your phone it's completely irrelevant. On a TV the jury is still out. On a PC however where the screen is on for many hours of the day showing a static image and we expect more than a few years life from our monitors (my current one is 10 years old), it becomes meaningful.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

"The trick is to make it fairly subtle."

There is no such thing as making Skeuomorphism "fairly subtle". You are using the term improperly.

Skeuomorphism is the literal imitating or mimicking of materials, it is not the implementing of subtle visual cues that provide visual complexity. It is the fake woodgrain or yellow lined notepad, not the shading of a UI widget.

Skeuomorphism is abhorrent and must die a painful death. Reducing "flatness" is not a "comeback" for Skeuomorphism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

But thanks - it is good to get a professional designer to educate us.

Re: Getting tired of this

[bjwest]

Are you sitting there waiting for him to finish typing? I figured out he was done by the post ending, and moved on with my life.

Re: Getting tired of this

[bjwest]

Mouse users != power users.

Please Mr. Power User, show me the Mona Lisa you drew in Illustrator with your keyboard.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Marisaze]

OLEDs have their flaws, but so do all other display options. Somewhere along the line every display technology we have has a flaw that you could use to call it rubbish. Size, resolution/DPI, cost, resilience, total life of product, power consumption, color gamut, etc.

OLEDs have low power consumption, size limited only by how many LEDs you want to string in/pay for, fair resilience, decent DPI, excellent blacks with passable whites and an overall exceptional color capability especially in low light. Their downsides are they're expensive and you can cause uneven wear causing the life of the product to be shorter.

As a counter, LCDs have higher power consumption (but still lower than other options), size limited by the fragility of the liquid crystal matrix, poor resilience (even minor bending of the crystal matrix can cause a fairly large amount of damage), decent DPI, excellent whites with poor blacks and overall exceptional color capability in high light with poor low light color. Their best positive is that if you are gentle with them they'll likely outlast their usefulness.

All display tech has compromises.

Re:Getting tired of this

[bjwest]

... and I have no idea where you'd go to directly tell Google your opinion on the matter.

Using Firefox is my choice to state my opinion to Google about Chrome.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor do power users use shitty apple auto punctuation, especially when they KNOW it will fuck up the result.

Re:Getting tired of this

[bjwest]

Possibly because the idea of a right-click (or other keyboard shortcuts) don't exist for mobile (apart from a long press in place of a right-click, I guess), so therefore a "mobile first" strategy often means making things less convenient for desktop experiences (where the developers wish to share as much code as possible and not fork the UI for the desktop).

Perhaps if this is your way of thinking, you shouldn't be making cross-device applications. The UI's should be separate not only because the display is much larger, but also the input methods differ.

Re: Getting tired of this

[iamgnat]

I keep reading about OLED burn in, but I have yet to see it on my now 4yr old LG TV. It only took a few weeks of watching 2 hours of news almost daily for my old Plasma to forever have NBC's logo burned into the corner. No such issues with the OLED.

Re:Getting tired of this

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Flat interfaces SUCK.

One of the things that made Windows 3 UI so likeable was that the interface actually looked like things people recognized, like buttons. People instantly got it- this thing that looked like a button could be clicked or pushed to do something.

Now everything is a flat fucking rectangle, who knows if it's a label, a status indicator, a button, a decoration, or whatever the fuck else there is.

I mean, why the fuck have a button that doesn't remotely resemble an actual, pushable button?

And don't get me started on the hipster trend of "discoverable" interfaces. Fuck that shit, just give me a goddamn menu and let me get some shit done. I do NOT want to have to "discover" your fucking interface, that's the opposite of good design.

Re:Getting tired of this

[oogoliegoogolie]

I agree, 10.6, the last really good OSX UI, was beautiful and each bit of functionality was visible and stood out from the background and other buttons. Buttons stood out, icons stood out, everything was beveled. Then came Lion and everything went to grey on grey on grey shit.

Or IOS 6. I have a 3GS that I use for playing tunes in the home gym occasionally and the UI is so scrumptiously beautiful functional. Everything is beveled and high-contrast so everything stands out. Black buttons with white text. White background with black text. None of this button substituted with a text link surrounded by a barely visible grey background that 1 shade darker than the background.

Re:Getting tired of this

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And if the customer demands trendiness, I can make the design flat and lifeless as they wish.

The correct response is to tell the customer "No", and then hit them in the head with a brick over and over again until they come to their senses.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprisingly, on non-OLED devices unless they have "adaptive backlights" bright white actually uses the least power on LCD screens.

Turning an LCD pixel to black is what actually consumes power, surprisingly; if you only turn the backlight on on a screen but leave the pixels themselves unpowered it'll be all-pixels-on white.

But even in that case, I don't know anyone that likes bright friggin' white UIs. Dark with light text is far easier to have to read for hours at a time in jobs that require using a computer, etc. :S

- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /. in far too long.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't always work, but sometimes you can edit the url manually to remove any ".m." which many sites use to steer you to the mobile version. It's not perfect but it can sometimes work when the site does not itself let you specify the non-mobile version.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody would ever be foolish enough to do that. If you need to draw something as complicated as the Mona Lisa, you wouldn't use a mouse, you'd probably use a graphics tablet. If you're looking to draw complicated technical drawings, you also wouldn't use a mouse, you'd likely type in the coordinates as a mouse isn't accurate enough.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

And if the customer demands trendiness, I can make the design flat and lifeless as they wish.

The correct response is to tell the customer "No", and then hit them in the head with a brick over and over again until they come to their senses.

oooohhhh, I like the way you think!!

Re:Getting tired of this

[WaffleMonster]

Not specific to Chrome, but - why does "mobile first" generally seem to consistently result in "crappy everywhere"?

Mobile first literally means f*** desktop users.

Re: Getting tired of this

[TheGratefulNet]

I use the hobby i2s oled displays (common with arduino projects).

after 1 year of a calendar project being displayed on my oled single color display, there IS burn in.

this is a fact. you may not notice it but if you leave a pattern on oled, it DOES burn in. can't be helped with how oled works, today.

so, don't expect long life from them; and don't pay a lot for them since they WILL wear out. warranty won't cover it since displaying things on oled is destructive itself (like an old o'scope from tek that used phosphor for high persistence; that one kind of scope display destroyed itself a little each time you used it. LPs (records) are also like that. anything that wears down as you watch or listen to it - that's not long-term stable stuff, of course.

Re:Getting tired of this

[ShnowDoggie]

I second this! F all those sites that are "pleasing to the eye" but are difficult as hell to use. Generally I am on the site because I have to be - Not for art. If I wanted art then I would have gone to an art site. If you are designing for an art site; Well, in that case you are excused.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been my observation that UIs seem to have peaked 15-20 years ago and have been rolling downhill ever since.

At this rate within a couple years computers will be harder to use back when the CLI was the main way of interfacing with a computer.

There's no reason for most of these UI changes. Most of the UI changes that are put into one program or another don't serve the user. They don't make it easier to use the program, they don't make using the program more efficient and in many cases, they don't even make the program look nicer.

For Windows, there's probably never going to be a UI as good as what they had for Windows 7. I'm less familiar with OSX, but the last release before Jobs started to really flip out over his legacy was the highwater mark for them as well. I think that was roughly the same time period.

In general though, we really need to go back to a time when most common programs used the same basic UI elements in the same place, with just program specific things being program specific. I shouldn't have to spend a ton of time trying to learn an interface because of stupid UI design. The only time I should have to spend learning to use a program is on program specific features.

Re:Getting tired of this

[gweihir]

Too many people that think an UI needs to be an "experience". Give it a few years and the morons driving these "innovations" may realize nobody cares.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

OLEDs have low power consumption, size limited only by how many LEDs you want to string in/pay for

OLED displays have HIGHER power consumption than LED backlit IPS under normal conditions.

fair resilience

Millions of tiny little light bulbs is not fair resilience it's madness with predictable results. The only OLED display I own is a VR HMD. I can clearly see results of uneven wear of lighting elements and it has less than 200 hrs use.

As a counter, LCDs have higher power consumption

Absolutely not. LCDs consume LESS power than OLED. Sure you can put a starfield up on the screen and assert otherwise but realistic real world testing has shown LCDs under the same conditions consume less energy. Reducing brightness of OLED displays cause a corresponding substantial reduction of contrast.

poor resilience (even minor bending of the crystal matrix can cause a fairly large amount of damage),

LCDs are much more reliable than OLED displays in every way that matters. Resilience to bending is not a real thing it's an act of desperation to show OLED is worthwhile typically by people with more money than sense trying to justify a decision they would regret had they been thinking clearly.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

Re: Getting tired of this

[MightyYar]

It's a real thing, but you probably won't notice it unless you look for it. The only places you are likely to see burn-in are on persistently white (or blue, really) GUI features. For instance, a white button bar. But you'll only notice it when the button bar goes away, like in a full-screen game - and even then, only when the background uses a lot of blue. Still, it pisses some people off. I'm that guy with the dirty glasses, so I'm not one of those people.

Re:Getting tired of this

[jez9999]

One thing that I've always found very annoying about Chrome's UI is that there are always close buttons on every tab, until you have like 100 tabs open. On desktop, you can use middle-click to close tabs... and I do. There's a long Google Groups thread somewhere with hundreds of users saying "please provide an option to remove close buttons on tabs" and Google did their usual arrogant thing of saying "no, it makes the product better [somehow]". I wouldn't say I accidentally close tabs all the time but I do maybe once every few days, and it is fucking annoying. Tabs should be buttonless!

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent!

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, current UIs are crap. I wonder, if the telemetry is to blame, as the user engagement is measured by the amount of clicks and mouse movement. And somehow the more clicks and mouse movement is now better, as previously user interfaces tried to minimize them.
Paramount of this movement are those "click to see more" buttons, which only reveal one line, which take the same amount of space as the idiotic button itself did.

Re:Getting tired of this

[iampiti]

Because, apparently, programs have to have the same UI in every device and use case and since mobile is the top priority these days (and also the lowest common denominator) PC users are left with a totally inappropiate UI.
Seriously, you thought they could leave both UIs but no, that's too much to ask.

Re:Getting tired of this

[drinkypoo]

Just boot a 2010 Mac, and look at OSX 10.6 , oh wow, so pretty, so nice, so cute, fucking sweet ass bitch.

AFAIC UI peaked when I was running GNOME2 with Compiz and emerald. Ubuntu... Dapper or so? The best features of all the systems in one place.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet your right. I never thought much of that platform but when you put it that way... it is well worth contemplating

Re: Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

Why do you assume "not mouse" == "keyboard"?

Apart from the fact that you're a retard, that is.

Re:Getting tired of this

[phantomfive]

That's normal for UIs. Before it was "throw it under the right click menu". The only difference is that now web pages do a lot more than they used to.

Re:Getting tired of this

[phantomfive]

I still design with Skeuomorphism. While not in fashion, we are pushing on figurative buttons and I've seen precious few buttons in the real world that are flat, shadowless monochromatic tiles. The trick is to make it fairly subtle

The attack on Skeuomorphism was led by people without the skills to design that way. Flat is easier. That is my theory.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

I I shouldn't have to spend a ton of time trying to learn an interface because of stupid UI design. The only time I should have to spend learning to use a program is on program specific features.

For me there was a tie in dumbshittedness. That was the Ribbon, and the whack-a-mole system maintenance of Windows 8. Simple tasks that functioned perfectly since W95 were moved for no reason at all other than to be different.

The OS is suposed to look nice, do what I want it to do and get out of the way so I can run my programs.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use a car, when a pickup truck is needed. I don't use a butter knife to slice onions for cooking. I don't use hand soap on my hair.

What is *wrong* with people. Why do the interfaces have to be the same? What borked, broken mind thinks that's even remotely important?

HINT TO ALL UI /. UX "DUDES": Mobile is mobile, desktop is desktop, don't think anyone will be happy cutting up onions with a butter knife.

I just don't get the logic. It's almost like people with no skill, that never used computers, are deciding these things.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

I can set mine to not show a static image, or to even blank itself if it's inactive for more than a few minutes.

The miracles of modern technology!

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

I still design with Skeuomorphism. While not in fashion, we are pushing on figurative buttons and I've seen precious few buttons in the real world that are flat, shadowless monochromatic tiles. The trick is to make it fairly subtle

The attack on Skeuomorphism was led by people without the skills to design that way. Flat is easier. That is my theory.

It certainly looks that way. Stick figure level design.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Malc]

Itâ(TM)s all about cheap development. Cross platform development has never really worked well - in the past this was the same UI toolkit for Windows, macOS and X11, now itâ(TM)s mobile vs. desktop. Actually mobile works worse on desktop than compromises like Java or Neuron Data (GTK has always been too shit to comprehend). It drives me nuts that websites like ba.com can barely show three flights from search results of far more on my laptop, and in general every âoemodernâ website uses text so large I need to step back, yet most of the important details is hidden and requires scrolling to discover. This is worse than the need black, blue and white web sites of the 90â(TM)s.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

For me Win 7 was a step backwards from XP. Likewise, Gnome 2 is good enough. Does what I want and lets me get on with it.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

LCDs are much more reliable than OLED displays in every way that matters.

Every one I've had has outlived its backlight.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Bongo]

Yes, and it's a simple principle: "don't make me think". The person should not be having to sit and ponder what things are, they should be able to just get on with using the functions. Just imagine if road signage went the way of subtle and "discoverable".

Re:Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

If something is first, then it stands to reason that everything else is later.

The problem is that later never comes. Sometimes there are valid reasoh look! shiny!

Re:Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

There is no such thing as making Skeuomorphism "fairly subtle".

Of course there is. You could, for example, make a photorealistic pushbutton or a very stylised cartoony one with a quite decent artist's rendering in between.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nor do power users use shitty apple auto punctuation, especially when they KNOW it will fuck up the result.

Slashcode is what fucks up the result.

Literally EVERY other forum on the web has no problem with UTF-8. Slashdot just refuses to join us in the 21st century.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

> Skeuomorphism is abhorrent and must die a painful death. Reducing "flatness" is not a "comeback" for Skeuomorphism.

There's really nothing inherently bad about skeumorphism, it's only a problem when it's deceptive or inconsistent with the object it's imitating.

Case in point: "knob" controls in software that you literally cannot turn.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

Agreed, it's using flat interfaces where you cannot spare a few pixels to create bevels to more clearly visually distinguish between elements.

They used up all the pixels on big white stripes down the sides and bloody great empty moats around everything.

Could you imagine if hipsters designed aircraft cockpits? The crew would need to keep a bike around because it's too far to walk from the compass to the altimeter.

Re:Getting tired of this

[adrn01]

Ubuntu did the same damn thing with Unity. Giant buttons, forcing all programs to be whole-screen -- fine for a phone, but on a large monitor? Losing both a big swath of screen to buttons four times bigger than needed, and the ability to see multiple windows at once was a HUGE fail; big enough to drive me to Mint.
Shuttleworth finally saw, or was clue-batted into seeing, the light, and dropped that; maybe Google has enough clueful folk around to follow the rest of that example.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, forget power users... what about people who just want to use a laptop or a desktop? Some people want mobile, some hate mice and want to recreate emacs, but there are a lot of people in the middle who just want a good experience on their laptop/desktop.

Re:Getting tired of this

[adrn01]

If you have to "discover" the parts of the UI they wrote that you actually need, perhaps they should be forced to "discover" their paychecks. "Under the rug? Nope,not there...perhaps behind the wall poster?..."

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a setting in facebook somewhere (sorry, long time since I set it) that partially solves that problem. Facebook works like desktop *except* if you try to, say, open a group in a new tab.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Because tiny touch screens are a shitty interface to most things, so designing with that as the primary means you're going to get shit results on everything else, too.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

XP was pretty much optimal as far as gui's go. All they really needed was to prettify the icons and generally fine-tune the look, but instead they wasted their time reinventing square wheels and trying to be "revolutionary" where what we really needed was gradual evolution.

Re:Getting tired of this

[mfearby]

I was merely trying to understand the thinking behind such annoyances. I abhor the "mobile first" paradigm, especially when it results in a degraded user experience on the desktop where we have keyboards and mice.

Re: Getting tired of this

[mfearby]

I think the long press on mobile devices to bring up the equivalent of a right click is probably a necessary evil, since there is no right-mouse button on a mobile screen. Having said that, I often have to fight with the long press to get it to actually appear half the time, so given that screens are getting bigger every year, maybe it's time they had an omni-present toolbar with common functions on display (in apps that could use it, that is)?

Re:Getting tired of this

[bjwest]

Sorry, that 'your' and 'you' don't mean you exactly, I was speaking to the developers doing this crazy shit.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there lies the problem of keeping the two or more versions in sync...

One codebase is the way to go.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Real power users use trackballs.

-Geekpoet

Re: Getting tired of this

[Billly Gates]

Even Microsoft no longer is following the trend. Office 2016 added colors back and 2019 is putting 2007 style icons back.

Just Google engineers justifying keeping their jobs by sake for the sake of change

Re:Getting tired of this

[Megane]

...until late next year when Firefox decides to copy Chrome again.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Megane]

Not just flat fucking rectangles, but so many times a button is made with a rectangle around plain text, such that the button is about 3x as high as the text, but you have to click on the actual text for it to do anything.

Re:Getting tired of this

[null etc.]

OMG, reading comments like this make me feel like I finally found my online family :)

Re:Getting tired of this

[Billly Gates]

It is coming back again. Look at Microsoft who we LOVE to bash. Office 2016 reintroduced a radical concept of colors. Office 2019 has 2007 style icons again here.

I just re-imaged my PC this weekend and went into Chrome to set the old UI back. I am pretty pissed and now I know why I can't find the settings

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the poos, Pajeets, sand n1ggers and other subhuman tird world shitskin shitstain scum are now product managers at gulag now. They want to do shit for a promotion and don't give fuck.

I pray they die of cancer

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I am still getting used to the shitty new mobile Slashdot site with all of the white space and gray shades.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... as mostly having been a user of Mozilla (and Classic Theme Restorer) with rectangular tabs, the change is an improvement to Chrome. I still hate that it doesn't have classic Windows-type menus but now at least I don't often accidentally click on spaces between tabs. As someone else in the entire reply thread said, the post is merely whining about nothing much, just to whine.

Re: Getting tired of this

[mcswell]

Can you say "reasoning from the converse"? I knew you could. (You might also learn to not take humorous posts seriously.)

Re:Getting tired of this

[mcswell]

How about under the pink slip?

Re: Getting tired of this

[thegarbz]

So you're basically saying your screen is off when you don't use it? How does that help people who use their computers?

Re:Getting tired of this

[MrL0G1C]

Won't always work, some sites use funny flow chart logic to determine the browser and ignore the user agent.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

kinda same, except i went with vivaldi, which seems better browser anyway bc of the customisation and mousegestures it offers. Only thing i really miss is better build in translation while I was using amazon.de. Seems that it supports all chrome extensions i used, so it wasn't major change, and UI is minimal, but still offers quick way to take partial screenshot

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Helps us weed out the useless comments made by tech hating apple cultists

Re:Getting tired of this

[Ol Olsoc]

It is coming back again. Look at Microsoft who we LOVE to bash. Office 2016 reintroduced a radical concept of colors. Office 2019 has 2007 style icons again here

Cool! Good to see that the flat ugly tile is going to the hell it deserves. Those new icons are completely acceptable.

Re:Getting tired of this

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Not just flat fucking rectangles, but so many times a button is made with a rectangle around plain text, such that the button is about 3x as high as the text, but you have to click on the actual text for it to do anything.

Yes yes yes yes. That drives me bonkers- you click around on the button and...NOTHING. Even mousing over the text inside the 'button' doesn't make it highlight or do anything to indicate it's clickable. But if you click on the text itself, well looky thar,it was a link after all.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto x 1000!

Mint/XCFE seems to do it for me nowadays, keep TFO of my productivity that is.

Re:Getting tired of this

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yes, and it's a simple principle: "don't make me think". The person should not be having to sit and ponder what things are

Exactly. If I have to sit and puzzle out what the interface is or what it does, it's not an interface- it's an anti-interface.

I long for the days of plain old simple menus, where things could be grouped logically. Even if they weren't, it was still easy to remember where a particular item or choice was.

Now it's ribbons (ech) and hidden hot corners and swipe to see if something's there. It's as if they got tired of practical design and decided that "artsy-fartsy and mysterious" was the new design paradigm. "Let's make this shit hard AND stupid to use!"

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one particular poster who is racist and a coporphilliac and posts obsessively combining the two subjects.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Agripa]

XP was pretty much optimal as far as gui's go. All they really needed was to prettify the icons and generally fine-tune the look, but instead they wasted their time reinventing square wheels and trying to be "revolutionary" where what we really needed was gradual evolution.

XP was actually a step back from 2000 where you could actually adjust all of the UI colors. XP made some of them fixed. Windows 10 is even worse.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

What couldn't you change? I used to set mine to classic look ( the others were metallic and something that looked like upholstery IIRC) and I don't recall anything bothering me that much.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

When I'm using mine it usually doesn't show a "static image" - your words, in the post I replied to.

Though I suppose staring and drooling might constitute "using" to some.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. The best Windows for UI was Win2K. XP could be customized to be similar and Win 7 sort-of too, but neither was as good by default.

Re: Getting tired of this

[thegarbz]

When I'm using mine it usually doesn't show a "static image" - your words

Oh? You run every app in fullscreen with no close buttons, no task bar, no title bar? Are you using a computer or an iPad? In any case you're not representative of the 99.99% of computer users out there who would very quickly burn the time of day and the windows logo into their screens.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

From the sound of it I expect you'll die first from the stress of your obsessive race hate.

Re:Getting tired of this

[Agripa]

If you switched it to the Classic 2000 look then there was not a problem but the XP UI did not allow as much configuration as the 2000 UI and more and more features have been removed as time goes on. I suspect Microsoft wants to enforce a uniformity between device types but is doing it by removing features and customization.

Re:Getting tired of this

[samwichse]

Vivaldi (Chromium based) has a pretty good solution to this. The close "X" doesn't appear on background tabs, only on the foreground tab. So currently I have 23 tabs open (17 Slashdot!). They're too small to show anything but the first three letters of each page title, but I can safely and blindly click to any one without fear of accidental closure. Then a second click on the "X" that appears when it comes to the foreground if I actually did want to close it.

Works pretty smoothly.

Actually, I just opened up the new "annoying interface" Chrome, and this appears to be the default now? So that's better, but the interface is still too flat and suck.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is well know /. doesn't handle unicode... sooo, you are outta luck.

Re: Getting tired of this

[Hognoxious]

The time of day isn't static. It changes approximately every minute.

And what's this "windows logo" of which you speak?

Re: Getting tired of this

[thegarbz]

The time of day isn't static. It changes approximately every minute.

Splitting hairs won't win you any friends or arguments. The time of day was the first thing burnt into early OLED displays on first generation smartphones. It doesn't need to be static, it just needs to be statistically in more use than surrounding pixels to make a difference.

Re: Getting tired of this

[chrish]

Guess we found the guy using Vimium. https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Re: Getting tired of this

[iamgnat]

I use the hobby i2s oled displays (common with arduino projects).

after 1 year of a calendar project being displayed on my oled single color display, there IS burn in.

Display a static-ish image 24/7? If so then after a year burn in would not surprise me in the least. Any display will burn in when subjected to enough "abuse".

When I bought my Plasma (viewed as the best screen by many sources at the time), it took a very short time for a static channel logo that was only displayed maybe a 10th of it's daily on time to become forever (8 years) visible as a ghost. My OLED, however, is 4 years old now and has seen very similar usage over it's life that the Plasma yet still shows no ghosted images.

I'm not saying burn in is not possible (I understand how OLED and Plasma work), just stating my own experience that OLED appears to be much more tolerant Plasma ever was while giving almost the same quality image (comparing to Plasma's heyday before MFGs started focusing on LCDs).

Windows 8 was BAD, new Chrome is ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 was BAD, new Chrome is ok. Perhaps not perfect, but, compared to Windows 8, this is brilliant.

Sorry folks. There's nothing to see. Please, move away.

Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please be **specific** and give their name. I'll wait here.

Re: Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sundar Pichai

Re: Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does that guy look to me like a 40 year old Emo?

Re: Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he is 46.

Re: Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does that guy look to me like a 40 year old Emo?

He looks kind of nine eleveney to me.

Adjust your display

[Anonymous Coward]

If you cannot distinguish the tabs from background/other tabs, your display's settings are _way_ out of whack. Adjust your brightness/contrast/gamma to not be clipping the high range.

Huh?

[dohzer]

I haven't noticed anything. Just opened "Help -> About" and I have "Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit)". My phone is v71 too. Is this some Apple thing?

Re:Huh?

[jblues]

Just did the same. Couldn't see what the problem was and checked the version. (On a Mac).

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't noticed anything. Just opened "Help -> About" and I have "Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit)". My phone is v71 too. Is this some Apple thing?

Do you still have the trapezoidal tabs? If so, you are an oddity.
They changed from the class trapezoid shape to a rounded rectangle, and the contrast went away with it.

I'm about to switch over to Firefox because of this.

Captcha: messes
Yes, that's exactly what this is.

Re: Huh?

[Tomahawk]

I have the rounded tab. My only complaint was that they are taller than the old tabs by a few items pixels, so leave a few pixels less to display the page. Otherwise I see no issues.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't noticed anything. Just opened "Help -> About" and I have "Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit)". My phone is v71 too. Is this some Apple thing?

Mee too I have Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit) and I don't notice any change

Re:Huh?

[Duds]

I have rounded tabs and it's super obvious which one the current one is?

Is this just a lot of people with badly calibrated monitors?

Re:Huh?

[angel'o'sphere]

The current tab is a shade of a grey brighter ... so not "super obvious".

Re: Huh?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Sounds like in your case the new UI works perfectly.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that only the active tab looks like a tab now. The rest is just a mess of fav icon, text, an X, and a pipe symbol ( | ). They no longer look like they are tabs anymore. Some people don't notice it at all, some people see it for the mess it is. All they need to do to make the unhappy people happy again is draw the damn tabs.

Re:Huh?

[dfghjk]

Is that different from other browsers? Looks no different to me.

Re:Huh?

[bjwest]

Current tab for me is white with the others as light gray. Really no problem distinguishing them.

Re:Huh?

[Billly Gates]

That is because you don't have a fresh install.

I supposed I could try to sprawl the net for the registry keys to change it back. Fckming ridiculous!

Re:Huh?

[alexgieg]

The current tab is a shade of a grey brighter ... so not "super obvious".

My active tab looks almost white to me, while all the other tabs look gray. I have no difficulty at all in distinguishing them.

However, I did calibrate my monitor, crudely, with Window 10's built in calibration wizard (Settings -> Display -> Advanced display settings -> Color calibration) after installing it on this computer months ago, so maybe that has something to do with it being quite obvious which tab is which.

Re:Huh?

[dohzer]

Oh... wait.... maybe it's my dark theme which is making it better. I just clicked.

Re:Huh?

[angel'o'sphere]

Current tab is light grey, the other are slightly darker, but the difference is not much. In Safari, the difference is bigger. Instead of making all tabs same size, the current one should simply be significantly bigger.

I don't get what the fuss is all about

[mfearby]

"its lighter tone and rounded tabs make it extremely hard to distinguish tabs from one another, especially when users open multiple tabs."

My eye sight is garbage and I'm normally the first person to complain about something being bad, but I've had no problems with Chrome 71. In fact, I didn't even know that this latest version was as described, although now that I look more closely, I can see that I don't get to see the rounded shapes of the inactive tabs until I hover over them.

I can see the favicon for each tab clearly, I can see each tab's close button, and I can see a clear divider between each tab. I can also clearly see which is the active tab.

Move along, nothing to see here, except a beat up.

Re:I don't get what the fuss is all about

[Calydor]

My inactive tabs still have rounded corners and are visibly grey instead of white for the active tab. I'm definitely not one to just accept change for the sake of change, but I honestly can't see that anything has changed since last week or last month.

Re:I don't get what the fuss is all about

[jareth-0205]

Yeah I'm not seeing the problem here apart from "people always react against change". The old tab design was really specific hit areas and I was constantly changing tabs rather than closing them because the crosses were too small. Feels like a positive change to me.

Re:I don't get what the fuss is all about

[Fly Swatter]

In chrome 70 linux (maybe they changed it?) the new design makes inactive tabs light grey text which is fine, but I have a bookmarks bar and the whole thing is light grey text - this is an eyesore. The round stuff isn't too bad but they added a doughnut icon to the right in the url bar - oh I look real close and it's a tiny head within a circle and the tooltip says 'you'. THIS LOOKS LIKE A DOUGHNUT! I bet it looked a lot more distinguishable in the square button form. Most of the round buttons on the url bar have a square active area, however the security icon has a round active area, so it is not consistent. My point is some of these changes do not look thought through or even quality controlled.

Re:I don't get what the fuss is all about

[Anonymous Coward]

It suggests that people with displays that are set too bright have a problem with the change. And it's quite usual for people to mistake a change that makes a problem visible for the actual problem.

Re: I don't get what the fuss is all about

[datavirtue]

Lol. I know. I didn't notice anything until I saw a story on hacker news about the change. Immediately my brow furrowed and I inspected the UI and conjered up anger at the change. Still didn't notice anything but I'm pissed.

Re:I don't get what the fuss is all about

[hey!]

What they should do is make the browser skinnable. Not enough people would actually bother to install a different theme to make any difference in Google marketing's nefarious plans for world domination through Material Design, but it would shut people up.

<oldFartAnecdote>If like me went to college back in the 70s, college dining halls were pretty much like larger versions of high school cafeterias: dingy dungeons that dished out slop. If you go to one now, the dining hall looks more like a shopping mall food court, with familiar brands like Pizza Hut or Burger King. It turns out that was my brother's idea. He'd worked his way up from dish washer to campus dining director and then regional manager for the company that ran the dining service. No matter what he did to upgrade the food or the dining ambiance, student satisfaction scores refused to budge. Then one day he had an epiphany: as long as the students felt they had no choice of where to eat, improving the quality of the food they were forced to eat wouldn't improve their opinions of it. </oldFartAnecdote>

I never saw a problem...

[Tomahawk]

I use Chrome both in work and at home. I would end up having a lot of tabs open in work, especially. I've never seen any if the issues being described here. Nor heard anyone in work complain. So I really don't get this...

Is this maybe just one person trying to find a reason to rant because they just don't like change, no matter how small, and are blowing stuff out of proportion?

Re:I never saw a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do like the shift off the user icon off the tab line but there needs to be more visible divisor separating the tabs. The pipes just make it look like one run on shitty bash code and not 'tabs' like the legacy style mimicking the folder tabs of paper folios.

The issue is a parsing. Not change.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[SurenEnfiajyan]

I think modern Chrome looks much better on Windows 7. The tabs are quite distinguishable. But on most other systems, especially on Windows 10 (with grayish window frames), it leaves much to be desired.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[dissy]

I use Chrome both in work and at home. I would end up having a lot of tabs open in work, especially. I've never seen any if the issues being described here. Nor heard anyone in work complain. So I really don't get this...

So is it if anyone has an opinion not matching your own, it's invalid?
Otherwise I don't get your post either.

Is this maybe just one person trying to find a reason to rant because they just don't like change, no matter how small, and are blowing stuff out of proportion?

I know five people personally, one of which is me. So the answer to that is no.

With aging eyesight and 40 years worth of muscle memory knowing the title bar is for moving windows, the latest UI change completely breaks flow and makes a mess of the tabs nearly defeating the entire point of them.

There is 4 pixels worth of blue at the very top of the title bar that functions to move the browser window. Anywhere below that in the exact same colored blue is a tab.
So the normal process of clicking in the title bar and dragging the window where you need it turns into chrome thinking I am clicking on a tab and dragging just it where I wanted the entire browser to be.
Sometimes this results in that tab detaching and becoming its own window, other times it just results in reordering the tabs.

If that is going to be the new behavior, it would be far faster and efficient to go back to individual windows and pretend the one tab in each window doesn't exist.
At least that way the same end result will already be there and expected, and at least it won't change the order of the windows in the task bar, or require retraining how the title bar works for a single app and the decades old behavior in all others.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[labnet]

If you have lots of tabs open, use Firefox and treestyle tabs. Thank me later!

Re:I never saw a problem...

[dills]

Uhm....dude. WTF? Are you really that incompetent that you can't adapt to figure out how to move the window via the title bar?

If you click on the area between the + and the - at the top right of the title, that space will never have anything in it. There's always space there.

I'm really blown away right now. Is this a troll?

Re:I never saw a problem...

[dissy]

Uhm....dude. WTF? Are you really that incompetent that you can't adapt to figure out how to move the window via the title bar?
If you click on the area between the + and the - at the top right of the title, that space will never have anything in it. There's always space there.

There is an invisible line between those two, with no space by minimize, and again only a few pixels above the plus. The only space even around the plus is due to it showing with a circle outline that has a few more pixels in the corners of the bounding box it is in.

Also you should be more careful throwing around insults like incompetent when you just literally stated the way to move windows is with a tiny space near one corner.

Go open any other window - a file manager, a text editor - anything.
Click *right in the center* of the title bar and move it around. See how it actually works?
Even Chrome used to work that way just the same. Hell it still does if you manage to miss the invisible line where the tabs start.

So no, don't even try to claim that isn't the standard way to move a window.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[cheekyboy]

Dude, wtf, its still a shit ui .

At least in FF, I can hit ALT to bring the title bar back.

You know what sucks about googles UI, No fucking setting to change shit, its like, the coders think, fuck this shit, we can purge 5kb of code, and piss of 20000 old farts.

Sounds like more young coders - oh we know better, we will change things our way, post 2010 old shit when I was in high school.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[lgw]

The thing about UI design: doing anything your own clever way is bad, stupid and wrong. The right way is always "the way the user expects".

Re:I never saw a problem...

[thegarbz]

So is it if anyone has an opinion not matching your own, it's invalid?

Well yes, in an opinion piece if someone's doesn't match yours it becomes invalid for you. However reading through the comments here and adding my own personal opinion to it, it would appear the author is looking for things to whine about given most of the posts here are completely neutral on the topic.

So yes it's invalid.

There is 4 pixels worth of blue at the very top of the title bar that functions to move the browser window.

And given that was not a change introduced in the recent UI change your post is invalid too.

Re:I never saw a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about UI design: doing anything your own clever way is bad, stupid and wrong. The right way is always "the way the user expects".

And now you know the difference between UI and UX:

UI: User Interface. The means by which the user interacts with the computer
UX: User eXperience. The means by which the marketing department shows off how trendy they are to potential advertisers.

Re: Fake News

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you.

No, seriously - YOU use Chrome for work. That is a big fucking deal that added SOOO much to the conversation!

Also, posting anything with "Fake News" makes it clear you are either an ignorant redneck or a Russian troll. Either way, shut up, after 2 years of this crap the world is tired of hearing your "insightful" thoughts.

First world problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitching about non-issues.

Switch to one of the hundred browsers that are available besides Google's spyware.

Done.

Re:First world problems

[ChunderDownunder]

I believe 'Chrome' derives from an ancient African word meaning "Can't install firefox".

When I was learning the ropes of programming...

[Anonymous Coward]

...everyone told us to use the system theme when drawing UI widgets and such. What changed?

Re: When I was learning the ropes of programming..

[Anonymous Coward]

Consistent theming is good for the end user, but doesn't help any one app stand out. This is the blink tag theory of design.

Mac only?

[reanjr]

This sounds like maybe a Mac only issue? I've always noticed Mac colors look washed out and low contrast at the high intensity end. Something about the gamma difference, like it's higher than on Windows/Linux.

Re:Mac only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac Gamma changed to same as Windows 2.2 back in Snow Leopard.

Re:Mac only?

[Anonymous Coward]

System Prefs > Displays > Color > Hold down Alt and click Calibrate

It's well worth the effort to get your calibration right. Retina displays can see marginal improvement, A1278 calibrations make colors pop, but Airs see MASSIVE improvement.

Re:Mac only?

[Carewolf]

This sounds like maybe a Mac only issue? I've always noticed Mac colors look washed out and low contrast at the high intensity end. Something about the gamma difference, like it's higher than on Windows/Linux.

No, in the general the colors should be the same. But text rendering is significantly worse on Mac than any other platform if you don't have a high-dpi screen, and text will always look washed out as a result.

Though if you have a recent iMac Pro, it has a DisplayP3 display, and if applications does something wrong internally and assumes sRGB, that can also end up losing contrast.

Re: When I was learning the ropes of programming..

[Anonymous Coward]

That went the way of "Things you can click should look different to things you can't" and "No matter how much the arty farty ui guys have #@%&ed things up to make it look 'pretty', you can always right click to get things done".

Re: Fake News

[Anonymous Coward]

I know how it goes. You just want to give some quick comment so that it can be demonstrated that you're taking part in the conversation, but you say something so basic and stupid that in the eyes of your peers, you come away poorer than having said nothing. It's okay man. Period's almost over.

Paranoid - Spying on me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wanted to spy on a user even more -Tabs are better than a 1*1 image.
You can hide controls widgets and more under that tab, and if Microsoft have CVE level window flaws that allows security escalation. Mothership knows what is in focus with tabs.
Now that browser add-ons of poor reputation are being locked out, and 1*1's, a new method to detect focus is needed. Enter the TAB / Boxy lump.

Want to make a bet security products presently do not contain whats attached to a tab, that can basically spawn multiple processes or alert you to same. Lets have a security expert lay some ACL logging to see whats really going on.

Re:Paranoid - Spying on me

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, tinfoil can block that stuff.

Re:Paranoid - Spying on me

[Anonymous Coward]

can't tell if you're talking about a mod that people spent hundreds of hours maintaining, to the genuine needs of thousands of people using it...

...or trying to ignorantly dismiss the very real flood of telemetry we live in

Remember when web browsers had themes?

[Misagon]

Do you remember when "web browser chrome" used to refer to different visual themes for user interface the that you could write yourself and choose between in the Mozilla web browser?
There were quite a few of them to choose between on a section on Mozillazine called The ChromeZone. The barrier to entry was quite low, all themes as images and as text files written in the XML-based language XUL. I had contributed a web browser UI theme to The Chrome Zone myself.

But the full-fledged Mozilla browser was known to be stupidly slow and got abandoned for the slimmed-down Firefox.
Firefox used native widgets, that were consistent with other programs on the platform that it ran on. On Linux (or other OS with X) the native widgets were GTK+ widgets, which had its own theming system -- also user-made in text format, with low barrier to entry and with many to choose from.

... and later Google snatched both the names "Chrome" and Chrome Zone for themselves.

Re:Remember when web browsers had themes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Firefox and Chrome had themes. Both have pretty much been sidelines for FEATURES and BLOAT.
Not to mention the fact Chrome is as unchanging as the concept of reality itself due to their stupid mantra of "it should be capable of being used by anyone anywhere". Fuck anyone and anywhere. It's only me that'll be using it, you worthless UX cunt.

Mind you, I do hide the useless parts of the UI and use a vertical tabs extension (Tabs Outliner) for tab management and haven't looked at the shitty tab-strip in years.
Never looked back. Google UX engineers can wank all they want over their crappy designs, I care not.
The instant it influences usability of the viewport, that'll be forked and removed just as quickly.

You can have any color as long as it's black.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one browser and it looks like this. Choice is anti American, so love it or leave it.

It's too much to expect better from Google...

[bogaboga]

... email when they can't get messaging right on a platform (Android), they wholly own.

Re:It's too much to expect better from Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mail's are free, widespread, multi-platform, decentralized tool. Not good for a company who want, like any other modern big and not so big IT company, lock users in... Private protocols and services, they do not offer any possible backup, migration etc are fare more interesting...

Re:It's too much to expect better from Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

You russki? Write like russki. Why write like russki if not russki?

Can't be that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

If it weren't for this article, I would never have known that there was a UI change at all.

Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly, And People Are Ver

[Anonymous Coward]

With that kind of headline, I was thinking I was on the Sun.co.uk website :-)

Progressive worsening

[Misagon]

This is only the latest in a general trend of Google of making their UI -- desktop, mobile and web -- progressively worse.
This being a distinct change, top, front and centre, and not something snuck in sideways in a seldom-used dialogue box, it is something that people notice immediately.

People have been upset about several more minor changes for a longer time, but for some, this was the last straw.
Reduced contrast, hover-indicators that take long to appear, hamburger menus and close-buttons that you don't see until you hover over them, wasted whitespace ...
Those are all crimes against good design, and part of Google's "Material Design" or "Polymer" or whatever they decide to call it these days.

Re:Progressive worsening

[AmiMoJo]

What the hell are you on about?

In the default install of Chrome on Windows the hamburger menu is visible always. The tab close buttons are visible always. There is no wasted whitespace at all. Are you sure you are not confusing it with Firefox, which does in fact hide some of the UI and recently added random whitespace around the URL bar?

Oh, and the hover animations are instant for me, and the pop-up tool-tips take around 500ms to appear (estimate), faster than the default on Windows.

Re: Progressive worsening

[datavirtue]

Next year's innovation....tabs at the bottom!!

Re:Progressive worsening

[Misagon]

The point of my post seems to have gone over your head. I'm sorry I was a bit tired when I posted that and I may not have made the point distinct enough.

What you replied to was in reference to Google's user interface design in several products and how they have changed over many years, not specifically to details within the latest version of Google Chrome.

Re: Progressive worsening

[Hognoxious]

I'd like them down the side.

Re: Progressive worsening

[mfearby]

Down the side? Eww! Think of all that wasted screen real estate if you have only one or a few tabs open (unless you were to hide text tab titles and use only favicons, perhaps).

Re: Progressive worsening

[Hognoxious]

Eww! Think of all that wasted screen real estate

I don't think of it. Neither do most website designers, hence the pages that have almost as much margin as text.

But OK, how about a diagonal band across the middle?

Top right to bottom left, obviously. The other way round would just be stupid.

The type of slashdot user who still uses Chrome...

[Anonymous Coward]

The level of discourse in these comments is really somethin' else...

UI

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

For some reasons modern designers are hell bent on making UI as opaque as possible and here at slashdot it's been already discussed multiple times.

I've found the only justification to this madness: designers have long become redundant but they want to be paid that's why we have new trends all the time and new design decisions which make the user completely lost.

For me, the best design was implemented in Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/7 OS'es without ribbon. The worst came in the form of Windows 8/MS Office 2007 and it's been all downhill since then. Too bad corporations just don't want to admit that and they still insist that there's one UI which fits them all which cannot be further from the truth as large displays with mouse and keyboard are a completely different mode of operation than touch devices with comparatively small screens.

Re:UI

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, the best design was implemented in Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/7

Perhaps not the **BEST**. But usable, and pretty much everyone including those working in non-alphabetic East Asian scripts is able to work with it on PCs without undue difficulty. Is it optimal ofr even suitable for mobile devices? Possibly not very? My solution is to do my computer stuff on PCs and use a 15 year old Nokia -- dumber than dirt -- cell phone for the odd phone call or text message. But that's not acceptable to most users.

Re:UI

[Anonymous Coward]

The funniest thing for me with that shitty Ribbon idea is the fact Microsofts own research showed it was trash yet they totally ignored their own findings and said "ribbin is gud pls and thank you" in the blog post.
Ribbon is honestly the worst thing to happen to UIs in a long time. Worse than the seeming return of full-screen stealing applications.
It has less features, it has zero muscle memory support for any significant work and it takes more clicks to get shit done.
Meanwhile, 3-4 toolbars can fit in the same space and over over 5 times the features! And at a click!

Ribbon, like UML, was designed for non-IT people. It was designed for idiots that don't want to learn.
Artificially inflated jobs paid pennies. In the latter case, it is much worse overall for software because these idiots only inflate development complexity, maintenance and costs! Not to mention bugs galore!
Fuck UML babbies. That kind of noise is the worst thing that hit the programming community, so much more so than this "purge of white people" going on now.
Hell, it's the reason we are here! UML lead to the influx of incapable developers from disadvantaged backgrounds, majority of which were held back in places like America due to many reasons. Majority of them being non-white, clearly it was systemic racism!
Then it just went from there. LGBT, females, liberals and we are now going in to 2019 and Linux has had its cock removed by a CoC in case the poor wittul babbies get hurt fee-fees at Linus calling them useless.
All pointless time-wasting shit not contributing to anything getting done but the erosion of an industry to lazy fucktards.
And to pre-empt the expected response, I AM a left-leaning person. I still despise all these cunts. Libtards are not normal. Left-learning is perfectly fine. The former are extremists, the latter are regular people with opinions.

Well this went places. How's your day?

Re:UI

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually prefer full-screen apps, but I grew up using DOS.

Re:UI

[dfghjk]

You should really put your name on a piece of work like this. Your mother would be so proud.

Why, though, do you feel the need to declare yourself "left-leaning"? Aren't all left-leaning people triggered into racist, misogynistic, homophobic rants by discussions of UI? Isn't it generally accepted by all "regular people with opinions" that "libtards" are to blame for everything? Sounds totally mainstream to me.

Re:UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. Design changes because designers need to keep themselves employed and the only way to do that is with new designs.

This is why everything old is new again (at some point.)

I agree that the Windows 7 UI is perhaps the best to date and is one reason why I don't want to upgrade to Windows 10.

Its free, stop your whingeing

[Anonymous Coward]

Its free, stop your whingeing

Re:Its free, stop your whingeing

[reboot246]

Okay, but first you'll have to tell me what "whingeing" is. It sounds pretty bad, whatever it is.

Re:Its free, stop your whingeing

[Xtifr]

http://lmgtfy.com/?s=d&q=whingeing

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are always complaining about everything and now everything's dandy as the article itself is negative. Contrarian much?

NICE.

Re: Fake News

[Joce640k]

Hush, the official UI spokesperson for the entire Internet is speaking.

Just like GMail

[thesjaakspoiler]

not all changes are for the better....

I'm just so angry right about now!

[bb_matt]

The world is going to hell, there's a madman in the white house, global warming is out of control, the stock markets are crashing, but dammit, don't fuck with my UI!

I think this article may be a case of exaggeration, but if not, there's certainly more important things to be angry about...

Re:I'm just so angry right about now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you go be angry about them then, cunt? Or is this the thing most worthy of your time for other reasons?

Don't hurt yourself by tugging so hard on your own dick.

Re: I'm just so angry right about now!

[Mattatron]

I can be angry at more than one thing at a time. It's my superpower.

Re:I'm just so angry right about now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you are right. There are many things more important. But you come to a tech forum and complain everyone is talking about tech. That's like going to a fidget spinner message board and wondering why nobody is talking about Trump. Are we having a political forum shortage? There must be at least, I don't know 10,000 of them. The fact that a tech forum is talking tech is what got you angry, there's certainly more important things to be angry about...

Re:I'm just so angry right about now!

[Anonymous Coward]

lol tugging on his dick

Re:I'm just so angry right about now!

[Anonymous Coward]

As in masturbation. That's really what it is. Slashdot is a circle jerk of nerds thinking that other people care what they think. It's the #MeToo of geek culture. Few posts bring anything that's really worthwhile. Most mods of Insightful and Informative are neither but does have the merit of pleasing the sheep in this echo chamber.

Teletubby interfaces and information density

[shatteredsilicon]

The thing that this particular teletubby interface update broke is information density. After the update, the new skin in both gmail and calendar quite simply puts less on a screen. On the desktop it is annoying. On the mobile devices with limited screen real estate, it is downright devastating for usage and productivity.

It's as if since the turn of the century, user interfaces have been continuously redesigned to be more and more friendly toward children under 2 - with rounded corners and buttons too big to accidentally swallow. It's as if Fischer Price have been contracted to do user interface designs ever since.

Re:Teletubby interfaces and information density

[Art Challenor]

/. beta anyone?

Re:Teletubby interfaces and information density

[Megane]

My opinion on /. beta and these other changes is it's the UX idiots (see other posts here pointing out the difference between UI and UX) making arbitrary changes to make themselves seem like they are doing something worthy of continued employment.

Re:Teletubby interfaces and information density

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fischer Price effect is everywhere. Tools, kitchen utensils, cars, furniture...all so big and chunky and brightly colored,, with nary a corner or edge in sight...even peoples clothing now, walking around with hi-vis t-shirts at barbecues, wearing their big, chunky, brightly colored "sports shoes".

Hell, we've even bred infantilism into cats and dogs.

Themes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course people's preferences differ. That's why popular programs have themes. I searched for Chrome themes but all I found were different tints and background images for the same toolbar icons. How can it be that Chrome doesn't have real themes? Why do users accept that?

Are the ads easy to see?

[AHuxley]

As long as the ads are tracking and users can see the ads its all ok.
GUI design: the user space around the ads.

Google = shit, and cannot be trusted, period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who willingly uses Google products is asking for either disappointment or betrayal.

How many times does Google have to arbitrarily kill off "products" before you cretins GET IT ?

Be quick now, and mod this post down because it threatens your sad little self image as a willing user of shit ( Google ) products.

complaining is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Google just does not listen.

Tons of users complain after shitty UI for Google News (no date ordering WTF) , did they listen ?

They're taking away fuchsia UI from repo, did they manage to make it even more awfull ?

Dear Mr. Kasting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice paternalistic quote...

"Please don't do this. As a Chrome dev, we would really rather you use another browser than try to lock yourself on an old version of Chrome," said Google engineer Peter Kasting. "There are serious consequences to this, and much like choosing not to be vaccinated, the choice affects other people besides just you."

If using Chrome 70 affects other people negatively, good. Hope it results in your kids seeing pr0n and your old grandma getting phished. I'm happy to spread viruses if it fucks your family.

ALL YOUR BABES ARE BELONGED TO US!

[Anonymous Coward]

Run. Run far away.

Everything fuzzy

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I was alone in my hate of the trend to make all Web pages fuzzy and hard (for my 51 year old eyes) to quickly read.

They're angry NOW?

[drinkypoo]

Chrome's UI has stunk on ice since day one. Now they're angry?

I do hate the trend of mobile apps with crap UI, though. For example, Firefox for mobile would benefit from a preferences dialog that would let me disable pocket, and tell the browser to actually load the URL I called it with instead of showing me quick links (including pocket.) I had never even heard of Pocket before Firefox integrated it over the wishes of the users, who proclaimed that we did not want it. Now I think it's the antichrist, and I hope their HQ falls over and bursts into flames.

We're going to need a new Mozilla foundation, without blackjack and hookers. Because they are apparently spending all their time partying, and none listening to users. We're gonna need a new Phoenix browser.

Welcome to your browser monopoly

[xack]

With Firefox killing their real add ons and Edge becoming a Chrome clone you are effectively limited to the Choices of the Chrome developers of what is good for browsing the web. You could have stopped this, but you didn't. The last resistance is in the Firefox forks but they will be crushed eventually as Chrome exerts its monopoly powers.

Re:Welcome to your browser monopoly

[Megane]

The Firefox forks are already having problems with FF nuking support for anything related to add-ons from the Gecko code base and extensions web sites.

So is Plex's new Roku channel

[Anonymous Coward]

Back at the turn of the century Microsoft figured it out: Your average moron can't see system internals. Improvements to kernels and drivers and stability get you nothing in the short term. Changing the userland bits is the only way to impress on the mundane user that something is new and/or improved. And changing your standard "File, Edit, Print" menu schema to a ribbon or some other layout (simpler, less dense) must mean that you've made it easier to use. Only that's not true. -- Another part of the problem is that we do not, can not, control our own destinies or choose if or when we want to make a UI change (backwards, for example, if we don't like the change). Vote with your wallet and your personal data and tell companies like Plex and Microsoft and Google to f*ck right off when their products suck for obvious but trivial reasons.

Never noticed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care about UI, this is a web browser, so it does not matter.

Also - when an article says people are angry, the translation is: some fuckwad on twitter got retweeted a few times for bitching like a whore about feeling mistreated. When they are not complaining about some social justice bullshit or getting worked up over their intersectional college friend's roommates asshole marxist professor who offered to pay their way through college just so she would get to feel up their tits and dick.

Eat it

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Google creates drive. Picture pages move to it. Ugly white on gray, hard to read.

Eat my shorts, Google.

Workaround

[williamyf]

Use firefox, for the next few weeks the interface will be very similar to the old chrome's interface. But be warned that, in two releases, they will copy the new chrome's interface, and then you will be back to square one...

Re:Workaround

[oogoliegoogolie]

What's unfortunate is that your tongue-in-cheek statement is a prediction that will likely come true.

Re:Workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, square one now has rounded corners.

IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Our shop has switched back to IE. Yes, IE. Not edge. It still works.

Can't stand Chrome's new "is underlined?" font!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the underline is broken for descending characters, like "g" or "y" -- it's visually confusing! Am I looking at one link, or two? Fucking Google.

omg they changed the aesthetics, what a disgrace

[Anonymous Coward]

time to stubbornly switch back to netscape navigator 4 in protest

I ditched it about then.

[Anonymous Coward]

I ditched in about that time. Who needs it? Firefox is fine on my phone and by adding a firewall, changing DNS settings, and ditching any Google app you can attempt to reduce the spying.

But if you have a gmail account you still have to go in every so often and delete the history they have collected on you. If you think that doing this once and setting everything to off will work you need to wake up. They change the wording or 'functionality' and when doing so they turn 'new features' on by default, again.

modern UI are puzzles

[e**(i pi)-1]

maybe that UI designers come from the gaming industry. They design puzzles. Once one get used to things, hide the toolbar, hide the scrolling bars, hide and seek is the new trend. That is what games are for: find the treasure! Find the current URL, fine the place to print, jackpot. Even when reading stories, the pictures have to appear dynamically, nonlinear story telling makes even reading a text feel like running through a maze. Maybe one has to swipe left, maybe down, maybe click. Just add a few adds, which attack from random sides and we are in a full blown computer game. Sometimes, one really misses the simplicity of the 90ies.

Re:modern UI are puzzles

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame OOP? It starts with DISCOVERING new objects and then divining their methods if not already known. Your end user OOP is to figure out the nomenclature, the non-standard graphic with no mouseover tooltip, where they moved the icon or menu option in a new release, renamed nomenclature... thankfully not everything is a multi-tab ribbon but still, the user experience doesn't need to keep being REFRESHED!

Firefox

[DaMattster]

I switched to Firefox last year around October after getting sick and tired of being the product to sell to Google. Now, everything I am on is open source and mostly Google-free. I only use Google for map because it's a lot better than the free/open source one.

The new UI *is* ugly?

[reboot246]

No, Google Chrome's UI has *always* been ugly. The shame is they won't let users change it easily. I use Chrome for only a handful of websites that simply don't work very well with other browsers. I can't imagine having to use it all of the time.

Change to Quit behaviour

[Anonymous Coward]

And why, oh why, do I now have to hold down CMD-Q for several seconds on MacOS in order for the damn program to quit? Who the hell thought that deviating from how 99.99% of all other programs work on the OS was a good idea.
Fuck Chrome.

Re:Change to Quit behaviour

[Megane]

That is probably because of something UI people have known since at least 1984 with the original Macintosh, but UX millennials are clueless about: you have to always read and save the state of the modifier keys (control, shift, command, etc.) at the moment the key (or mouse) event happens, and keep it as a single object. You can't just poll it later when you feel like it, because it can change in that time. UX people also only use the fastest PCs possible, so they never have the lag that shows this problem, and will just tell you to get a faster computer. (Hint: it worked fine on an 8MHz 68000.)

One game I play a lot is built on Unity, and I'm not sure if it's part of the custom game code, or an event loop in the Unity base code (I suspect the latter), but not only does it not save modifier keys along with events, it only polls for events once per display frame! One effect of this is when dragging items, with sufficient UI processing lag and a fast enough mouse drag, the initial mouse coordinates of the drag can be on a completely different object than where the original click happened. And when the frame rate goes below 10fps or so, you can't double-click anymore, because it doesn't save the time when the event happened (something else that should be in an event object), and instead compares when the two clicks were processed. At a sufficiently low frame rate, this will always be beyond the double-click timing threshold.

You mean an experimental flag got removed?

[The MAZZTer]

Nobody could have seen that coming!

Seriously this is what I call the cycle of /r/chrome because I see it all the time on there.

1. Chrome team introduces a new feature or a change, hides it behind a flag so they can privately test it or do a/b testing or whatever.
2. Nobody notices or cares.
3. Chrome team feals the feature/change is stable and turns it on for everyone.
4. Vocal minority hates it.
5. Someone finds the flag and realizes it can be used to revert the change, ignoring the big warning at the top of the page that flags may disappear for any reason.
6. Vocal minority is happy and thinks they have solved their problem.
7. Chrome team does cleanup and removes dead code and flags they no longer need.
8. "Fix" stops working, vocal minority is outraged and claims they will switch to Firefox.
9. Nobody actually switches to Firefox. The whole thing is soon forgotten.
10. GOTO 10

Honestly the changes aren't even all that big. The most noticeable changes are the tab design and the moving of the profiles button one inch down. Given that the tabs were ALWAYS the same shape, I'm not sure how changing that shape now makes it difficult to tell sites apart when it didn't before. If it's difficult now, it was difficult then, and it was probably difficult in every other browser. Get the site's creator to invest in a good favicon and now you can tell it apart. Chrome can only show you what the site has configured.

Also if you don't like the colors, fix it yourself. Chrome supports custom themes. Use one.

On a side note, related to mobile UI, Slashdot's commenting sucks on mobile. I tried to post this four times and each time my comment form would randomly get closed and cleared out while I was typing. I eventually gave up and switched to my desktop PC where I can type a comment just fine. Not to mention typing HTML codes on a mobile keyboard is a pain.

Riots in the streets!

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw buildings burning because people were SO ANGRY about Chrome's UI!

Re:Riots in the streets!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in France, maybe. Rioting there is as traditional as running with the bulls in Spain.

Re:omg they changed the aesthetics, what a disgrac

[fustakrakich]

Switch back? I never left.

20 years of interface and functional stability is damn near newsworthy.

Ugh, clickbaity headlines

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly, And People Are Very Angry"

Jesus, please stop with the HuffPost and DailyMail style headlines. FFS, this isn't Romper Room or The Enquirer.

Alternative headlines:

Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly and It Broke The Internet
Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly and Cardi B Clapped Back at Them
Google Chrome's New UI is Ugly and Demi Lovato Showed Off Her Toned Abs
Google Chrome's New UI so Ugly that the Queen's Protocol Made Her Do WHAT?
What Does Kanye Think About The New Chrome Interface?

This kind of asshattery was what fucked Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what fucked Firefox originally. I could tolerate the endless memory leaks and even ditching the add-ons to a degree. But the UI fuckery was what made me go to Pale Moon and Waterfox. I've never used Chrome and now I am glad I didn't get on that treadmill. Microsoft fucked up Office and their operating systems by doing UI fuckery too. Why can't people learn? How does some fresh out of school kid get to make the decisions in these companies that end up dooming them? Why is this a re-current problem? It's unbelievable how much people hate UI changes. Change the back end all you want but leave a good thing alone for fucks sake!

Re:This kind of asshattery was what fucked Firefox

[Megane]

How does some fresh out of school kid get to make the decisions in these companies that end up dooming them?

Because the people who don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation get promoted to management, and end up hiring punk kids who also don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation. Punk kids are not the people you want designing UIs anyhow, you want grumpy middle-aged perfectionists who get pissed off when they have to use bad UIs. (Note that Steve Jobs was a well-known perfectionist, and that both the Mac OS and hardware have declined in quality since his death.)

how many are actually mad

[Anonymous Coward]

the OP from
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chromes-new-ui-is-ugly-and-people-are-very-angry/

says that "hundreds" of users are mad
Lets say that thousands of users are raging mad
there are what, 100 million chrome users ?
so like a tiny tiny tiny fraction are mad ?

and this is what we are talking about ?

forgive me while i throw up

Didn't notice...

[duke_cheetah2003]

I didn't even notice much of a change until I came across this article.

I think people are whining to whine, and not much more. It's barely much of a change.

Why use Chrome and not Brave?

[schwit1]

Is there anything that Chrome does better than Brave?

Re:Why use Chrome and not Brave?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anything that Chrome does better than Brave?

Who knows? What's Brave? (If you're going to reference something that you clearly realize many people have never heard of, be a dear and include a link next time, will you? I'd never heard of it and had to Google it.)

Re:Why use Chrome and not Brave?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brave is the future browser of the new internet.

msmash posts are shit

[Anonymous Coward]

and slashdot readers are very angry

do you think they care?

[Anonymous Coward]

they make youtube worse every year and they never back down

Re: Fake News

[Falos]

Yes, step aside, I need to ask about his macbook keyboard, he'll solve the whole fiasco by saying "mine is working fine"

Death of Chrome

[WindowsStar]

Hopefully this will be once and for all the death of chrome. EULA states things no one should agree too.

Getting tired of poor journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problems with the new interface.

Some people might be unhappy, but sick of journalists assuming everyone's opinion is the same as their own

Angry? Really? About a UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just goes along with the insanity in America. Everything is a major issue that must be addressed now. Can't believe what people get upset with these days. Yeah, I don't particularly like the new UI of Chrome, but I am not angry or upset about it in the least.

Try CentBrowser

[mrlinux11]

Try this chromium browser https://www.centbrowser.com/ it still has the old UI

Peter Kasting

[Hognoxious]

I vaguely remember the name Peter Kasting. Don't remeber where, but I'm pretty sure the context was something to do with assholes.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

i use chrome every day for years and barely noticed. definitely didnt cause any problems.

people now get upset so easily, and get upset over every little thing.

future brower direction is the kiosk

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that all browsers are removing the various menu bars and forcing one to select a menu via configuration popouts i.e. options, print, etc or by unknown url links embedded into the toolbar one must find where/what they are.

Thus, the direction seems to be a minimalist layout in the form of a kiosk with the intent of causing users to talk to their browser. Once this happens, all the toolbars, and buried url commands to configure the browser will fully disappear and one wont be able to manually configure it, but only by voice. Phones seem to be the farthest along, with tablets and PCs to come next. It could be the amazon voice devices will be talked to and the commands from it will be transmitted to the other devices such as tablets and pcs and maybe TV sets.

I don't like any of the current browser changes myself, but the only way to go back is for some fork of firefox, chrome etc to be done that changes it back.

every chrome UI "enhancement" is garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

can anyone name one redesign google ever did that didn't suck?

Re:every chrome UI "enhancement" is garbage

[Megane]

When they un-linked G+ from YouTube? When they killed G+ completely?

Re: every chrome UI "enhancement" is garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

The time that they undid the change to make the search page more like Bing! Your point is valid though, the best change was undoing a UX disaster.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

People need to switch browsers and stop relying on Chrome so much.. Chrome isn't magical. It's just a browser.

Who only uses ten tabs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"tens of tabs". I routinely have 100+. Who thinks 10 is a lot?

Re: Who only uses ten tabs?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you manage 100?

At some point, Chrome started doing this stupid thing where at about 25 tabs, every new tab is invisible. You can see the page but to close the tab you have to close enough older ones that you can see this newer one. Heaven forbid they do what Firefox does and scroll. It's completely stupid and they should fix it before screwing around with whatever they're screwing around with this time.

Don't worry...

[Excelcia]

Don't worry, Firefox ignored clear majority user preferences with its UI change choices on back-to-back-to-back releases and they are still doing great. Chrome has nothing to worry about.

Oh.... wait....

Re:future brower direction is the kiosk

[Megane]

with the intent of causing users to talk to their browser

Well I certainly talk to my phone all the time. The usual words are "Fucking Google!" and "What the fuck, Google?"

What do you mean "New UI"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since day UI for Chrome has being ugly and mediocre

âoeSame as it ever wasâ x 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has always sucked at UI.

For an entire year? Of course there is burn in!

[Anonymous Coward]

For an entire year? Of course there is burn in!

Switch from Spyware Chrome to Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

There's literally no reason to stay on Chrome now if you don't even like the interface. The performance differences between the two browsers are not anything humans can notice.

God I miss the flash era

[Anonymous Coward]

Great games and fun animations at less than 10 MiB.

Flash should have been properly sandboxed and integrated natively into the browser instead of being abandoned. Just like a browser don't need a plugin to read a jpg file it doesn't actually need a plugin to read a swf file. The format is open.

Just sandbox it, refuse the swf internet access and 99% of 20 years of flashes can still work. The threat of flash was always exaggerated but if it literally cannot connect to anything and still must be clicked and activated to play (no auto-play) then people need to be pretty dense to still object to it.