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

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.

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: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.

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]

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: 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.