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

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.