1) Downloads - I love the download bar. And the downloads tab lets you view the progress there, too.
2) Title Bar - You can actually drag using any empty space up there, including all that space to the right of the new tab button and around the close/maximize/etc buttons.
3) Massive Preferences List - Sorry, that's a feature. As for being hard to find what you want, without those options, you couldn't find it anyhow... Because it wouldn't be available.
4) Favicons - Humans are visual people... It's much easier to determine location by an icon than text.
5) Search Field - The complaint is that it covers some of the UI and you have to close it to use the page? Sooo... How does a massive search dialog work better? I've actually found very few sites that are rendered useless by that search field, but almost all are rendered useless by the giant box that all other browsers use.
6) Lack of Attention-to-Detail throughout - Still trying to find the 'broken gradient'. Everything looks fine to me.
7) Network tab - I find this tab massively useful. It (wait for it) let's me see what was transferred over the network. Surprise! No guessing if something munged the HTML or if it was transfered that way. No guessing what parameters were posted. Etc, etc.
Some of the criticism make sense, but most of it is just preferences or misunderstandings.
Oh yeah, the thing missing from her list of good points:
1) Stretchable text boxes. I use this all the time now. Especially on HN.
> Search Field - The complaint is that it covers some of the UI and you have to close it to use the page? Sooo... How does a massive search dialog work better? I've actually found very few sites that are rendered useless by that search field, but almost all are rendered useless by the giant box that all other browsers use.
I'm having trouble figuring out what you're talking about here. "All other browsers"? Safari and Firefox did away with the old big and centered find-in-page dialog box; they both use a find bar. I just downloaded Opera and checked it, too. It also uses a bar.
Regarding "rendered useless [in]… all other browsers", neither Opera nor Firefox obscure any part of the page with their find bars. Safari temporarily obscures the part of the page that exists in the space where the find bar appears, but still lets you scroll up to reveal that part if you really need to.
I realize people form an emotional attachment to their software of choice and get defensive, but ease up. This is baseless stuff you're speaking here.
6) Lack of Attention-to-Detail throughout - Still trying to find the 'broken gradient'. Everything looks fine to me.
It's definitely there. Open the Web Inspector, pop it out into a new window, focus another window or application.
Edit: Here's a side-by-side screenshot of the unfocused Web Inspector dialogs in Safari and Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/WftBr.png Also, it turns out that you can make it even worse by focusing the Web Inspector window, then moving an icon on your desktop: http://i.imgur.com/WvEIq.png Safari's Web Inspector handles both cases properly.
Yeah... this one threw me for a loop while I was reading the post... then I realized it. In OS X the whole top of the window is a continuous gradient (all the way from the top edge to the bottom of the primary toolbar). So the OP's complaint appears to be that that the Chrome window renders as though it's in Window/Linux instead of Mac OS X even though it has the brushed aluminum look. This also goes for the "Non-native behavior, Native look" point. In OS X you can drag from anywhere on the gradient, while in Chrome it just "looks" like it's doing shiny Cocoa things.
I'm using chromium 13.0.759.0 on OSX and I don't see this issue either, the gradient looks fine. Not that a gradient in the developer tools could overshadow all the positives of chrome.
Where the original goal would be being free of issues (or "Everything looks fine") with respect to the attention to detail regarding the gradient, and the new position is no longer being free of issues, but not enough of a personal nuisance for wccrawford to cause him or her to "complain much".
I'm still not sure that it needed to be spelled out like that.
I probably should have refrained from adding my personal opinion. I don't disagree that it should be fixed. I only interjected that I didn't think it was much of a priority.
The author's coming from Safari, where the search field is integrated into the page yet doesn't obscure content. It's a very well done implementation that doesn't suffer the problems of Chrome's overlay tab or a search dialog.
Also, Safari has resizable text boxes. I agree, they're wonderful.
It is quite obvious that the article compares Chrome against Safari. This makes you objection to point 5 invalid, since Safari uses a search bar, not a search dialog and the thing you think is missing in the list of good points is something Safari has had forever.
2) Title Bar - You can actually drag using any empty space up there, including all that space to the right of the new tab button and around the close/maximize/etc buttons.
3) Massive Preferences List - Sorry, that's a feature. As for being hard to find what you want, without those options, you couldn't find it anyhow... Because it wouldn't be available.
4) Favicons - Humans are visual people... It's much easier to determine location by an icon than text.
5) Search Field - The complaint is that it covers some of the UI and you have to close it to use the page? Sooo... How does a massive search dialog work better? I've actually found very few sites that are rendered useless by that search field, but almost all are rendered useless by the giant box that all other browsers use.
6) Lack of Attention-to-Detail throughout - Still trying to find the 'broken gradient'. Everything looks fine to me.
7) Network tab - I find this tab massively useful. It (wait for it) let's me see what was transferred over the network. Surprise! No guessing if something munged the HTML or if it was transfered that way. No guessing what parameters were posted. Etc, etc.
Some of the criticism make sense, but most of it is just preferences or misunderstandings.
Oh yeah, the thing missing from her list of good points:
1) Stretchable text boxes. I use this all the time now. Especially on HN.