Google Is Testing a New Chrome UI
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
That's the most worrying thing about it. Material Design has serious accessibility problems (motion and color) and is full of some really bad design ideas. It encourages people to abandon aesthetic restraint. If you walk around smashing cymbals together, your data will show that you are getting people's attention, but it won't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.
Even worse, both Chrome and Firefox have been building Material Design style animation in to the browser rendering, and I haven't figured out if there is a way to turn it off. Even on my own sites, where I don't want any animation, the pages are rendered with unpredictable animation.
Designers seem to not realize that the human brain is fantastic at doing visuals diffs. We don't need animation hints anywhere near as much as they seem to realize and in many cases will actually undermine the brain, like when the change is to slow for the brain to register it.
That web design seems explicitly designed to make your normal way of looking at things fail is not a bug. Also I bet those designers judge themselves (and get performance evaluated) based on how long people look at those sites.
1. I don’t want to be surprised to find some old tab hidden by the scroll.
2. Id like to be able to close tabs without first scrolling to it.
3. If I control tab past the last tab does it scroll to the first tab? Id then have to scroll back to find my latest tabs?
4. Again, personal preference, but if I had 50 tabs open and wanted to go back to the 24th one, id rather navigate to it through a search engine or bookmarks, rather than trying to locate that particular tab.
You can move a tab to the right with ctrl-tab and back to the left with ctrl-shift-tab. If you go too far, just ctrl-shift-tab.
How would you go to the 24th tab in Chrome, if no title is visible? With Firefox, you can use the button to the right of the tabs to view a list of all tabs, with titles, and find your tab from there.
Another useful tool is onetab. When you have too many tabs, send them into onetab and reopen them as you need them.
I've never had an issue with old tabs being hidden. Although in general I rarely have more than 8 or so open in a window since I'll generally have multiple windows open across several workspaces
What? God no, that's the worst anti-pattern in tabs. Keep all tabs visible all the time. If there are too many tabs, then the user can choose to clean them up however they like (by closing some, splitting some off into another window, etc.) A scrolling window of tabs is horrible from a usability perspective. You have no concept of how many tabs are open, you have a convoluted experience to switch between tabs on different ends of the tab list, etc.
Worse than that is Chrome's way of animating tabs long after you close the tab. You close your tab, go back to what you're doing, and then the tab row animates to slide into a new position after an unnecessary pause. It's extremely distracting, because my brain sees the motion and interrupts my new task, thinking that there might be something happening in a different part of the screen that I should investigate.
It's a serious problem with UI animation in general that keeps getting worse.
FWIW Firefox and Edge both do the same thing.
The tabs will close quickly enough, but then there is an artificial delay before all the other tabs shift over to fill the space on the right. It only a second, but I work quickly and have usually started to move onto a new task by then. The animation breaks my concentration. It's a problem for people who are especially aware of visual motion. If there were a way to turn it off, it would be fine, but I haven't found a way.
The current chrome UI is quite good at exposing necessary functionality without wasting space.
You're probably used to seeing a maximized Chrome windows, which don't have that space.
The space is present in free-floating windows to provide space for the mouse to grab and move it around (because grabbing on a tab would split the tab out into a new window).
At least, this is how it works in Windows, and (iirc) quite a few *nix window managers. Can't say for sure; I'm currently on i3 with window decorations disabled and my floating windows don't have it (and I can drag using any part of a floating window with alt+drag). Don't know how OSX behaves.
I'll possibly feel like I am using an old Firefox version when running Chrome the first few times.