Ever notice Chrome has no "Set image as wallpaper"?

I'm the 'Glen' from the Chromium UI team referred to in the bug report; we actually do torture ourselves over questions like this - it comes down to painful decisions about keeping Chrome lightweight.

Sure, a single small context menu item might not make a lot of difference, but there are thousands of features like this, each servicing a different small set of people. In addition to the interface overhead of having all of those features, the engineering (don't forget cross platform, keeping it up to date, translation into 40 languages, and support) is never as small as you think it is.

It's painful because taken individually, we know we could fix an issue and make a set of people happy, but there are never ending piles of these issues, and we none of us want to let Chrome become a never-ending pile of menu items and buttons and extra leading to cruft and bugs.

Now I have made myself sad.

Who says it's a bug? Maybe they've omitted it on purpose to de-emphasise the desktop/OS as part of their Chrome OS play. Still a pain if you use it though.

As an aside, it's interesting that the reporter says it's their favourite feature. Either they're emphasising for effect or they don't think of most of Chrome's core features as features.

That thread was hilarious.

"Definitely thinking of going back to firefox over this"

"Stupid Google; I set new backgrounds more often than I download pictures by far. This is not bloat. Breathtaking arrogance and disrespectful attitude toward users."

:-) are we sure this isn't some kinda 4chan joke?

I've never noticed the lack of this feature in Chrome, and I don't think I've ever used it in a browser that had it.

Maybe this is a feature an extension could handle, assuming Chrome's security model allows it.

The security model is one area in which Chrome could, perhaps do with a bit more complexity. The fact that I can't use mouse gestures on local directory listings or the new tab page annoys me. I want to mark the mouse gestures extension as trusted and therefore allowed to run on any page Chrome can display.

I didn't notice it was lacking this option until this reading. Like most other people here when I see my desktop background it means I'm shutting down the computer.

Funnily though, the Google folks are silly enough to give people the ability to add a background image feature to their that-many hits/day search page, but not the user's own desktop..

People get so worked up about the little things.

This already works on KDE, just drag the picture from chrome to the desktop and you'll be asked to set it as wallpaper.

This is a feature I'm glad Chrome lacks. This is also an excellent reason why you need a deep understanding of your product and its uses so that you know when to ignore user suggestions. Users will beg and plead for you to ruin your product if you're not careful. Remember the importance of listening to your users, but also remember that your product is not a pot-luck.

After reading this, I've just noticed that my FF has the option. I've never felt the urge to use it - probably because I have a (127,127,127) background so that I can actually see my icons and text.

I think Glen justifies it well - it's not a tiny little feature, it's a load of unnecessary overhead. Good on him and the team for standing their ground.

Reading some of the comments on the tracker, I'm amazed at how much of a must have they consider it.

It occurs to me that I take my background a lot more seriously than most people. I can't imagine using that feature to set my background. I would want to have a good view of the background while I do it, and I would want to make sure I like it more than my current background, or any other options at the moment.

Also, I change backgrounds ... Well, almost never.

And finally: I have multiple monitors and they can have different backgrounds.

Hey Glen, its Mohamed (Chromium contributor/committer), I decided to create an extension for this feature and it works great. Hopefully those people who are left out will be happy again, and continue to use Chromium. It is uploaded to the Gallery as of 30 minutes ago! https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddkmiidlgnkhnfhi...

(I didn't notice, I just somehow landed on it via the bug tracker.) The tracker has quite a few of these amusing threads. You'll frequently notice: 1) it's only one line of code! 2) this bug has been open for a year - outrageous!

Edit: the WontFix reason from a Googler is at https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1019#c16...

The thing that struck me was the level of passion that the users who wanted the feature had.

Also the range of argument quality: "i think ya'll should be able to have your thing mothafucka" vs "Lengthening the context menu? Finally a REASON as to the WontFix. A seriously flawed one, since you could easily allow your users to customize things such as what's displayed in the context menu."

I haven't seen my actual desktop for ages. I always have applications, editors and viewers running.

Is it possible for a Chrome extension to access desktop settings, such as the background?

Obligatory Userfriendly-link: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000229

Perhaps that's why.

Talk about building a bike shed :D

Personally I think I've used that feature in other browsers more as an accident than on purpose, so I see why they don't have it.

"Comment 32 by orphenshadow, Jan 24, 2009 I love chrome, but this is one of the main reasons it is 2nd behind firefox."

Clearly.

This thread made me realize how disciplined a team must be to resist feature creep.

Chrome's philosophy is self-consistent, and that's probably the only objective metric, even though this means that they produce (to me) a useless browser. (I use set image as wallpaper all the time.)

maybe that's why I use Chrome and dread IE ;-)

Hmm: "direct from our Browser, like we have since the dawn of the internet". I'm young, and the internet existed when I was born, but I don't think there was a web in the internet's "dawn", let alone graphical web browsers. Still, aren't applications made for their users? The use case would be commoner among the less computer savvy people I suppose (i.e. not the three Google people).