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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I was doing my pre-sleep reading of HN on my iPad and got out of bed and on my computer to thank you and tell you that I'm very happy you guys have the balls to say no and choose what's best over the public opinion.

You guys have made caught up and surpassed in many ways every other web browser out there in a staggering pace -- seriously, congrats to that. Chromium is my default browser and I love and look forward to what you guys are doing! :D

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

Here's my personal favourite, from when Mozilla dropped MNG support: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574#c672

I remember being upset that MNG was removed. I never used it, but I might have! Maybe! And an extra 300kb or so isn't really that much, is it? And you can just drop it in instead of libPNG, there probably won't be any security or compatibility problems, and if there are they'll be easy to fix, right? I'm sure the other browsers will support it soon.

Hard to be the bad guy, I guess, but you guys are doing the right thing. Have you read Jim Collins' Good to Great? Look up "rinsing your cheese".

I no longer accidentally misclick these things either. I find that with some UIs and especially those where everything has a hotkey by default, i end up doing all kinds of crazy things. Owning a cat just makes it worse.

Thank you for valuing simplicity!

You're doing the right thing. Even Microsoft agrees you should start features on "-100 points" — http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericgu/archive/2004/01/12/57985.aspx

You can't please everyone by trying to please each person. You have to look at what everyone really wants, and count the small negative utility of having an unused feature across all the people that don't use it.

One option would be to have these settings as optional with default turned off.

A first time user would then have a very simple browser and yet the more advanced user could add features they prefer.

In a way this is what plugins are for but installing a plugin for a tiny feature seems like overkill.

Glen don't add it. It adds further OS dependencies to chrome. If someone wants to make a plugin they can. Maybe Google can offer an award for people who product much needed plugins. It might be a way to promote the extensibility of chrome.

Stay strong and keep fighting the good fight. thumbs up

Cheers! What I'd do would be to just write an extension for it and if people really want it, it's there and easily gettable.

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