> What I don't like about these Chrome UI's is that they don't respect my OS settings
Hear, hear. On our new serious workstation, we mostly run a variety of developer tools and browsers, some basic office software, various graphics/DTP/modelling stuff from companies like Adobe and Autodesk, and a bunch of tools to automate things and join the dots.
On a quick look, exactly none of the major products there uses the standard Windows 7 UI conventions.
I, for one, am sick of:
- not knowing which keyboard shortcuts perform frequent tasks like undo/redo, or more generally, not being able to navigate a UI using systematic and intuitive keystrokes;
- every application's windows having different conventions for dealing with multiple documents, docking panels, and so on (and making the labels ever-smaller wherever they are, so your documents all look like "C:\users\Fred\..." and your web pages are all "Favourite Site | The S...");
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious auto-update policies that break stuff;
- every application having different ways to download and maintain plug-ins;
- more and more applications trying to squeeze every last square inch of screen space by hiding commands behind a small number of tabs or, worse, meaningless menu-icon-things (we bought large, hi-res monitors for a reason, and having access to browser bookmarks within two clicks is worth far more to us than reading a web site at 2560x1400 instead of 2560x1370);
- every application shoving its executables and config files in its own place (not helped by Windows 7's holier-than-thou "you can't put that in that directory" and "are you sure you want to do that" messages);
- and many other things that just make day-to-day work horribly inefficient.
I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
And then I wish other software, including everything I mentioned above and most definitely including Firefox and Chrome, would just follow the conventions or make some effort to collaborate and standardise in connection with Microsoft (or whoever else writes the platform(s) they run on).