Hacker News Reader

Comment by TIPSIO | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to the Chrome team! Obviously with market dominance will come a lot of criticism (some very much deserved) but you don't get there unless you made something truly awesome for people. I remember the outrage for the forced / auto-updates and am so thankful for their insanely aggressive installer today.

One small non-dev nitpick recently... I am a fan of keeping things "zen" or slim for productivity. Basically annoyingly hyper-focused on only having essentials. Today though, my Chrome browser is a mess of things I can't get rid of on my window:

- Share Icon

- Star Icon

- Extensions/Jigsaw Icon

- Reading List / Bookmarks Icon (new?)

- Profile Icon

- Tab arrow icon

- More icon

Less is sometimes more! I miss the minimalism. At least let me remove. Disgusting pic below:

https://imgur.com/a/CHVLaXQ

View on HN

You just inspired me to dig through the flags -- at least the side panel is removable.

chrome://flags/#side-panel

It'd be useful if this side panel could be at top or bottom instead. I usually have two chrome windows side by side (left and right of the screen), so they're more vertical than horizontal

Or if they did not change the viewport size and instead appeared as a popup like how it is on Edge.

I hate to tell someone with a solution they're happy with to change, but consider firefox. It lets you customize your toolbar and remove/add/resize whatever you want, and anything you still want access to but don't want to be immediately visible you can throw into the overflow menu so you can still get a dropdown with all of them but only have one symbol in your toolbar the rest of the time.

It’s always baffled me that Chrome lacked toolbar customization entirely, even in the early days back when such a feature was practically a given in any serious desktop software, and standard across several different platforms (Mac/Cocoa, Win32, Qt).

It’s such a cheap feature to add and maintain and has practically zero overhead for less technically inclined users. Really strange that Chrome doesn’t have it.

They maybe knew they were able to take over IE monetization with their toolbar and someone could do it to them. Same reason you can't set a custom home page for new tabs (they only moved to that later though).

I find the small, label-less, monochrome icons undistracting, personally. If they tack on a few more I might start grousing, though.

On the other hand, for some reason I cannot get myself over Firefox's default UI cruft in comparison.

Firefox has a way to remove the icons though. (Right click, customize toolbar, drag off what you don't want)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com