Google Chrome's biggest annoyance: Download bar | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome's biggest annoyance: Download bar

code.google.com

62 pointselectic68 comments

I personally bless this design everyday at least twice a day.

This usually happens when I download a file from one web-service and then switch tab to send that file as an email attachment or upload it to another service (google drive, drop box, etc.)

Having the file box at the bottom let me easily drag that file onto the other tab and get it done.

Yet, by all means, there should be a checkbox available for those who prefer not seeing it at all.

Completely agree. I love being able to drag the files from the download bar into a WP blog or Gmail. So until Google makes it so you can drag and drop from another tab (if ever, because of the sandbox), they should keep it as it is.

I think the problem is that it's obnoxious to get rid of as soon as you don't need it anymore. There should be a Shortcut to dismiss it.

(no, the Ctrl-J + Ctrl-W doesn't count. that is a workaround at best and it doesn't work when you're on a pinned tab)

I had no idea you could drag a file from the download bar. I usually click on the arrow & "Show in finder". Thanks. Definitely a time-saver.

Agreed. It is super useful.

Firefox biggest annoyance: The download window. I feel like I've taken a time machine to the 90's every time it pops up.

Chrome's download bar on the other hand is quite neat and it doesn't distract your workflow.

I wish it was more like Safari's download feature.

Why drag Firefox into this discussion? Firefox has options for customizing everything, and when it doesn't there's always extensions. That's one of it's best features.

If you don't like "taking a time machine" Firefox's download window can be disabled using "Show the Downloads window when downloading a file" option.

It's completely fair to judge Firefox on its default design decisions.

It's fair to judge Firefox's design decisions. It's not completely fair to compare Firefox's default design decisions with Chrome/Safari/IE's design decisions, which are more than just defaults.

If Firefox had a download bar, you would be able to download or write an extension to make it auto-hide, because Firefox's interface is entirely XUL and is relatively trivially extensible. With Chrome, you can star an issue and hope someone will listen to you, but you're probably going to be ignored.

>It's not completely fair to compare Firefox's default design decisions with Chrome/Safari/IE's design decisions, which are more than just defaults.

What do you mean by "more than just defaults"?

It takes <1 hour to write a Firefox extension that modifies its UI in a trivial way, and that Firefox extension can be distributed easily. You can do almost anything by modifying the XUL and/or CSS, and there is a good framework and good documentation for doing so. The default Firefox UI is just a default. There are many extensions and themes out there that make it easy for even non-programmers to modify Firefox to look and behave the way they want it to.

While it's possible to modify Chromium's UI by changing the source, it's far more difficult, and, unless your changes are accepted upstream, you have to maintain and distribute a whole new set of binaries yourself. If you want to do something like make the tabs square, make the tab bar scroll, or replace the download bar with a panel or a separate window, you're gonna have a bad time. Chrome's "themes" are really just different title bar and tab backgrounds. If you're a non-programmer, you can't really change the Chromium UI at all. The UI defaults are not just defaults; they're the only option unless you want to write a shitton of code.

Safari and IE are closed source, so it's extremely difficult to modify their UIs at all beyond the meager options provided to you in the preferences, even if you're a rockstar programmer.

> It takes <1 hour to write a Firefox extension that modifies its UI

Not for anyone using Firefox. Browser software is not just for developers, in fact, the majority of the users is not developers. I think this discussion was from a regular users default point of view of the Downloads window.

I think I addressed this pretty well already. Read the whole post.

Non developers like my mom can extend Firefox to fix a better UI for downloads – and that's and argument for Firefox not to have great defaults?

Have you seen the replacement UI?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:DownloadsPanel-Downloading.png

For reasons unknown to me, it's been delayed for ages. So long that even Safari has copied and deployed it before Firefox did.

I actually liked the download window in FF, and find this new UI (been using it on Nightly for a while) pretty annoying.

Agreed. Maybe I'm just too used to the download window, but I tried the recent Firefox nightly I instantly cringed when I downloaded a file. I prefer Chrome solution to both.

I like this. It is one less window to manage.

Too bad they didn't patent it.

That's the UI used in Safari 6. It's pretty terrible, in my opinion; it hides too much information in a single button. It's roughly equivalent to Chrome's download bar, except with less information.

What info do you need?

If I am downloading more than one item (and maybe I am waiting for a particular one), it's not telling me which ones are finished.

OS X postfixes files that are being downloaded with .download – so if you're looking at a file, you should see if it's done or not.

Safari has publicly had that since October 20, 2010, and of course it was worked on privately before that. That screenshot looks like it's from April of this year?

Safari's expanding download button is a lot better than the download bar. Ideally I'd prefer it if you could just disable it and it would open the download window in a background tab instead.

https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/download-statusb... and it works just like Chrome.

Actually it's much better: it takes much less space, can be configured to ignore certain file types and can disappear after the downloads are finished.

2 and a half years ago I tried Chrome and was turned off by the download bar. I pleaded, along with a few others, for at least a shortcut that would close the bar. The response was: What's the matter with your mouse?

EDIT: Oh wait. This issue was from 2 years ago. Silly me thought something finally changed. And it seems the main discussion isn't in the OPs link, but here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=27797 and here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=89922

I've noticed the Chrome team are pretty cavalier and don't seem to appreciate outside recommendations and critiques.

If Google ever changes the download bar in Chrome, you can be damn sure it has nothing to do with a snarky Chromium bug tracking thread. And they wouldn't be totally in the wrong because it isn't a bug, obviously.

But honestly, would you be so quick to respond to a snarky bug tracking thread? I wouldn't. The fact that it's so snarky with such an entitled attitude would push me to give it attention at some point but it definitely wouldn't make my top ten list. There are better ways to go about this stuff and I think reports like this one are counterproductive.

Looks like someone at Google is working on this actually. Found this in chrome://flags

New Downloads UI Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS

Disables the download shelf. Will show the new downloads UI as it is implemented.

The only difference, that i was able to make out, is that it disables the bar. But it does say "Will show the new downloads UI as it is implemented." as you point out, so it may still be a work in progress, although i have been seeing it for some time now in about flags. More than a few months actually.

This flag exists since chrome://flags exists. I always enabled it (due to the shitty download bar), but never saw a new UI, even 2 years later.

There is some "new UI" insofar as the "Keep"/"Discard" Buttons for "dangerous" files are now in the Download Window. Maybe they were talking about that... Who knows

Totally agree with you. :-) I spend so much time every day clicking the little X to kill the download bar. I think Google developers design for 30" monitors or something... I work on a laptop all day and my vertical pixels are very valuable to me.

You can type Shift-Cmd-J + Cmd-W to hide it.

<control>-j + <control>-w for me (on Linux). That solves the major annoyance of this, which is not having a keyboard command for closing it.

Just curious, how come you have so many things to download? Is that email attachments in web mail? I can't really think of many things to download - usually PDFs, I suppose.

Random cool images I see on the web... I use them as inspirations for apps / sites that I design. Right-click save as... and I'll review them at some point. But now I have this big bar at the bottom that I don't want to see. :-(

You could just drag the images right to your desktop.

You're right, and sometimes I do do that. But most times I'd rather have it end up in my Downloads folder. Also, on my mac laptop, I'd have to drag, exposé-show-desktop, drop, exit-exposé... :)

On OS X, I just put a "drag stuff here" folder in my Dock. Worked pretty well.

firefox + the download sort addon is super awesome. no popup window at all, the thing just saves (customizable based on extension)

I think Safari's download window is the most elegant solution. Chrome's download bar is annoying, but functional for the most part.

When I read this I was just astounded by the self-righteous, entitled tone as if the person who filed this knows (yes, "knows", not "believes" or "prefers") that the download bar is an annoying, unnecessary, undesirable feature that the Chrome team must fix immediately. It's not the request itself that bothers me but the tone of it.

I use Chrome on 4 very different machines. A 10-11" Xubuntu laptop, 11.6" MacBook Air, 20" iMac, and a dual 17" monitor Win7 machine. On each computer I feel a bit differently about the download bar. On the MBA and iMac I love it, on the Win7 machine I'm indifferent to it (I actually have a love/hate relationship with it on that one) and on my Xubuntu "netbook" I consider it a necessary evil. So I feel both ways about the download bar but I would never call for its end because it's far more helpful than not.

Its really not difficult or at all time consuming to close it out. And yeah, I totally agree that it would be a good idea to have the option to not show it. Notice I said "it'd be a good idea" and not "there should be that option". If I were the guy on the Chrome team that read this I'd consider it but not make it a priority simply because it sounds like entitled user complaining which the web is so chock full of, especially when users get something free.

Sometimes I really hate users. I mean, lots of people like me need them to succeed with our startups but god damn it if they don't just piss you off to no end sometimes. There's a big problem with users not being able to tell the difference between what they'd like to have and what they need to have. Often it's a real fine line. Yes we should give the users what they want within reason (the customer is always right and all that) but at what cost? My web browser needs to allow me to download files. I would like for it not to clutter up my screen with another window made active by default. Solution? Download bar. Great! But now I need the download bar to just go away because it takes up too much screen space. Or do I? Maybe what I really need is a bigger monitor or to close the bar when it shows itself. Is it an annoyance? Yeah. Is my demand more important than the desires of other users if they're happy with the download bar? No. Unless I'm the only user. It really seems like lots of users really believe they're the only users. It's like every user on the web is an only child or something that's been accustomed to being served everything they want all their lives at the expensive of others' needs.

To be clear, and to repeat it again, I really do think the option to always hide the download bar would be a great thing for users and it'd even help me! It's just that I've seen so many entitled attitudes from users, my own clients, and others this past year and a half that it gets to me bad and I think a lot of people can relate. There's a way to get attention and there's a way to get the wrong kind of attention. You know, Chromium is open source. Maybe someone who wants it bad enough will fork it, add the functionality mentioned, and submit the changes back to Google. Who knows, maybe the next auto-update will surprise us with this new feature.

If you look at the screenshot you get a better picture of why it bugs the issue submitter so much: he's downloading torrents. I.e. in Chrome he's downloading a tiny .torrent file, and the real download is happening in uTorrent or some external downloader. So you can probably assume he's also downloading quite a lot of those files.

Personally I like the Chrome download bar, but I get why it might get in the way of some uses.

The best download UI right now, is Safari's

Why? Come on man, don't leave us hanging. Give us an argument. Start a discussion. You can't just leave that dangling out there like that. That's why these comment threads exist.

No! The biggest annoyances for me are:

1) Not easily switching to a new tab when it is opened (I somehow learned about command-option-shift-click, but, really);

2) Not being able to use ctrl-scroll wheel (on Logitech trackball) to zoom (command +/- not nearly as nice).

My biggest annoyance: When I click on downloaded items on the download bar, it takes me to the folder instead of opening the file.

Anybody have this same issue?

It opens the file for me.

I've found Google Chrome's downloader stalls out or fails from time to time, so I'm pushed to Firefox for these failed downloads.

Go to about:flags, enable New Downloads. Bar is disabled.

Easy.

OS X, Chrome 22 dev

I see no such flag.

Strange, I have it on both Windows and Linux, and the flag claims its available on "Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS"

Yep. I updated my old PC's Chrome (it was on version 6! I thought Chrome auto-updaed itself?) to latest version (21) and it was there. But strangely changing it didn't change anything in the download UI.

There are hundreds of millions of people all over the world dying of diseases and starvation. And you are complaining about the "download bar"? Are you kidding me?

There are hundreds of millions of people all over the world dying of diseases and starvation. And you are complaining about people complaining about the "download bar"? Are you kidding me?

There won't be an option to disable the shelf. There are other bugs about making dismissing it easier. Status: WontFix

Grr. What's the bloody point of open source if the developers of the project won't accept wanted fixes? There are a number of ways I can think of off the top of my head that don't involve taking up unnecessary screen space like that.

Heck, even the Firefox extension for a download status bar isn't that absurdly large.

The point of open source is that if you don't like something, you can fork and make your version which pleases you. Just because a project is open source does not mean it will have to incorporate every user request. Project leads/managers still have their say in that project.

>..you can fork and make your version which pleases you.

Which is completely unrealistic for 99% of people out there. Nobody's going to fork Chromium based on a single UI facet. And then even if you do, you're in the unenviable position of maintaining a branch for a single UI fix.

Not happening in this universe, guys.

I just wish project leads/managers would listen a bit more to the community rather than arrogantly dictating "It will be done this way, deal with it".

Failure to do that leads to crap like Gnome 3's infamous shutdown option.

> I just wish project leads/managers would listen a bit more to the community rather than arrogantly dictating "It will be done this way, deal with it".

You say that looking at single side of the coin. On the other side, the story is different. The devs receives several feature tweaks every single day. One can give detailed responses for only so much longer. There will be one time when you just cant write a satisfying response because it is not your main job.

>There will be one time when you just cant write a satisfying response because it is not your main job.

I've got to disagree here. There's always time to remain gracious and professional. If you can't bother to keep those two qualities when dealing with your users, you should probably find a new line of work.

If I was the developer of the browser with the most rapidly growing market share, I would definitely be looking for a new line of work. Wait, what?

If I was the developer of the browser with the most rapidly growing market share, I would definitely not go out of my way to make my users feel unimportant.

This

Also, most of the people who say "oh, go fix yourself", did you try even to build chrome from source?

A friend of mine tried, and it's a huge pain! File size, compile times, libraries, etc, etc

Unfortunately, having the build environment sometimes is more difficult than changing the code.

The point is that anyone can redesign and recompile as they see fit.

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