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.
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.
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.
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.
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.