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Google Chrome continues to ruin standard user interface

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Paul Keith:


Note: Sorry if this is written like a fanboy post. For a more critical to Google post of mine, see this other thread.

Google first talked about the Omnibox API back in August of last year, but at that time, it was experimental. But today they’ve done a new post on the Chromium Blog to highlight the option. And developers are wasting little time getting extensions working for it.
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Source (also one or two extensions are mentioned)

The idea isn't new and you could argue FARR and other things do this all the time but I just thought since I made that other thread, it's worth noting how seemingly bad ideas can turn out great. However this is more like the reverse, great ideas turning bad but being perceived as good by developers.

What I mean by this is that eventually more and more web services would have a monopoly over user attention kind of like how google is the default search box and the more services do this, the more it's just going to be another add this to your browser's homepage button that empowers only the services with most of your attention. (even if every service can have a place in the omnibar, imagine people wanting to remember the search aliases in anything but Google, Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Youtube...sorry I already forgot small service #99)

Still kudos to Google for taking all these risks despite being a huge company and not needing to experiment much on Chrome's interface. Especially since some of the things they are doing can alienate casual browser users while others would turn away tech users and the pay-off is very little to basic on initial implementation.

Renegade:
I love the graphic. That's hilarious. :)

Ath:
And it's an even bigger wave: http://logoblink.com/2009/06/13/google-wave-logo/

zridling:
I don't see the utility of the "Switch-to-Tab" extension when Ctrl+Tab does the same (or a mouse-over). Guess I'm not getting it. To me the gorilla in the browser room is the memory load of multiple extensions. Just like Firefox, by the time you get 6-12 of your favs loaded, suddenly the browser is a hog.

Paul Keith:
I don't see the utility of the "Switch-to-Tab" extension when Ctrl+Tab does the same (or a mouse-over). Guess I'm not getting it. To me the gorilla in the browser room is the memory load of multiple extensions. Just like Firefox, by the time you get 6-12 of your favs loaded, suddenly the browser is a hog.
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It's for CLI users and pure keyboard users. My guess is that just as the KDE file manager combined both file browser and web browser, Chrome will do this + a terminal.

Also, setting aside AutoPager, I haven't found any of Chrome's extensions to be huge memory hogs. This is more due to the limitations of things like being unable to add an extra toolbar but on my side, without using the betas, Chrome becomes more of a memory hog due to Flash and other plug-ins which constantly crashes. (Chrome also has tons of directory extensions compared to Firefox which reduces opening anything - like almost all their extensions treat storage as bookmarks rather than separate extension specific storages)

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