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I've always liked this article by one of Stripe's interface designers: https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-the-new-ie-1a21c1efc133#.3uae32q82 https://medium.com/

I've always liked this article by one of Stripe's interface designers: https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-the-new-ie-1a21c1efc133#.3uae32q82 https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-the-new-ie-1a21c1efc133#.3... >Chrome is unfortunately contributing to the web’s bad reputation by caring more about developers than end-users. Mobile Safari can easily handle, say, a Photos.app-like interface with a translucent navigation bar, native-like swipe gestures and smooth animations. Chrome handles none of this. No position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type (heck, even IE supports it). It’s concerning that Apple is doing better on a phone than Google is on the most powerful desktop.

wahsd 11y ago
Pretty much describes the archetypal difference between Apple and Google, end-user experience vs engineers developing for engineers ... and those pesky end-users if we must.
- techdragon 11y ago
  I'm honestly not sure which label applies to which here. Since I find both Safari and Chrome have various feature sets where they are swapping developer vs end user focus.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Wat. Safari ios is the most obtuse browser regarding to standards, makes devs life miserable in every conceivable way, breaks every standard web interaction since 199x (like a top fixed navbar), has it's own opinion on transform origin, handles differently than every other pseudo elements positioning parent and to top it all when it crashes because it gobs more memory than the os can handle spits a message vague enough that it's the website owner that gets the blame for its faults.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Safari is also the only desktop browser that can handle my "power user" web browsing style. Chrome completely falls over after a few dozen tabs are opened. Firefox holds up better, but still starts starts stuttering when it gets to 80–100 tabs. Safari keeps going fine with several hundred tabs. Edit: For the folks who are apparently offended by my browser use, I’ll elaborate: Why would anyone want a large number of tabs, you ask? Well, when researching a topic, it’s often useful to open in tabs, breadth-first style, every potentially relevant link in a network of {academic papers, historical web pages, wikipedia articles, ..}. For me, it’s much more efficient to partition my browsing tasks into {open a bunch of tabs without looking closely at the content | go through the list of tabs in order, lightly skimming the content and closing any that aren’t relevant | dive deep into each relevant tab, reading carefully, taking notes, etc.}. I find that, as alternative strategies, both (a) trying to entirely finish with one tab before opening another, storing its hyperlinks in a text file for later examination, or (b) only opening links in the same tab, using the browser history as a linear linked list of my current place in the browsing tree, are much less effective. Theoretically, my strategy could be done with a set of bookmarks, a list of links in a text file somewhere, one of those "read later" apps, etc. In practice, I find that it works better for me to just keep the tabs open in my browser. YMMV. Anyway, now imagine you have 4–5 different long-term ongoing research interests/projects (possibly related). Sometimes, when diving into one topic, you end up stumbling across a useful tangent into one of the other topics you care about. Occasionally, the thing you stumble on is important enough to temporarily set aside the first topic (tabling the in-progress search by leaving all of the, say, 50 currently open tabs in their own window) and open up a new window to dive in on the second topic. Alternately, imagine you receive an important email, and need to suspend the entire research session for later. Again, it’s easier to just keep the window open with all the tabs in it, rather than closing everything and reconstructing it later. This might not be the browsing style for everyone. But it works for me, and Safari is the only browser I’ve tried which holds up.
    - zajd 11y ago
      Several hundred tabs? Dear god
      - awakeasleep 11y ago
        Aka The User is Wrong
        Klathmon 11y ago
        AKA the software was not written with that use case in mind. Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.
        jacobolus 11y ago
        I definitely am not claiming that Chrome is “bad software”. All I said was that it can’t handle my browsing style, while Safari can.
        Klathmon 11y ago
        And I didn't mean to imply that you did, just that the person I replied to did. Your explanation there is a great example of what I personally want to see more of. A clear concise reason why you prefer one browser to another. So often its just "X is faster" or "Y uses less memory" without any other details. And those kinds of complaints help nobody.
        zajd 11y ago
        Honestly I was just shocked someone actually uses hundreds of tabs, I struggle to understand why but I guess that's just me. Downvotes ahoy
    - Illniyar 11y ago
      I can't imagine opening 10 tabs, let alone hundreds of tabs without tree-style-tabs. And only firefox has the infastructure to support such changes to its UI. I would say that the only broweser that supports your use case is firefox, not safari.
  - BackPropagate 11y ago
    Bingo. This is just a rant from a Mac Apologist who's bitter because his browser isn't everyone's darling.
open-source-ux 11y ago
I'm a Windows user, and one thing I dislike about Chrome on Windows is the text rendering. Here is a screenshot of some text from the Google Play store rendered in IE, Firefox and Chrome. Click the image to see it in its full size: http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO). You might argue that the difference in each browser is not great, but it is a noticeable difference. I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.
- speeder 11y ago
  I have a CRT monitor, and Windows 8 font rendering is overall TERRIBLE on it, as in, heavily aliased AND full of colour fringes. So I installed MacType, only to find that Chrome has two ways to render fonts, and both are extremely wonky, I spent like 30 minutes tweaking MacType to my tastes, and then 3 hours re-tweaking it to make Chrome behave properly, it was a serious pain.
  - Bjartr 11y ago
    You can probably go through the cleartype calibration wizard to improve the font rendering, I'm basing that on the assumption that the out of the box settings are probably tuned to look good on generic lcd screens
    - speeder 11y ago
      I did, many, MANY times, also tried disabling it, and doing other things. there are two issues: 1) Windows 8 assumes CRTs won't ever be used with it, and takes the liberty to do some LCD specific graphics stuff, that doesn't even work in LCDs that are organized differently (example: if the panel is "sideways" somehow). 2) the default system font of Windows 8 onwards is "Segoe", that renders poorly in CRTs, and even worse if you disable anti-aliasing of any kind.
  - henrikschroder 11y ago
erikpukinskis 11y ago
Ugh. Candy. Who cares. People are dying in this world and you judge a platform by candy.

wahsd 11y ago

Pretty much describes the archetypal difference between Apple and Google, end-user experience vs engineers developing for engineers ... and those pesky end-users if we must.

techdragon 11y ago
I'm honestly not sure which label applies to which here. Since I find both Safari and Chrome have various feature sets where they are swapping developer vs end user focus.
LoSboccacc 11y ago
Wat. Safari ios is the most obtuse browser regarding to standards, makes devs life miserable in every conceivable way, breaks every standard web interaction since 199x (like a top fixed navbar), has it's own opinion on transform origin, handles differently than every other pseudo elements positioning parent and to top it all when it crashes because it gobs more memory than the os can handle spits a message vague enough that it's the website owner that gets the blame for its faults.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Safari is also the only desktop browser that can handle my "power user" web browsing style. Chrome completely falls over after a few dozen tabs are opened. Firefox holds up better, but still starts starts stuttering when it gets to 80–100 tabs. Safari keeps going fine with several hundred tabs. Edit: For the folks who are apparently offended by my browser use, I’ll elaborate: Why would anyone want a large number of tabs, you ask? Well, when researching a topic, it’s often useful to open in tabs, breadth-first style, every potentially relevant link in a network of {academic papers, historical web pages, wikipedia articles, ..}. For me, it’s much more efficient to partition my browsing tasks into {open a bunch of tabs without looking closely at the content | go through the list of tabs in order, lightly skimming the content and closing any that aren’t relevant | dive deep into each relevant tab, reading carefully, taking notes, etc.}. I find that, as alternative strategies, both (a) trying to entirely finish with one tab before opening another, storing its hyperlinks in a text file for later examination, or (b) only opening links in the same tab, using the browser history as a linear linked list of my current place in the browsing tree, are much less effective. Theoretically, my strategy could be done with a set of bookmarks, a list of links in a text file somewhere, one of those "read later" apps, etc. In practice, I find that it works better for me to just keep the tabs open in my browser. YMMV. Anyway, now imagine you have 4–5 different long-term ongoing research interests/projects (possibly related). Sometimes, when diving into one topic, you end up stumbling across a useful tangent into one of the other topics you care about. Occasionally, the thing you stumble on is important enough to temporarily set aside the first topic (tabling the in-progress search by leaving all of the, say, 50 currently open tabs in their own window) and open up a new window to dive in on the second topic. Alternately, imagine you receive an important email, and need to suspend the entire research session for later. Again, it’s easier to just keep the window open with all the tabs in it, rather than closing everything and reconstructing it later. This might not be the browsing style for everyone. But it works for me, and Safari is the only browser I’ve tried which holds up.
  - zajd 11y ago
    Several hundred tabs? Dear god
    - awakeasleep 11y ago
      Aka The User is Wrong
      - Klathmon 11y ago
        AKA the software was not written with that use case in mind. Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.
        jacobolus 11y ago
        I definitely am not claiming that Chrome is “bad software”. All I said was that it can’t handle my browsing style, while Safari can.
        Klathmon 11y ago
        And I didn't mean to imply that you did, just that the person I replied to did. Your explanation there is a great example of what I personally want to see more of. A clear concise reason why you prefer one browser to another. So often its just "X is faster" or "Y uses less memory" without any other details. And those kinds of complaints help nobody.
      - zajd 11y ago
        Honestly I was just shocked someone actually uses hundreds of tabs, I struggle to understand why but I guess that's just me. Downvotes ahoy
  - Illniyar 11y ago
    I can't imagine opening 10 tabs, let alone hundreds of tabs without tree-style-tabs. And only firefox has the infastructure to support such changes to its UI. I would say that the only broweser that supports your use case is firefox, not safari.
- BackPropagate 11y ago
  Bingo. This is just a rant from a Mac Apologist who's bitter because his browser isn't everyone's darling.

open-source-ux 11y ago

I'm a Windows user, and one thing I dislike about Chrome on Windows is the text rendering. Here is a screenshot of some text from the Google Play store rendered in IE, Firefox and Chrome. Click the image to see it in its full size: http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO). You might argue that the difference in each browser is not great, but it is a noticeable difference. I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.

speeder 11y ago
I have a CRT monitor, and Windows 8 font rendering is overall TERRIBLE on it, as in, heavily aliased AND full of colour fringes. So I installed MacType, only to find that Chrome has two ways to render fonts, and both are extremely wonky, I spent like 30 minutes tweaking MacType to my tastes, and then 3 hours re-tweaking it to make Chrome behave properly, it was a serious pain.
- Bjartr 11y ago
  You can probably go through the cleartype calibration wizard to improve the font rendering, I'm basing that on the assumption that the out of the box settings are probably tuned to look good on generic lcd screens
  - speeder 11y ago
    I did, many, MANY times, also tried disabling it, and doing other things. there are two issues: 1) Windows 8 assumes CRTs won't ever be used with it, and takes the liberty to do some LCD specific graphics stuff, that doesn't even work in LCDs that are organized differently (example: if the panel is "sideways" somehow). 2) the default system font of Windows 8 onwards is "Segoe", that renders poorly in CRTs, and even worse if you disable anti-aliasing of any kind.
- henrikschroder 11y ago

erikpukinskis 11y ago

Ugh. Candy. Who cares. People are dying in this world and you judge a platform by candy.