Tag Archive for 'chrome'

The Irony is Thick

Ugh

Vertical Pixels Are Friends

I love me some Chrome, let there be no doubt about that. On Windows it’s my browser of choice, no contest, and on OS X it’s getting to a point where it’s usable as a default browser. But, there is one thing that is really grating me on OS X.

Chrome vs. Safari

That’s Chrome’s 100 vertical picels toolbar highrise vs. Safari’s lean 72px. Even with its bookmark bar folded, Chrome is taller than Safari…

28 paltry pixels don’t seem like a whole lot, but considering that all of Google’s web apps also take up at least 25px at the top for links to other Google apps, sign out, help and settings links… Well my 13.3” MacBook Pro’s screen is starting to feel vertically challenged.

I actually ahppen to love Chrome’s ‘oversized’ address bar and on-top tabs, but something’s gotta give.

Update: After some discussion below, it should be noted that Safari actually exceeds Chrome in vertical… eh… chrome pixels if you also turn on the status– and tab-bars.

Movable Tabs

At work, where I’m forced to use Windows Vista, I use Google Chrome exclusively. And a thing I’ve grown to love about Chrome, is how it handles moving tabs, which is slightly different — and better — from Safari 4b, which I use at home.

In Safari, you grab the small lined area at the top left of a tab to start dragging, something introduced with Safari 4, where before the entire tab was draggable. Once you start dragging, the semi-transparent tab follows your mouse arround until you let go of it, whereupon it either integrates itself into a row of tabs or into a new window. Most annoyingly, Exposé doesn’t work while dragging tabs.

In Chrome, you can initiate dragging anywhere on the tab, and if the tab is the last remaining member of a window, that window will disappear when you start dragging. This allows you to move a tab into a window behind the current, without first rearranging windows; quite nice in Windows’ maxmized windows regime.

Dear Apple: Please steal some of these interface tricks for Safari.

PS: I would switch to Chrome on OS X in an instant, if I could; extensions or no.