A few times today already I forgot that was up there and some downloads had completed. It's small and out of the way but then out of mind?
It's fresh and modern feeling but I suppose it's the automatic dismissal that throws me off.
We are talking about the company considering removing the URL from the address bar[0] so I'm not sure why they would want to provide more information for the user in the status bar. I expect they will tell you you just don't need it[1].
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-resumes-its-...
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/58833523/bottom-sta...
However, I can see your point, and the design probably be more approachable if I had a higher-end computer with a good screen.
Why we ever let this kind of meandering marketing speak become 'normal' is beyond me. I deal with these types of PMs every day at work, and with all due disrespect they live in an isolation chamber. They will drop insane acronyms they made up from their niche projects in front of customers and other teams without defining them. They will reference their important OKRs without ever showing where to read them. They ignorantly assume everybody is involved in their niche scope. And somehow these are the best people to talk to 'stakeholders'?
What you have witnessed here is not a software feature alone, but some Googler's promotion opportunity. So yeah it has to have a catchy name.
> core download journeys
A bunch of my neurons experience a segfault each time I read these words. Just what kind of a twisted mind even invents those terms?
So, for example... will Edge (chromium based) get this "new" download, because it's based on Chromium ? Or will it be a Google Chrome specific feature ?
It looks like even Google doesn't know anymore what the difference between Chromium and Chrome.
Anyway, I'll stay on firefox :-)
PS: edited for typo
The old bottom bar was annoying in different ways (taking up viewport space, disappearing when you still needed the shortcuts, downloads not being visible across windows etc.).
I like it when the Chrome team writes blog posts explaining their changes rather than just the "What's New" infobox once in a while :-)
Whether someone else did it first... Who cares. The browser is a utility. If someone else has a better way of doing things then why not bring that to your users too if it works well. Just like water, power and any other utilities.
Coming up with a long winded article about how you invented a new way of managing your downloads and how great you are for coming up with this new way of doing things when you actually mostly copied your main competitor's UI is disengenious.
In fact I wish there was a system-level global switch (like with dark/light themes) which would disable all the animations. I feel like people should start thinking about their attention resources the way they think about energy and system resources, doing their best to eliminate everything that leaks it. Both ideas go great together with e-ink displays.
My other UI pet peeve/antipattern is the ever-decreasing information density (and increasing padding). I have trouble with working memory, so I need more stuff on the screen, not less!
I have the same problem. Roughly saying, my memory clears every time I hide a window to view another one. That's why I bought a 49″ 4K display and put it right to my desk (it won't stand reliably on it so I use a floor-based monitor stand) to use it without any scaling. This way I always have plenty of room to tile my windows alongside each other. Multi-monitor set-up I used in the past is something in between (but it works better when the secondary monitor is above the primary rather than to the left/right of it).
I was making a stylized image-sharing tool that allowed users to download the image or share it with an OS-sharing tool. But after testing with actual users we found that the "download image" button just confused the hell out of everyone. One comment stuck with me, when the user hit the download button the comment was: "it goes to that one strange place". They had no memorable way to access browser's downloads.
In the end, we used different methods for iOS and Android, it seemed that iOS users were happier to use "press and hold image" to get to the familiar context menu, and for Android users, the browser's sharing tool worked fine. But no download button for either of the browsers.
Unfortunately it also does it on macOS and the share menu there is something people almost never use but oh well.
Years ago, I attempted to download Chrome on a new computer and accidentally installed some bizarre Chrome-like malware from an ad instead of a search result. I had to wipe the drive to be safe. This hassle could have been avoided if the download were flagged.
If it can happen to me, it can happen to my grandparents.
Cynically, this looks like a PR strategy: “Our course corrections are always about us improving on our past selves, not anybody else knowing better than us.”
I wonder, though, if it either really took them this long to reimplement it, or this long for some political change to enable it, and meanwhile a disconnected PR department was just spinning whatever they had at the time.
I'd also like it if "show all downloads" just opened my downloads folder instead of the nerfed, in browser view.
Many years later, they're finally recognising that it's a terrible UI and have finally dropped it. It's ironic to see that they've copied Firefox's bar this time. How the tides change.
