I want to take a moment to register my dissatisfaction with the chrome developers.
I think the way they are handling bug 41467 is disrespectful to their user community. Given the uproar surrounding the change why haven't they provided an extension or a user option to display the "http://" part of URLs? I think their behavior shows that they are not listening to their users.
Chrome devs, please give us users more freedom.
Does anyone know of an extension to put the http back in the URL?
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The reaction I'm seeing in the comments is similar to the "tab pinning" feature; for a while it was completely gone in development builds of Chromium on Linux, and a lot of people reported it and asked why. The response was essentially, "You don't need tab pinning and we're working on something completely new and different anyway that will replace it." But eventually tab pinning made it back into the builds. So I guess people were heard. Based on that, I think with enough user backlash they might reconsider.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Google on this one - settings suck. They make software hard to build, and should be reserved for things which will commonly need to be set/changed by users.
ReplyDeleteMost users won't even notice that the 'http://' is gone, let alone want to put it back - so all a setting would do is increase testing/dev overhead.
Maybe I'm reacting to the enormous amount of settings on our product at my last job :-)
Antoine, if you read the linked ticket you'll see a rather long list of people who noticed and want it back. I don't know how else to measure the ratio of users. I do know that most people won't file bugs. The sheer number of commentaries on that ticket (and duplicate bugs) tells me that lots of people dislike it.
ReplyDeleteLeaving the user option discussion aside for a moment. This feature has been appearing in dev builds for some months. They could have worked out an extension by now, in my opinion.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dctzb/call_me_old_fashioned_but_i_missed_this_so_much/
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm not tied to the behavior one way or another, but I think I prefer the simpler look.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm pretty hard-line against configurations. Maybe this is a backlash against the environment I was in in my previous job.
Also, a bug report comment has two big things against it as a source of usability informations 1) it's full of power users, which is precisely the group you don't want to poll for this sort of thing - a power user is a power user because they will do the most amazing things in the worst HCI environment 2) the only people that will post will be the people that hate it. The folks that don't care won't speak up.
But I guess I'm speaking up, so maybe my thesis isn't so strong. Maybe it's only the people that hat it and the people that like arguing that speak up :-)
I guess ultimately my concern is: Are the Chrome developers *listening* to their users? The things they want/need may not always be convenient or the first thing the Chrome devs want.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it will be like cygnus says and the bulk of cries against the new feature will be enough to make the functionality come back in later versions.
This is my pet WontFix, though I agree yours sucks too.
ReplyDeleteTime for a fork, perhaps?