Look. I won't even appeal to my own authority, as a software developer with over a decade of UI experience. I'm sure you're also an experienced developer with UI chops, and I don't want to have a bigger dick contest. Instead, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... - it's actually a pretty decent article for Wikipedia, and may be helpful in understanding what I was talking about (if you have any interest in understanding what others are talking about, instead of just trying to be "right" on the Internet).

Have a nice day.

Yeah okay, "UI" just means how a thing looks and Chrome is uniquely terrible. Goodness forbid I try to expand the conversation a little without it being an all-or-nothing debate.

Not all, but they're all expressing more than just a pixel configuration on a screen.

Yeah, okay. Glad we've reached the endless repetition portion of this conversation. Cheers!

Really? The problem with government is that the people in it are "evil"? Are you twelve years old?

Funny, when I download software with lots of stuff in menus, I usually view it as stuff like this: http://www.uxdesignedge.com/wp...

I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.

That isn't what I meant by native menus, and Firefox does actually use *those*. What I meant is that menus rendered for selects/dropdowns/context are fakes that neither look nor behave as a Mac user expects.

As far as where a menu bar in an OS belongs... More often than not, it doesn't belong anywhere. If your application needs to provide so many operations that it needs to hide many of them in a multi-dimensional listing, your application either does too much or is poorly designed for user interaction. There are some (few) exceptions to this, but for most purposes menu bars should be considered legacy UI elements providing redundancy for users who expect every operation to be catalogued in a single place. Their primary function at this point is to provide a visual listing of all of the (also hopefully few) keyboard combinations available. If this approach is taken, it does not matter where the menu is positioned.

I beg your pardon. UI stands for user interface, which is the way a user interfaces with an application. Yes, that includes appearance, but it is far from only that. The behaviors of menus, cursor interactions, focus, stacking, direction of elements, language, are all factors in a UI. Even vague things like "feel" which includes such nit picks as which elements of an interface respond to interaction while in the background, how a caret moves through a text field, what portions of a window are draggable. All of this and more is user interface.

And you listed other browsers using the same rendering engine as Chrome, so clearly the rendering engine has fuck all to do with the UI.

I'm pleased you see this much UI conformity in Windows. My experience on Windows is not the same, but I am also considering a much broader set of expectations (as listed above).

To clarify this entire conversation: we had a misunderstanding about what you meant by "UI", and diverged from there. Obviously Chrome looks out of place in some environments, because it has a fairly distinctive appearance of its own. Yes, I agree it can be annoying. But my point was that every current browser does unconventional things in their UI, because the UI toolkits available to them are too limited for the needs of a good browser interface. I hope we can agree that is the case as ell?

Why on earth would anyone do this? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?

Evidently there's going to be a HP Z27q for about half the price of the 5k iMac. Glad to see Apple driving prices down though.

What does it mean to "conform to my UI"? Why are you listing rendering engines (which, apart from Firefox, are literally not involved in windowing UI at all)? Are you just talking about adopting appearance characteristics of a windowing theme? Because if that's the case, I definitely misunderstood. I was talking about browsers (all of them) adopting UI conventions that are at odds with (every) environment, often for the better but sometimes not so much.

But basically, I wasn't talking about appearance convention... and if that's what we're supposed to be talking about, I can single out Firefox\ as far and away the worst offender on the Mac, and pretty much guaranteed never to look or feel native in any way. It probably feels just as foreign as Chromium does on whatever WM you use. The damn thing has never even used native menus EVER, and they're just there, free for the taking!

Taking your price comparison claim for granted (which is not a safe bet, but one I'm willing to indulge for the sake of making a point)...

Plenty of people find a reason to pay extra for a mostly-equivalent product. Some people buy Coke or Pepsi versus RC; some buy Crown Royal versus whatever the other one is that CR rebrands; some buy Acura versus Honda or Toyota or whatever. In all of the cases where this happens, a price comparison will be convincing (pretty much) only for people on the economic margins of the target market. It turns out people are willing to pay more for perceived quality or even for differences you do not yourself find substantial even if they do.

I have a number of reasons to prefer OS X versus competing operating systems, and I have a number of reasons that I'd "pay more" to continue using it. Some of them are deeply subjective (I prefer the way OS X works versus Windows or Linux, in a lot of ways) and some of them are pure balance sheet (I spend less on software I already licensed, I spend less on hardware that either I know how to maintain or I can trust won't require maintenance). Those reasons are, to me, worth a very large chunk of a price comparison between computers which, on the whole, cost nearly nothing compared to how much they provide to me in income.

If you don't feel the same way? If you'd rather purchase based on price-to-spec alone? Sure, go for it. Why does this need to be a battleground? Why do you need to convince me to spend my money differently (or vice versa)?

I provided a bunch of reasons. Tab behavior, toolbar behavior being the most substantial.

Maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not aware of any Blink or WebKit browser that isn't heavily customized from its native environment (including Safari, which has the fewest excuses). Can you say more about what you expect and what violates those expectations?

Use Netscape Communicator, for bonus retro points!

That's a good gripe. It's mine too. My gripe isn't so much about appearance (which is increasingly familiar on the Mac) as it is about behavior and interaction expectations. I expect certain behavior of tabs ("move tab to new window"), keyboard (including accessing keyboard shortcuts and the rest of the document even if currently focusing a plugin "frame"), find (Chrome stops highlighting found results after a refresh, unless you cancel and reopen the find panel). I'm fine with the visual differences—in fact, there are good innovations I wish the Mac would adopt, like spoof-proof warnings/notifications. I just can't use Chrome without thinking about how Chrome is different, and that's a sign of a bad UI citizen.

Now this... of course there is. There are a lot of reasons. Few applications have to serve the needs a browser does, and no pre-mobile/pre-ChromeOS operating systems were built with those needs in mind. That isn't to say a good browser can't fit in, but we're far from a point in time where a browser simply has to implement some library features to do everything it needs to do. No OS/WM (as far as I'm aware) implements a tab system with the features any modern browser provides. Every major browser implements toolbar features not available in the core OS/WM. Some are better at fitting in than others (Chrome/Chromium probably being the best, despite being highly customized). But asking for a completely non-descript UI from a browser, at this point, is asking for something akin to IE 6's UI: plenty familiar and native, but barely able to fill the needs of browser users (and IE 6 had the benefit of a Windows task bar that was basically its "tab manager"... this is basically no longer a possibility for any browser).

Governments do not deserve trust, but it has nothing to do with "evil". No institution should be trusted, it should be evaluated according to its purpose, actions and outcomes; whenever any of those is inappropriate, insufficient, or inefficient, the institution should either be altered to better serve people, or it should be eliminated and if necessary replaced.

This is true for governments, bureaucracies, businesses, trade unions, religions and religious organizations, even book clubs. The concept of trust is incompatible with institutions, because they are not people.