Copying the design that Firefox and Safari use makes sense, but the way they talk about the changes really irks me for some reason. Who calls it “Chrome downloads”, as if it's a product with a name? What does “no longer modern [or] interactive” or “strong support for core download journeys” mean? I know this must be normal product manager-speak but far from creating understanding with users, for me it's alienating.
I find it amusing that downloads UI is still an issue, I don't mean just Google Chrome, but also in Android and iOS.<p>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.<p>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.
Looks like they've copied Firefox's download design -- which is a significant improvement. Chrome's strangely tall bottom downloads bar always confused me and seemed a waste of space.
It may sound stupid but... shouldn't it be "ChromIUM Downloads" ??? AFAIK, Chromium is the "open source" browser developed by Google and Chrome is the Google browser based on Chromium<p>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 ?<p>It looks like even Google doesn't know anymore what the difference between Chromium and Chrome.<p>Anyway, I'll stay on firefox :-)<p>PS: edited for typo
I use Chrome. I'm a fan of the change.<p>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.).<p>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 :-)<p>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.
So why now? Everybody told them the download bar was weird way in the beginning… back then it would take a LOT of space relative to the 1366x768 screens everybody had.
More interesting to me is that they changed the design of the dev-tools slightly. Some of it is already in the canary build [1]. For example, the syntax highlighting colors are more vibrant in dark mode. But I can't find any online information on this.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/</a>
It seems like it often happens that a company makes a bad decision, everybody begs them to fix it, the company sticks to their guns until the complaints die down, then years later the company finally does what everybody was begging for, claiming it as their own idea.<p>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.”<p>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.
The new rotating indicator is aesthetically pretty but terrible in terms of ergonomics - it's yet another attention vampire.<p>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.
When I saw this update my issue was that the downloads button doesn't always show. Like something would download and I'd open it but then if I wanted to get back to it the downloads button would be gone. There's probably a setting to keep it visible all the time but I don't see it yet.<p>I'd also like it if "show all downloads" just opened my downloads folder instead of the nerfed, in browser view.
I still remember when Chrome introduced this "downloads bar" at the bottom of the screen. It seemed like a terrible idea, yet Firefox went ahead and copied it (to which there were lots of complaints, as expected).<p>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.
I don’t use Chrome (Firefox is my regular browser) and hence don’t know how the current/previous download interface was. The blog post doesn’t seem to have a before/after comparison either. Is there a screenshot or GIF or video of the existing/old UI for downloads?
was effing time...!!! I had to install an extension to hide the d/l bottom bar, so annoying! BTW if you have the latest chrome and still don't see the new d/l manager, go to chrome://flags and enable :'Enable download bubble'
"All your downloads will be blocked until you verify your identity using Google account.". But on a serious note, popup covering top part of the page does not make one productive.
Yes, keep using Chrome so that you are (((safe))) from those horrible downloads. Let Google protect you from unapproved software that scares the AI overlords.