Google Is Testing a New Chrome UI

&gt; The new &quot;Refresh&quot; design looks more closely to a user interface designed using the rules and guides from Google&#x27;s visual design language known as &quot;Material Design.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s the most worrying thing about it. Material Design has serious accessibility problems (motion and color) and is full of some really bad design ideas. It encourages people to abandon aesthetic restraint. If you walk around smashing cymbals together, your data will show that you are getting people&#x27;s attention, but it won&#x27;t necessarily mean that it&#x27;s a good idea.

To each their own, but I’d hate the firefox-style scrolling tabs UI suggested by the article.<p>1. I don’t want to be surprised to find some old tab hidden by the scroll.<p>2. Id like to be able to close tabs without first scrolling to it.<p>3. If I control tab past the last tab does it scroll to the first tab? Id then have to scroll back to find my latest tabs?<p>4. Again, personal preference, but if I had 50 tabs open and wanted to go back to the 24th one, id rather navigate to it through a search engine or bookmarks, rather than trying to locate that particular tab.

&gt; <i>&quot;Google designers should definitely take a page out of Firefox&#x27;s book and use a side-scrolling system, which keep tab names visible.&quot;</i><p>What? God no, that&#x27;s the worst anti-pattern in tabs. Keep all tabs visible all the time. If there are too many tabs, then the user can choose to clean them up however they like (by closing some, splitting some off into another window, etc.) A scrolling window of tabs is horrible from a usability perspective. You have no concept of how many tabs are open, you have a convoluted experience to switch between tabs on different ends of the tab list, etc.

I personally find Chrome&#x27;s current tab style very geometrically pleasing. I&#x27;ll even admit that it was one of the reasons why I wasn&#x27;t using Firefox back in the day (it did have a Chrome skin, but it couldn&#x27;t replicate the animations). Why give up the iconic shape? Wouldn&#x27;t flattening suffice?

The images posted in that article look pretty bad. Why are they adding so much wasted space above the tabs?<p>The current chrome UI is quite good at exposing necessary functionality without wasting space.

Funny. These new tabs in Chrome make me think of the tabs in Firefox before Quantum, although in Chrome they are more rectangular. This would be a mix of Firefox Quantum and pre-Firefox Quantum tabs.<p>I&#x27;ll possibly feel like I am using an old Firefox version when running Chrome the first few times.

Are they going to call it Austral-ish?

Gross.