What Google Chrome could be
Google made a nice job on the new design of the development version of Chrome. However, there's still some things I don't like, so I made some tweaks:
- Removed the "Add tab" and "Close tab" buttons. Should be visible on hover.
Edit: I recieved a very interesting suggestion about this by Xavi RamĂrez, which is replace the favicon with the close button on hover the tab instead of having it on the right. That would keep it OS User Interface consistent and de-clutter it even a little bit more.
- Removed the "Tools" button from the toolbar. Should be removable by preferences. All the stuff is (or should be) still accessible from the menu bar and keyboard shortcuts.
- Made a thinner star icon. It could be better, but it now matches more the other url icon.
- Pinned, active and hovered tabs should have the favicon in color. Otherwise, it should be grayscale to reduce visual noise.
- Increased the space between the favicon and the page title in a couple of pixels.
I'd like to remove the favicons as in Safari, but I'm aware that part of the Chrome's functionality relies on them (pinned tabs basically), so I adapted the UI for that. Also, they don't use favicons on the url bar because they use that to identify what kind of url is showing up. It's a different concept, more noisy if you implement it badly, but equally valid.
Looking forward to more updates from Google, although I think I'll keep Safari as my default browser for a while.