Redesigning Chrome Downloads | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning Chrome Downloads

blog.chromium.org

33 pointsbarryvan51 comments

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.

> as if it's a product with a name

What you have witnessed here is not a software feature alone, but some Googler's promotion opportunity. So yeah it has to have a catchy name.

> strong support for core download journeys

> core download journeys

A bunch of my neurons experience a segfault each time I read these words. Just what kind of a twisted mind even invents those terms?

But now I am really curious, what's a tertiary download journey?

Drive-by downloads? /s

>I know this must be normal product manager-speak

Why we ever let this kind of meandering marketing speak become 'normal' is beyond me. I deal with these types of PMs every day at work, and with all due disrespect they live in an isolation chamber. They will drop insane acronyms they made up from their niche projects in front of customers and other teams without defining them. They will reference their important OKRs without ever showing where to read them. They ignorantly assume everybody is involved in their niche scope. And somehow these are the best people to talk to 'stakeholders'?

I find it amusing that downloads UI is still an issue, I don't mean just Google Chrome, but also in Android and iOS.

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.

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.

FWIW I was in a similar situation to you a while back on a web project and discovered that users loved navigator.share(), which invokes the OS native share sheet you mentioned on both Android and iOS.

Unfortunately it also does it on macOS and the share menu there is something people almost never use but oh well.

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.

Strangely tall yeah but at least I knew something was happening down there and was reminded later when there was completed downloads.

A few times today already I forgot that was up there and some downloads had completed. It's small and out of the way but then out of mind?

It's fresh and modern feeling but I suppose it's the automatic dismissal that throws me off.

If you don't remember your own downloads, it means you don't really need them in the first place atmo.

Or, you started a big download of something you need to continue a specific task, but it takes long time so you continue with something else in the meantime, and promptly forget about keeping track of the download after a while.

But the end result is the same. If you forgot about it, it means you don't need to interact with it.

It is like things that we buy, put in storage and discover several months/years later when cleaning/moving. These are things we didn't need in the first place.

I like this, too. I can directly click big button to open file or get a promise that it will automatically open after finish download. now I need find it from some small icons.

ooo.... looks to me the first time something firefox did first and chrome copied it. usually its the other way around with firefox bastardizing chrome features just to appease "it had to be done"

Pretty much every Chrome feature is a rip-off from Firefox, IE, or Netscape before so there's that.

The combined address/search bar was presented by Chrome first iirc. Maybe IE was earlier? I cannot remember, never used it (first Netscape, then Mozilla, then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox).

Safari is first.

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

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 ?

It looks like even Google doesn't know anymore what the difference between Chromium and Chrome.

Anyway, I'll stay on firefox :-)

PS: edited for typo

Google copied it from Firefox and called it "Chrome Downloads", so it's only logical that when Microsoft copies it from Chrome, they will call it "Edge Downloads".

Afaik, Edge already has a download manager like this. No idea about the naming though.

They wrote a whole explanation on how they came to implement the design when it was we copied Firefox.

Ok so it wasn't just me. I thought maybe I was being dismissive of UX design process. The design is good, but not much to write about in a blog post when it's already been designed and used in other browsers. This is the kind of thing I expect to read in release notes as an entry.

I use Chrome. I'm a fan of the change.

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.).

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 :-)

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.

I use chrome and firefox and I couldn't tell you any differences between the two download windows without looking at them. Neither party managed to break it in the last 15? or so years. I click on files and then I find them in the download window.

Nothing wrong with applying tried and tested UI elements, that's how the majority of GUI software is built.

Coming up with a long winded article about how you invented a new way of managing your downloads and how great you are for coming up with this new way of doing things when you actually mostly copied your main competitor's UI is disengenious.

I've been missing so many downloads due to this. Bottom bar is better. What kind of tests did they do to decide the top placement was better?

I generally don't get why the bottom space is not used anymore. Long time ago every browser had a fixed status bar on bottom that could be used to show metrics. The url tooltip on the bottom on hover is a remnant of this.

> I generally don't get why the bottom space is not used anymore. Long time ago every browser had a fixed status bar on bottom that could be used to show metrics.

We are talking about the company considering removing the URL from the address bar[0] so I'm not sure why they would want to provide more information for the user in the status bar. I expect they will tell you you just don't need it[1].

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-resumes-its-...

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/58833523/bottom-sta...

With the plague of 16:9 screens, that began around 2008, on cheaper devices often coming with a resolution of 1366x768, vertical screen space started to come with a premium.

agreed. i've specifically disabled it. unfortunately i imagine the option will dissapear eventualy.

Bottom bar forces you to drag your cursor in a part of the screen you rarely goes. Also saving vertical space makes sense in an era of wide screens.

Personally, I have no difficulty navigating to different parts of my screen, and I don't consider it saving space if it removes something I actually want to be prominent.

However, I can see your point, and the design probably be more approachable if I had a higher-end computer with a good screen.

It is not difficult, it is just a movement less traveled for non windows user in general.

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.

They copied Firefox and Safari. Nice. Kind reminder: love yourself and the open web, and use Firefox.

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.

[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/

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.

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.”

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 best part is opening the file explorer with a single click of the folder icon.

Still going to use firefox anyway. :)

The new rotating indicator is aesthetically pretty but terrible in terms of ergonomics - it's yet another attention vampire.

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.

Wow, "attention vampire" nails it. I am acutely aware of my limited attention, but I've never been able to articulate my problem with some UI/UX so succinctly.

My other UI pet peeve/antipattern is the ever-decreasing information density (and increasing padding). I have trouble with working memory, so I need more stuff on the screen, not less!

> I have trouble with working memory, so I need more stuff on the screen, not less!

I have the same problem. Roughly saying, my memory clears every time I hide a window to view another one. That's why I bought a 49″ 4K display and put it right to my desk (it won't stand reliably on it so I use a floor-based monitor stand) to use it without any scaling. This way I always have plenty of room to tile my windows alongside each other. Multi-monitor set-up I used in the past is something in between (but it works better when the secondary monitor is above the primary rather than to the left/right of it).

So they've made it the same as Brave and Firefox. Good.

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.

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).

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.

I consider myself technologically savvy, but I appreciate the safety net.

Years ago, I attempted to download Chrome on a new computer and accidentally installed some bizarre Chrome-like malware from an ad instead of a search result. I had to wipe the drive to be safe. This hassle could have been avoided if the download were flagged.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to my grandparents.

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