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Comment by rtfeldman | Hacker News Reader

It's not as straightforward as "they're doing things right." As a Web developer I have all the major browsers installed, and even in that fair fight I prefer Chrome.

There are certain things I like about FF better, but Chrome's minimalism really appeals to me. There are only two total rows of UI elements and each row contains only the bare essentials. I love that.

I won't speculate on others' reasons for switching, and certainly bundling has served Chrome's market share well, but I can't really feel sorry Firefox is lagging when I don't even personally prefer it on the merits.

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Chrome's UI is also completely and totally inflexible. As you can see in this screenshot, http://i.imgur.com/D8rMRBa.png , my firefox's UI takes up less space and is only two rows. Chrome has three rows (the close/max/min buttons, tabs, and navigation). There is no way on windows to reduce that top height. Firefox is flexible enough that you can trivially do what I have with only some simple css. The defaults for firefox are roughly as minimalistic as chrome too. Also, on my linux box my firefox is thinned down even more, while chrome just looks horribly out of place since you can't alter its appearance to closer match the native environment.

I prefer firefox for quite a few reasons, but since you bring up the UI, that's the only one I'll mention here.

Actually both browsers look out of place on my Linux box, because they deviate from the desktop theme. I'd rather they looked native. It's really window manager territory. I'm sick of the inconsistencies with tab control etc, accross applications.

At the end of the day, both UIs are primitive. I'm of the believe that the browser can be so much move than a web page viewer.

What windows is that? In windows 7 the tabs touch the top of the screen. You can't get any more minimal than that.

On my Windows 7 there's a big huge bar behind the tabs. (This was also there on OS X, and that's worse because of the OS X menu bar which is unremovable)

I really really want an easy way to squidge that background bar down a bit.

This is windows 7. Notice that neither of them are maximized. The behavior you talk about only occurs when you maximize the window, not when it is "half-maximized" as shown.

For what it's worth, Firefox can have a pretty minimal UI: http://grab.by/kWSM

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