Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.

Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.

Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?

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phatfish 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.

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rsynnott 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).

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neilv 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars

FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

Besides the use of chrome by Netscape/Mozilla that you mention, roughly around that time I heard it used by HCI people to refer flashy GUI design for cosmetics rather than function, and specifically to changes in a particular MacOS version.

I wonder whether Netscape/Mozilla jokingly then used it as a term for the GUI toolkit "trim" around the browser page. Given that this was a transition to the important stuff being on the Web page, rather than your computer. And/or whether Google did.

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pseudalopex 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

Mozilla named the web program Phoenix for rebirth. A company objected. Mozilla renamed it Firebird because phoenix was a fire bird. They named the mail program Thunderbird for similarity of Firebird.

	▲	neilv 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I forgot about Phoenix.

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Findecanor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Between Netscape Navigator and Firefox, their web browser was called simply "Mozilla". It supported GUI themes in XML with images which were officially called "Chrome". Mozilla also hosted user-contributed themes on a web site called "Chrome Zone".

The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.