Waiting for Google Chrome

Waiting for Google Chrome

The closest technical issue I could find was a mismatch between the X11/ICCCM window management mechanism and Chrome's desire to put tab controls in the window's title bar.

Yeah, this seems to be the biggest issue. On Windows and MacOS there very few "usual" window decoration styles, and chromium is able to mimic them well enough that users don't really notice that it's not using the native controls. On Linux this is a hopeless situation because of all of the window managers and theming systems in play; and as they note some of the window managers don't even have title bars.

It should be noted that even on Windows it breaks if you adjust the desktop appearance sufficiently. For example Issue 758 was opened the day after the beta came out and shows that chromium retains the rounded-blue look when you change the rest of the desktop to classic style. It was quickly marked "WontFix" and gets bumped occasionally by people complaining about it (or most recently someone noting that Safari beta on Windows 7 does it better).

Issue 92 is perhaps an even better example, because it affects accessibility. Apparently if you set the Windows desktop to high-contrast mode, parts of chromium start rendering as black-on-black and white-on-white. This one has been submitted several times and remains open.

Personally I really don't like it when applications do their own window management, so if Google insists on pulling these title bar shenanigans on Linux I guess that's one more reason (beyond the non-64-bitness) to avoid it. I saw way too much of that crap from commercial vendors back in the 90s (such as Photoshop on Solaris or PowerAnimator on IRIX) and they always screw it up somehow, such as stealing focus or autoraising at the wrong time or breaking window resizing or ignoring window manager keyboard shortcuts, etc, etc.