As another pointless strategy decision, Google decided to get rid of the native look of Chrome and force the hideous Material theme on all Chrome and Chromium users, regardless of OS. Before you could disable the Material theme in flags, but that option was removed.
That pretty much did it for me. Not only is the theme ugly, it's also space inefficient. While the spaced out layouts might be a good decision for touch devices, that is only a tiny fraction of users of the desktop version.
I had been playing with Vivaldi for several months, but never got around to trying to make it work as a primary browser. Yesterday I finally just dumped Chrome for it. It's also based on the Chromium browser code (so Chrome extensions work, etc), but almost everything in it is customizable. Like FF, the UI is rendered in HTML/CSS and you can change almost anything on screen. A little CSS to get rid of what I didn't want to see (trash can, home button, RW/FF buttons), and to slightly resize and reposition the tabs, and it's glorious or at least not annoying.
That pretty much did it for me. Not only is the theme ugly, it's also space inefficient. While the spaced out layouts might be a good decision for touch devices, that is only a tiny fraction of users of the desktop version.
I had been playing with Vivaldi for several months, but never got around to trying to make it work as a primary browser. Yesterday I finally just dumped Chrome for it. It's also based on the Chromium browser code (so Chrome extensions work, etc), but almost everything in it is customizable. Like FF, the UI is rendered in HTML/CSS and you can change almost anything on screen. A little CSS to get rid of what I didn't want to see (trash can, home button, RW/FF buttons), and to slightly resize and reposition the tabs, and it's glorious or at least not annoying.