It's an extremely non-specific term that people use to describe software they don't care for, much as people cast arguments they don't like as "FUD".
I was in a conversation with someone who said he felt IE 9 was bloated. I asked him why. "The right-click context menu is too big."
"Uses too much RAM", "requires too much disk space", and "has too many dependencies" can all be valid complaints. But it seems that in most uses, "bloat" = "has one or more features I don't use."
Now, sometimes it is possible to add features in a way that is unobtrusive enough that it doesn't affect usability for basic tasks. But it's a tough design challenge to do this, not a given.
By the way, I think Chrome overall does a pretty good job of design simplicity. But the "just ignore the features you don't want" argument is not a good basis for HI design.
It is a good basis if you can find out (as the HI designer) which features most people don't want: Then you can put them into places for advanced users, where they wait for the moment people need them. IMO the "simplicity" of many programs is just a crutch for HI designers unable to design a usable interface with more features.
Yes they do ignore the unwanted features, but they also ignore features they would use if they knew about them. In that respect the notion of bloatedness is even amplified because a larger portion of the software is provided but idle.
• bzip2,
• codesighs,
• cros,
• icu,
• jemalloc,
• lcov,
• libevent,
• libjpeg,
• libpng,
• libxml,
• libxslt,
• lzma_sdk,
• molokocacao,
• ocmock,
• pyftpdlib,
• simplejson,
• tlslite.
As TODO, there is still zlib due to an issue during compilation.
It would also be great to have V8 as a different project so that it could be used outside of chrome with much less pain.
Instead of using shared libs - like those that you've probably got on your system already - Google appear to like slurping everything into the one blob to solve dependency/versioning issues.
Not all of it. Part of the third_party code is a modified version of bsdiff, and as the bsdiff author I specifically endorse the shipping of modified versions of bsdiff with the software which required the modifications.
It is less OS-like than any other major browser!
But it is just slightly-extended Chrome running directly in X unparented without the standard Gnome Desktop BS on otherwise stock Ubuntu.
I don't need yet another local posix system to maintain, I want remote access to my real server where my main screen session lives, and I want that access to live in a tab.