Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, and examples are licensed under the BSD License.

User Experience

Contents

  1. 1 Major Themes
    1. 1.1 Content not chrome
    2. 1.2 Light, fast, responsive, tactile
  2. 2 Features
This section describes the motivations, assumptions, and directions behind Chromium's user interface design. Its goal is to explain the current design in a way that further work can be developed in-style, or so that our assumptions can be challenged, changed, and improved.

Major Themes

Content not chrome

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application's title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar.

Light, fast, responsive, tactile

Chromium should feel lightweight (cognitively and physically) and fast.

Features