A Million Comments Later, Someone Finally Fed The Bloat Trolls

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

It was bound to happen, I suppose.

A week and a half ago, I wrote a post about bloatware, and how we (the customers) are likely the ones to blame for it. In that post, I cited this thread about Google’s Chrome browser in which hundreds of people complain, and bitch, and moan, that it doesn’t have the feature to set an image as your wallpaper. Yes, seriously — hundreds of people have been complaining about this for over two years.

Well, someone finally fed the bloat trolls.

Thankfully, it wasn’t Google. They still have yet to implement that feature, and I hope they never do because it’s incredibly lame and just leads to a bunch of tacky computer desktops. It’s really a crime against humanity. Naturally, we can blame Microsoft for it — and Mozilla for perpetuating it even as they slowly killed Internet Explorer.

But one developer, who actually contributes to the Chromium open source project behind Chrome, took it upon himself to code up a Chrome extension that gives people the ability to set any image on the web as their wallpaper. It’s a little buggy, according to reports, but overall it seems to work as advertised. The developer is now a savior to bloat-lovers everywhere.

Well, PC-using bloat-lovers, at least — the developers says a Mac and Linux version are in the works. Phew!

Thus ends a two-year saga of Chrome users not being able to practice their fundamental right of easily setting the web’s best pictures of unicorns and Metallica as their desktop backgrounds. And to tile them as far as the eye can see.

I think development of Chrome can stop now. Feature complete.

Product: Google Chrome
Website: google.com
Company Google

Google Chrome is an based on the open source web browser Chromium which is based on Webkit. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and slated for release the following day. It premiered originally on Windows only, with Mac OS and Linux versions released in early 2010. Features include: Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it A...

→ Learn more

blog comments powered by Disqus