Today I noticed a very pleasing attention to detail in Google Chrome. This new browser gets rid of the status bar, something that’s been core to all browsers since their inception 20 years ago. When you hover your mouse over a link, just enough of the status bar is shown to inform the user of the link’s destination.

By default the mini-status bar appears on the bottom-left of the browser. This is almost always just fine and I never ran into an edge case where that position would be problematic, until today.

Hovering over a link very low on the page I noticed that the mini-status bar jumped to the right side. Brilliant! If this didn’t happen then the status bar would overlap the mouse and obscure the link being hovered. I realize that it’s easy in hindsight to say “duh, of course it should work this way” but it seems that this level of design attention is often overlooked, especially in beta software.