Chromeless windows are ALMOST always bad

What is a chromeless window? There are very few good uses of chromeless windows Some common bad uses of chromeless windows Chromeless windows may not work

What is a chromeless window?

A browser window which has none of:

• Toolbar - so no Back and Forward buttons.
• Menu bar.
• Address / location bar.
• Status bar.

Have a look at an example of a chromeless window .

How do you like being a helpless puppet?

There are very few good uses of chromeless windows

The only ones I can remember are:

• some web-based courses which used chromeless windows to prevent students from cheating in the exams by going back to previous pages.
• a page which displayed and sorted a large amount of data, and used a chromeless window as a control panel.

Some e-commerce sites use chromeless windows to prevent users from causing confusion in a transaction by using Back, Forward or cloned windows. But I think there are better ways of avoiding such confusion, although they take a bit of programming effort - and the majority of e-commerce sites don't use chromeless windows.

Some common bad uses of chromeless windows

Pushing advertisments at users.

Trying to make users complete registration forms, mostly leading to their getting tons of junk email.

Chromeless windows may not work

You can't rely on chromeless windows because:

• The only way to create chromeless windows is by using a programming language which runs in the user's browser, for example Javascript .
• Many users make their browsers ignore such languages (see Charles A Upsdell's design issues page).

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