A Million Comments Later, Someone Finally Fed The Bloat Trolls

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.