It's an extremely non-specific term that people use to describe software they don't care for, much as people cast arguments they don't like as "FUD".
I was in a conversation with someone who said he felt IE 9 was bloated. I asked him why. "The right-click context menu is too big."
"Uses too much RAM", "requires too much disk space", and "has too many dependencies" can all be valid complaints. But it seems that in most uses, "bloat" = "has one or more features I don't use."
In practice, yes really. Simplicity is one of the basic principles of good Human Interface design. User testing bears out that users find it hard to do even basic tasks with a more complicated program.
Now, sometimes it is possible to add features in a way that is unobtrusive enough that it doesn't affect usability for basic tasks. But it's a tough design challenge to do this, not a given.
By the way, I think Chrome overall does a pretty good job of design simplicity. But the "just ignore the features you don't want" argument is not a good basis for HI design.
> But the "just ignore the features you don't want" argument is not a good basis for HI design.
It is a good basis if you can find out (as the HI designer) which features most people don't want: Then you can put them into places for advanced users, where they wait for the moment people need them.
IMO the "simplicity" of many programs is just a crutch for HI designers unable to design a usable interface with more features.
Do you really believe that it is possible to create arbitrarily simple interfaces for programs with arbitrarily many features? That seems unlikely to me. It seems much more reasonable to me that there is a correlation between the number of features and the complexity of a program.
They also don't use what they can't fathom. A plethora of options can make it difficult for a new user to find the features they want.
Yes they do ignore the unwanted features, but they also ignore features they would use if they knew about them. In that respect the notion of bloatedness is even amplified because a larger portion of the software is provided but idle.
It's an extremely non-specific term that people use to describe software they don't care for, much as people cast arguments they don't like as "FUD".
I was in a conversation with someone who said he felt IE 9 was bloated. I asked him why. "The right-click context menu is too big."
"Uses too much RAM", "requires too much disk space", and "has too many dependencies" can all be valid complaints. But it seems that in most uses, "bloat" = "has one or more features I don't use."