I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. This is partly, I guess, because its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful, I think.
* Mouse over a tab, and move your cursor back and forth. The whole tab is highlighted, but there's extra brightness around the cursor.
* Similarly, look carefully at the buttons on the main bar, or at bookmarks, when mousing over. There's a subtle brightening over a fraction of a second, instead of an instant-on hover effect. Don't believe it? Compare it to mousing over the "+" new tab button, which is instantly highlighted to its full degree.
* Tabs, when re-arranged, slide to their new positions instead of snapping.
* URLs lose http://, and everything after the first "/" is very slightly grayed instead of black.
* Every corner is curved. Every dark edge is under-highlighted, so tabs seem to "float above" the rest of the UI. Those back / reload buttons seem to be recessed black icons instead of buttons - until you mouse over them.
* "Active" chrome elements - active tab, browser + extensions, and bookmarks - have a light -> dark -> light transition through all of them. Inactive tabs are noticeably closer to a solid, darker gray, though they to have a slight gradient. It helps unify the active tab with the applicable chrome seamlessly. You'll also notice Firefox 4 has adopted similar visual cues for tabs.
All of which adds more visual cues to what things do, and easier hierarchical organization at a glance, while maintaining extremely minimal clutter.
There are also a couple things I dislike. Like how utterly massive the bookmarks-in-folders on the bookmarks bar are. Almost twice what other browsers have / via the menu. Glitches in Web Inspector. Excessively-useful hidden preferences. But overall, there's a frightening amount of polish in Chrome.
The day that minimalism got equated with beauty was the day we realized we had too much clutter in our lives, so minimalism = beauty is simply a reactionary concept. Minimalism in of itself could not be considered beauty if you looked at what is considered beautiful art, architecture, clothing, etc, in general.
Take a course on art history. Especially global art history. This is not a new concept, new style, trend, focus, what-have-you, though it has gained new momentum.
All of which was pretty heavily influenced by the traditional Japanese aesthetic, which has a pretty strong focus on Minimalism-like attributes.
Minimalism as a positive thing isn't just reactionary. It also serves to bring subtle details into focus, and to emphasize the craft (ie, crafter's experience / quality) as a whole rather than individual details.
Couldn't agree more. The tabs and buttons fit perfectly into my operating system (http://i.imgur.com/DO5SQ.png reusing this image from a few threads back). I don't even use the "Use GTK+ Theme" option (though I do use system titlebar because it looks hot).
Unstable Docky from PPA (The stable version is basically identical). Docky is pure butter. It is a few features down from AWN but it's MUCH more consistent (had problems with clicks registering in AWN in weird places) and is gorgeous. It really takes advantage of the SVG icons from Faenza.
* ppa:docky-core/ppa
The toolbar at the top is standard gnome-panel with Cardapio replacing the standard GNOME Main Menu. Cardapio is easily my favorite main menu of any OS. I have the ability to change the identifier for it, search the menu, see everything grouped nicely, AND resize the menu itself. Awesome stuff.
Note, there is a conflict caused by Faenza's author overwriting PNGs in /usr/share/dockmanager which is used by the Docky DEB. I used DPKG and --force-overwrite to get them to install properly. A bit of a pain when there are updates, but really it's only one command and it's well worth it.
(The only other thing I could add is, I use dockbarx when I remote in because it doesn't require compositing where Docky does. When I do that, my setup looks like this: http://i.min.us/iErSa.png)
I would consider using dev chromium so you have the option to hide the system title bar and push the [x] [_] [[]] down inline with the tabs. Otherwise great links!
I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. This is partly, I guess, because its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful, I think.