10 ms·

Chrome, 10 Years Later

233 points by felixc 4y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Shower thought: If Chrome was launched by today's Google, nobody would start using it, knowing it'll be cancelled in a few months.
chungy 4y ago
It's sort of funny the paragraph about a custom title bar, that is always the first feature I disable whenever I deal with a new install of Chrom(ium|e). Don't really know why it tries to do it, but a right click and "Use system window title bar" and back to normalcy.
MattDemers 4y ago
I remember how exciting it was to be in my college dorm and having people be like "Man, this new browser is amazing!" It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I felt that way when Rockmelt came out, and the original Opera. I sometimes wonder if these alternative browser projects were too early, or were only able to exist due to the lack of Chrome's dominance on the space yet.
  - peanutz454 4y ago
    Chrome gets free marketing, and tons of google money. Opera could not have competed with that. Opera only went free after they did the same deal with Google that firefox had. Otherwise, it's quite an achievement that it was able to exist in a world where it was a paid browser for such a long time.
- jonas21 4y ago
  While the shift toward mobile means a lot of things are released as apps these days, I'd argue that desktop continues to be exciting. Two things that come to mind from this year are: - Stable Diffusion - Unreal Engine 5 (in particular, the Matrix demo).
- tibbar 4y ago
  Heck, many desktop applications are just skinned Chromium now…
- weberer 4y ago
  I remember the launch of Firefox 2.0 being an internet-shattering event. People were having launch parties and everything.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  That's a testament to how bad browsers were/are compared to Chrome. Chrome was a ground-up project, written by highly-paid Googlers, while other browsers were sitting on old codebases built up by many average employees and unpaid volunteers over a decade+. Chrome was also, at that time, allowed to be a pure browser for browsing the web while other browsers were trying to get you to sign up for toolbars (essentially more ad real estate for them) or use their homepage (more ad spots) and were pushing out updates constantly (an excuse to show you more ads in the updater progress window!)
  - darkmuck 4y ago
    Chrome was based on Webkit which was based on KHTML. It wasn't quite a ground-up project.
sanxiyn 4y ago
> Apple cares about making a browser that renders web pages just adequately enough to be acceptable I think this is biased. It's closer to "Apple cares about rendering currently existing web pages superbly" while "Google also cares about rendering future web pages". Once upon a time, V8 won benchmarks and ran demos faster but JavaScriptCore rendered the web faster. This was mainly due to JavaScriptCore having an optimized interpreter and V8 lacking one, and actually existing web at the time didn't execute JavaScript long enough on average to compensate for JIT overhead.
- password4321 4y ago
  It's hard to speak for Apple why Safari is where it is. Pro: battery life Con: lagging behind on some features
  - sanxiyn 4y ago
    Indeed, battery life shows Apple's goal is being superb, not adequate. For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web.
    - culi 4y ago
      The Safari team has been killing it in interop-2022.[0] They've not only improved the most (and are currently leading) but was also way ahead on certain features like the new color spaces. [0] https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web. The reality is, of course, much more complex. For example, once upon a time Apple wanted web components to be declarative: https://twitter.com/rniwa_dev/status/1352322006448947203 https://twitter.com/rniwa_dev/status/1352322006448947203 And yet Google was "move fast and break things" and here we are 10 years later with Declarative Shadow DOM struggling to become a thing. However, this aggressive push did surely help Google to sabotage Mozilla when they kept the abysmally slow polyfill for the deprecated v0 of Custom Components spec on Youtube for ages. This also applies for the many, many, many features of the "future possible web" that both Apple and Mozilla increasingly object to (anything from hardware APIs to web-component-related bullcrap Chrome churns out every day it seems).
sanxiyn 4y ago
> save newspapers I don't think newspapers (here standing for media organizations in general) need saving. Newspapers have great influence, and they will be funded for that. Let's say, ads go to zero and all newspapers are bankrupt, except BBC, NHK, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Is that a problem? I don't see a problem.
- dylan604 4y ago
  If you think all of the news orgs you just listed have a particular slant, then you'll have a problem. If you don't see a slant because you honestly believe they are neutral or you just happen to agree with them, then of course there's no problem to see. I'm not saying any of those have a slant or not. I'm just seeing how it's pretty obvious there's going to be public perception problem with your list
  - sanxiyn 4y ago
    I mean, obviously all of them have slants. I am saying that generally well respected media organizations exist right now without depending on ads, and I don't see what ads-supported media organizations add over that, except variety. Opposing slants are also represented: Xinhua News and Russia Today will survive without ads. I just didn't list them because they are less respected.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I don't see a problem with this either. If companies want to charge for some opinionated blog drivel about their market predictions or how work-from-home is bad for the economy then so be it, at least it is obvious that those are biased... but to pay for fear porn in regards to current events is nonsense.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I actually really like Chrome, well Chromium, despite the negative perception about Manifest v3. I truly hope that they work out the kinks quickly enough to resolve some of the concerns. I do get that the new API in some ways is safer for the average user, but there are power users that should be able to do what they want. Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith, it has only harmed their public perception and they may never recover from that unless they try to address and resolve the concerns publicly.
- culi 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks ads to create noise and make you harder to track. Clearly against Google's business model It wasn't enough for Google to find some rules in their policy to exclude it from their app store. They literally labelled it as malware (completely unfounded) Google's been pretty ruthless about this stuff
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I agree that they've made questionable decisions, but if an extension is clicking on ads in the background wouldn't that be considered a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.. essentially, a way to game ad revenue? If someone released an extension to silently DDoS ad organizations in the background, even if the user was aware of the purpose, then I'd imagine it would still be against their ToS. Extensions like this can still be installed from a packed extension. I don't think Apple would do anything different if there was an app in their app store that did things in the backgrounds to violate their policies.
    - sanxiyn 4y ago
      As far as I know, AdNauseam is not against relevant Google ToS and no ToS term was ever cited.
tppiotrowski 4y ago
> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.
- asddubs 4y ago
  to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.
  - duped 4y ago
    Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be. You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better. The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.
    - asddubs 4y ago
      I think it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Of course google didn't exclusively use their increased control over the web for strictly evil purposes, but it's more about whether someone who has a vested interest should be the one controlling browsers. It's kind of like a manufacturer being in charge over the safety regulations of their own factories. Sure, you can argue that they might know better than anyone what needs to be regulated, and might regulate things for the better where other manufacturers are worse than them, but there's also a huge conflict of interest built into the scenario. Of course chrome was an improvement over browsers at the time, it's hard to dispute that, but that doesn't really mean that googles intentions were pure. Or that it wasn't a strategic move to place themselves into a position of having a grip on a central piece of internet infrastructure. If a wal mart shows up in your town and drives all the smaller stores out of business you can also argue that they might have genuinely lower prices and a wider selection, but that's also just part of a larger strategy to assume dominance.
Game_Ender 4y ago
He didn't make it that obvious but the author is also the creator of Ninja [0]. One of the, if not the, fastest ways to build C/C++ software on a single machine. 0 - https://ninja-build.org/ https://ninja-build.org/
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
Nothing personal against the author, I'm sure hes a great guy and all, but I got a chuckle out of someone working at a company deploying the largest world-wide spying apparatus complaining about Microsoft's practices.
dmitriid 4y ago
> There was a second subplot about how Microsoft was increasingly turning to nasty practices to get back at Google, and fears about using IE to pull some anti-Google shenanigans. And then Google started doing the same, against Mozilla (and probably Apple, too): https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&t=38pEa15ljkThR5mBM8Gg6g https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&... Quote from that thread: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."
xg15 4y ago
> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway". What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them? The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels). Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above). "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
- tjoff 4y ago
  > What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them? Can anyone really make that argument though? Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it? You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.
- tgvaughan 4y ago
  I agree, although it's never "cheating" to block ads on our own devices, unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style. (Even the term "blocking" seems wrong: it's not like the ads are coming down a pipe and my "ad blocker" is bouncing them away.)
  - 4y ago
alex_suzuki 4y ago
> In retrospect I enjoyed this a lot, for two reasons. One is that getting code review from experienced engineers is one of the best ways to grow as a programmer, and the Apple engineers came from a totally foreign engineering culture — no unit tests! no comments! — that also was clearly producing a high-quality product. Anyone know if this still applies to Apple’s SW engineering culture? Or if it’s just some urban myth? Hard to believe.
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  From my experience observing Apple and Google in WebKit and LLVM project: it's relative. Of course Apple's culture is not literally "no unit tests" and "no comments", as can be easily verified by looking at sources Apple released. On the other hand, I do think Apple's culture was "less unit tests" and "less comments" compared to Google, and it still is.
gmurphy 4y ago
I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the many reasons I left Google last week. I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends. Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  Heh, that's this article I presume: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/chromes-new-feature-click-the-ui-designer-to-close-the-window/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/chromes-new-feature-click-... That is indeed hilarious.
  - amake 4y ago
    Yes, the very one linked from the article itself.
    - Vinnl 4y ago
      Ah, I'd already read the article in my feed reader before seeing it on HN, and hadn't followed the link back then, sorry.
  - jansan 4y ago
    I have to admit this is one of the funniest pranks I have seen in years.
752963e64 4y ago
stephc_int13 4y ago
Chrome used to be so much better than others browsers that I mostly didn’t even think about using an alternative. Now I feel that it is just an other bloated beast, and only use it when forced to access online Google tools (drive etc.) for work.
jongjong 4y ago
Google should do something about the Chrome repo's file size... 65GB+ is kind of ridiculous. Last time I tried to download the thing, I gave up.
- Forge36 4y ago
  I don't think that's on Google. I tried it last time using git. Having learned more about git: the defaults are not well suited to large repos. Worse: it's not easy to get the right settings.
- rasz 4y ago
  They did, Chrome devs fly 128 core 64-128GB workstations, no problem for them.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    And my recollection is that Google devs use something akin to Chromebooks, coding remotely, meaning the multi-gigabyte repo isn't on "their machine" anyway
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Why would they do that? Chrome being hard to compile is a benefit to them. It means it's harder for people to fragment the Chrome ecosystem by making slightly-incompatible forks.
jbirer 4y ago
I will always support Chrome over Firefox because they are not politicizing their project, they just serve you and leave the politics to politicians. They earned their market dominance for being great and supporting things that Firefox did not at the time. I am OK with monopolies of good products, I don't really care about using an inferior product for the sake of lack of monopolies.
- nske 4y ago
  I think they mostly earned their market dominance by aggressive marketing -i.e. pestering the search engine users to install Chrome, or bundling it with most Android devices. I feel that any browser that was good enough (and Firefox was) could have gained the dominant position on the market if they had the same promotion platform.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LightHugger 4y ago
  by default, chrome is scanning your whole computer and uploading that information to google under the guise of chrome now being an antivirus too (hilarious excuse). enjoy!
- tristan957 4y ago
  "Inferior" is your opinion. I believe Firefox to be superior. Chrome is winning for a few reasons, least of which is that it is a good browser. I believe Chrome is winning because: 1. Chrome is advertised on the most popular website in the world for free. 2. Chrome is the bundled in both ChromeOS and Android. 3. Some of the most popular sites in the world are only built to work well in Chrome (Blink), ala YouTube, at least in the past. 4. Chrome is a performant web browser. Chrome is an inherently political project. Google is using Chrome's market leader position to push what it wants on the Web, whether that is standards, Manifest v3, removal of third part cookies, etc. Mozilla is honest about the politicization which mainly revolves around an open Web and freedom of information. Chrome's politicization happens in the background where a normal user wouldn't see it. You seem to have fallen into this trap.
- 4y ago
sxyuan 4y ago
> In retrospect I think of this as a failure of leadership on my part. Many years later when Chrome eventually inevitably switched to using Git only, I think it was a multi-year project to dig out from SVN. Had I spent a little bit of time advocating for something that was pretty obvious to me I would've saved those people a lot of time. I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.
jeroen79 4y ago
weird people still accept spyware in chrome whitout thinking about it.
readthenotes1 4y ago
"Everybody hates ads" Wrong. I don't remember being disturbed by advertisements in the magazines are read, and even in some of the books I read, nor in the print newspapers. What I hate are advertisements that attack me: vectors for viruses, assault me with noises when I am reading, suddenly block the page I am viewing. If Web advertisers treated their audience better, I suspect there would be a lot fewer installations of uBlock origin

233 points by felixc 4y ago

Shower thought: If Chrome was launched by today's Google, nobody would start using it, knowing it'll be cancelled in a few months.

chungy 4y ago

It's sort of funny the paragraph about a custom title bar, that is always the first feature I disable whenever I deal with a new install of Chrom(ium|e). Don't really know why it tries to do it, but a right click and "Use system window title bar" and back to normalcy.

MattDemers 4y ago

I remember how exciting it was to be in my college dorm and having people be like "Man, this new browser is amazing!" It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.

aliqot 4y ago
I felt that way when Rockmelt came out, and the original Opera. I sometimes wonder if these alternative browser projects were too early, or were only able to exist due to the lack of Chrome's dominance on the space yet.
- peanutz454 4y ago
  Chrome gets free marketing, and tons of google money. Opera could not have competed with that. Opera only went free after they did the same deal with Google that firefox had. Otherwise, it's quite an achievement that it was able to exist in a world where it was a paid browser for such a long time.
jonas21 4y ago
While the shift toward mobile means a lot of things are released as apps these days, I'd argue that desktop continues to be exciting. Two things that come to mind from this year are: - Stable Diffusion - Unreal Engine 5 (in particular, the Matrix demo).
tibbar 4y ago
Heck, many desktop applications are just skinned Chromium now…
weberer 4y ago
I remember the launch of Firefox 2.0 being an internet-shattering event. People were having launch parties and everything.
phendrenad2 4y ago
That's a testament to how bad browsers were/are compared to Chrome. Chrome was a ground-up project, written by highly-paid Googlers, while other browsers were sitting on old codebases built up by many average employees and unpaid volunteers over a decade+. Chrome was also, at that time, allowed to be a pure browser for browsing the web while other browsers were trying to get you to sign up for toolbars (essentially more ad real estate for them) or use their homepage (more ad spots) and were pushing out updates constantly (an excuse to show you more ads in the updater progress window!)
- darkmuck 4y ago
  Chrome was based on Webkit which was based on KHTML. It wasn't quite a ground-up project.

sanxiyn 4y ago

> Apple cares about making a browser that renders web pages just adequately enough to be acceptable I think this is biased. It's closer to "Apple cares about rendering currently existing web pages superbly" while "Google also cares about rendering future web pages". Once upon a time, V8 won benchmarks and ran demos faster but JavaScriptCore rendered the web faster. This was mainly due to JavaScriptCore having an optimized interpreter and V8 lacking one, and actually existing web at the time didn't execute JavaScript long enough on average to compensate for JIT overhead.

password4321 4y ago
It's hard to speak for Apple why Safari is where it is. Pro: battery life Con: lagging behind on some features
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  Indeed, battery life shows Apple's goal is being superb, not adequate. For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web.
  - culi 4y ago
    The Safari team has been killing it in interop-2022.[0] They've not only improved the most (and are currently leading) but was also way ahead on certain features like the new color spaces. [0] https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web. The reality is, of course, much more complex. For example, once upon a time Apple wanted web components to be declarative: https://twitter.com/rniwa_dev/status/1352322006448947203 https://twitter.com/rniwa_dev/status/1352322006448947203 And yet Google was "move fast and break things" and here we are 10 years later with Declarative Shadow DOM struggling to become a thing. However, this aggressive push did surely help Google to sabotage Mozilla when they kept the abysmally slow polyfill for the deprecated v0 of Custom Components spec on Youtube for ages. This also applies for the many, many, many features of the "future possible web" that both Apple and Mozilla increasingly object to (anything from hardware APIs to web-component-related bullcrap Chrome churns out every day it seems).

sanxiyn 4y ago

> save newspapers I don't think newspapers (here standing for media organizations in general) need saving. Newspapers have great influence, and they will be funded for that. Let's say, ads go to zero and all newspapers are bankrupt, except BBC, NHK, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Is that a problem? I don't see a problem.

dylan604 4y ago
If you think all of the news orgs you just listed have a particular slant, then you'll have a problem. If you don't see a slant because you honestly believe they are neutral or you just happen to agree with them, then of course there's no problem to see. I'm not saying any of those have a slant or not. I'm just seeing how it's pretty obvious there's going to be public perception problem with your list
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  I mean, obviously all of them have slants. I am saying that generally well respected media organizations exist right now without depending on ads, and I don't see what ads-supported media organizations add over that, except variety. Opposing slants are also represented: Xinhua News and Russia Today will survive without ads. I just didn't list them because they are less respected.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I don't see a problem with this either. If companies want to charge for some opinionated blog drivel about their market predictions or how work-from-home is bad for the economy then so be it, at least it is obvious that those are biased... but to pay for fear porn in regards to current events is nonsense.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I actually really like Chrome, well Chromium, despite the negative perception about Manifest v3. I truly hope that they work out the kinks quickly enough to resolve some of the concerns. I do get that the new API in some ways is safer for the average user, but there are power users that should be able to do what they want. Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith, it has only harmed their public perception and they may never recover from that unless they try to address and resolve the concerns publicly.

culi 4y ago
> Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks ads to create noise and make you harder to track. Clearly against Google's business model It wasn't enough for Google to find some rules in their policy to exclude it from their app store. They literally labelled it as malware (completely unfounded) Google's been pretty ruthless about this stuff
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I agree that they've made questionable decisions, but if an extension is clicking on ads in the background wouldn't that be considered a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.. essentially, a way to game ad revenue? If someone released an extension to silently DDoS ad organizations in the background, even if the user was aware of the purpose, then I'd imagine it would still be against their ToS. Extensions like this can still be installed from a packed extension. I don't think Apple would do anything different if there was an app in their app store that did things in the backgrounds to violate their policies.
  - sanxiyn 4y ago
    As far as I know, AdNauseam is not against relevant Google ToS and no ToS term was ever cited.

tppiotrowski 4y ago

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way. This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.

asddubs 4y ago
to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.
- duped 4y ago
  Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be. You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better. The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    I think it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Of course google didn't exclusively use their increased control over the web for strictly evil purposes, but it's more about whether someone who has a vested interest should be the one controlling browsers. It's kind of like a manufacturer being in charge over the safety regulations of their own factories. Sure, you can argue that they might know better than anyone what needs to be regulated, and might regulate things for the better where other manufacturers are worse than them, but there's also a huge conflict of interest built into the scenario. Of course chrome was an improvement over browsers at the time, it's hard to dispute that, but that doesn't really mean that googles intentions were pure. Or that it wasn't a strategic move to place themselves into a position of having a grip on a central piece of internet infrastructure. If a wal mart shows up in your town and drives all the smaller stores out of business you can also argue that they might have genuinely lower prices and a wider selection, but that's also just part of a larger strategy to assume dominance.

Game_Ender 4y ago

He didn't make it that obvious but the author is also the creator of Ninja [0]. One of the, if not the, fastest ways to build C/C++ software on a single machine. 0 - https://ninja-build.org/ https://ninja-build.org/

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

Nothing personal against the author, I'm sure hes a great guy and all, but I got a chuckle out of someone working at a company deploying the largest world-wide spying apparatus complaining about Microsoft's practices.

dmitriid 4y ago

> There was a second subplot about how Microsoft was increasingly turning to nasty practices to get back at Google, and fears about using IE to pull some anti-Google shenanigans. And then Google started doing the same, against Mozilla (and probably Apple, too): https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&t=38pEa15ljkThR5mBM8Gg6g https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686?s=20&... Quote from that thread: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."

xg15 4y ago

> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway". What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them? The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels). Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above). "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.

tjoff 4y ago
> What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them? Can anyone really make that argument though? Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it? You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.
tgvaughan 4y ago
I agree, although it's never "cheating" to block ads on our own devices, unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style. (Even the term "blocking" seems wrong: it's not like the ads are coming down a pipe and my "ad blocker" is bouncing them away.)
- 4y ago

alex_suzuki 4y ago

> In retrospect I enjoyed this a lot, for two reasons. One is that getting code review from experienced engineers is one of the best ways to grow as a programmer, and the Apple engineers came from a totally foreign engineering culture — no unit tests! no comments! — that also was clearly producing a high-quality product. Anyone know if this still applies to Apple’s SW engineering culture? Or if it’s just some urban myth? Hard to believe.

sanxiyn 4y ago
From my experience observing Apple and Google in WebKit and LLVM project: it's relative. Of course Apple's culture is not literally "no unit tests" and "no comments", as can be easily verified by looking at sources Apple released. On the other hand, I do think Apple's culture was "less unit tests" and "less comments" compared to Google, and it still is.

gmurphy 4y ago

I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the many reasons I left Google last week. I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends. Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.

Vinnl 4y ago
Heh, that's this article I presume: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/chromes-new-feature-click-the-ui-designer-to-close-the-window/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/chromes-new-feature-click-... That is indeed hilarious.
- amake 4y ago
  Yes, the very one linked from the article itself.
  - Vinnl 4y ago
    Ah, I'd already read the article in my feed reader before seeing it on HN, and hadn't followed the link back then, sorry.
- jansan 4y ago
  I have to admit this is one of the funniest pranks I have seen in years.

752963e64 4y ago

stephc_int13 4y ago

Chrome used to be so much better than others browsers that I mostly didn’t even think about using an alternative. Now I feel that it is just an other bloated beast, and only use it when forced to access online Google tools (drive etc.) for work.

jongjong 4y ago

Google should do something about the Chrome repo's file size... 65GB+ is kind of ridiculous. Last time I tried to download the thing, I gave up.

Forge36 4y ago
I don't think that's on Google. I tried it last time using git. Having learned more about git: the defaults are not well suited to large repos. Worse: it's not easy to get the right settings.
rasz 4y ago
They did, Chrome devs fly 128 core 64-128GB workstations, no problem for them.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  And my recollection is that Google devs use something akin to Chromebooks, coding remotely, meaning the multi-gigabyte repo isn't on "their machine" anyway
phendrenad2 4y ago
Why would they do that? Chrome being hard to compile is a benefit to them. It means it's harder for people to fragment the Chrome ecosystem by making slightly-incompatible forks.

jbirer 4y ago

I will always support Chrome over Firefox because they are not politicizing their project, they just serve you and leave the politics to politicians. They earned their market dominance for being great and supporting things that Firefox did not at the time. I am OK with monopolies of good products, I don't really care about using an inferior product for the sake of lack of monopolies.

nske 4y ago
I think they mostly earned their market dominance by aggressive marketing -i.e. pestering the search engine users to install Chrome, or bundling it with most Android devices. I feel that any browser that was good enough (and Firefox was) could have gained the dominant position on the market if they had the same promotion platform.
deleted 4y ago
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LightHugger 4y ago
by default, chrome is scanning your whole computer and uploading that information to google under the guise of chrome now being an antivirus too (hilarious excuse). enjoy!
tristan957 4y ago
"Inferior" is your opinion. I believe Firefox to be superior. Chrome is winning for a few reasons, least of which is that it is a good browser. I believe Chrome is winning because: 1. Chrome is advertised on the most popular website in the world for free. 2. Chrome is the bundled in both ChromeOS and Android. 3. Some of the most popular sites in the world are only built to work well in Chrome (Blink), ala YouTube, at least in the past. 4. Chrome is a performant web browser. Chrome is an inherently political project. Google is using Chrome's market leader position to push what it wants on the Web, whether that is standards, Manifest v3, removal of third part cookies, etc. Mozilla is honest about the politicization which mainly revolves around an open Web and freedom of information. Chrome's politicization happens in the background where a normal user wouldn't see it. You seem to have fallen into this trap.
4y ago

sxyuan 4y ago

> In retrospect I think of this as a failure of leadership on my part. Many years later when Chrome eventually inevitably switched to using Git only, I think it was a multi-year project to dig out from SVN. Had I spent a little bit of time advocating for something that was pretty obvious to me I would've saved those people a lot of time. I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.

jeroen79 4y ago

weird people still accept spyware in chrome whitout thinking about it.

readthenotes1 4y ago

"Everybody hates ads" Wrong. I don't remember being disturbed by advertisements in the magazines are read, and even in some of the books I read, nor in the print newspapers. What I hate are advertisements that attack me: vectors for viruses, assault me with noises when I am reading, suddenly block the page I am viewing. If Web advertisers treated their audience better, I suspect there would be a lot fewer installations of uBlock origin