Google claims they made Chrome "from scratch" (Japanese ad campaign) | Hacker News Reader

Google claims they made Chrome "from scratch" (Japanese ad campaign)

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11 pointskazuya32 comments

....and?

Translation issues aside, they did make it from scratch. Sorta. It's hard to point to any software written in the past two decades and say it was made "from scratch."

I guess it really depends on what you define as an ingredient. But I'm gonna say this is okay.

Yup, rendering engine in the browser is a minor ingredient, right?

If someone claims they made a video game "from scratch" should we bust them for not having written opengl/directx?

They also didn't program the operating system, or design/manufacture the hardware.

Webkit is the primary and integral part of Chrome, isn't it? At least being Webkit-based is one of its defining features.

Likened to video games, it is sorta well done MOD based on a great game. I don't call it "from scratch".

An OS is an integral part of pretty much any software and yet many people claim to have written their software from scratch which relies on the OS for major parts of it's functionality.

Is twitter not written from scratch because it uses MySQL and Rails?

Is apache not written from scratch because it relies on glibc?

RDBMS functionality is a primary and integral part of almost all web applications, could any web app that uses a database back-end be said to be "written from scratch" then?

Was Facebook written from scratch? The amount of work that went into creating Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Memcache, the x86-64 instruction set, etc. is almost certainly vastly greater than the work that has gone into creating Facebook.

When I tell somebody I made bread "from scratch" I don't mean that I coded the DNA sequences for wheat in my spare time and then planted, grew, and harvested the wheat myself, nor that I ground the wheat into flour. Nor that I grew, harvested, and processed sugar cane myself. Etc. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I would say it's much more analagous to writing a game with an engine such as Quake or Unreal. In which case, claiming to have made it 'from scratch' should probably raise a few eyebrows but not much more.

ゼロからdefinitely means "we did everything ourselves" aka from scratch. They've been running ads on the little video-panels on at least some of the subway trains in Tokyo recently, pushing the idea that Chrome makes your browsing experience super fast. I'll leave the judgement of whether this is intentionally deceptive or an innocent marketing goof to you.

Sure, they used webkit, but they made most everything on top of that themselves. What's the issue?

Well, the stuff around webkit is kind of secondary, for the most part

I'd hardly consider the V8 JavaScript engine a second-class citizen in Chrome at this point.

When Chrome came out everyone was excited about how each tab was a separate process, and how fast the JavaScript was compared to Firefox/IE/Safari. Apparently none of that matters anymore? It's all just 'boilerplate?'

So the main ingredient in the browser: rendering engine does not matter enough and you can claim making your browser yourself if you did everything around it? Cool, I can code my own browser from scratch in about an hour, just drop in WebView and add some controls.

From the comments that some people are making here you would have to think that the content of the Chrome binary was:

  #!/bin/sh
  exec webkit

Which is not the truth. If you're going to rail against Google's claims, then go ahead, but don't start making up crap and/or under-estimating the amount of work that they did just because you think that it makes your argument look more appealing.

Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into Webkit development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor compared to everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we made everything from scratch" makes sense.

I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components was not developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".

  > Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into
  > Webkit development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor
  > compared to everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we
  > made everything from scratch" makes sense.
  >
  > I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components
  > was not developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".

You fail to understand my comment. I was commenting on people claiming that the non-WebKit parts of Chrome are (effectively) boilerplate. The difference between claiming that Chrome is 95% WebKit, 5% Google code and a reality of (probably something like) 70% WebKit, 30% Google code is meaningful. Maybe not meaningful when talking about 'everything from scratch,' but let's not lower ourselves by resorting to overstatements just because it makes us feel better when we are ranting against something, no?

It's not just boilerplate. However, webkit is not an insignificant part of the browser. It's easily the hardest and most complex part, especially when it comes to dealing with all of the broken web pages.

not to mention the fact that they are the biggest contributers to webkit.

If Chrome is "from scratch", then I'm having trouble understanding what making something not from scratch is. It's got to contrast with something to have any meaning.

Where to draw the line?

1 Tool written as an Excel spreadsheet. 2 Custom IDE built on Eclipse. 3 Web browser using someone else's rendering engine. 4 Banshee music player running on Mono. 5 Pure native app calling only operating system supplied libraries.

But I suppose you could also read it in the sense of "from a blank slate". It seems to make more sense this way.

Translated to English: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

I don't know Japanese, but does that string really translate to the equivalent of "from scratch"? I know that Google Translate has had issues.

Also, what does that phrase mean in the context of Japanese? Does "from scratch" in Japanese mean what it does in English?

It says, "from zero", where zero is the transliterated word from english.

Yes, I think Google is claiming they built it from scratch.

Yes, the Japanese headline expression simply but strongly suggests Google made everything, including WebKit, SQLite etc.

I guess they mean they made everything that the user is aware of. Uses don't see, or even need to know about WebKit or SQLite.

But since when was advertising honest?

Without WebKit users would not see any web pages. Kind of lame behavior for the web browser.

You're forgetting:

  - glibc
  - gcc
  - Windows/OS X/Android/Linux
  - libjpeg
  - libtiff
  ... etc

Literally translated it says "from zero", and it carries the connotations of "from square one"/"from first principles"/"from scratch"

"Google built chrome, a new web browser from scratch", or "It is not just a usual (IE), try this google's new chrome browser", which context do you prefer, esp when they put 'what is opensource?' column in detailed page?

Does Japan have laws about false advertising? How about plagiarism? At the very least Google should be made to feel shame and lose face, something significant there.

Google Japan is full of it, starting from their recruiters to their marketing. Somebody has to flush that toilet...

Hmm, Google seems to have removed "from scratch" part.

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