Comment by sakisv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakisv | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so.

>Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there.

I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.

I'm not saying they didn't want that and they are not happy to be in this position.

What I'm saying is that their initial plan with Gmail/maps/chrome was to gather more data and give themselves the competitive advantage in the ad selling business. If you remember, when most of these products started they looked nothing like each other, quite telling that there was no central plan to create an ecosystem.

The ecosystem idea started much later, with the failed attempts to make social network and with the not-so-failed Google Now which is when they finally started bringing all the data they had together.

Surely they took advantage of their position eventually and managed both to create an ecosystem and to successfully lock people in, but that doesn't mean that they planned it since 2003.

> I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.

Think about it. The time when Chrome came around, Firefox was poised to become the dominant player in the market, barring Safari, which was big on mobile but small on traditional desktops. To some extent, Mozilla depended on Google's money, but was still an independent body, and I suspect, Google came to the conclusion that Mozilla could thrive without their money.

I would not rule out the possibility that their top management decided that it'd be better to have another, Google controlled browser in the market, just in case.

So the Idea would have to be there, to have another browser in the market, just so to make life tough for Mozilla. And being nerds, their engineers put focus on speed, performance, etc.

And Google put a lot of money into the Chrome branding. I remember seeing ad's for Chrome, on huge banners, on prime real-estate in Indian tier-2 cities. Nobody does that sort of advertising, just to get people to use their browser.

Google's thought process absolutely involved the concept of getting people into their eco-system and keeping them there.

May not be a 'conspiracy', but definitely wasn't simply "Hey lets build a great browser, just because we love technology and we can do it"

The ad-Blocker market blew up in response to privacy concerns. And it directly threatens Google's revenue bread and butter, Ads and data collection. Google will fight till death to maintain the status quo, disable any meaningful ad-blocking software. Even if it means risking being a monopoly and paying fines. Even if it means it gets branded as evil.

Alternate motivation: People stay engaged on the web more when pages are faster. One thing that makes pages faster is a faster browser. When people stay engaged on the web more, Google makes more money. Chrome's initial big selling point was being faster.

Disclaimer: ex-googler.

The core motivation wasn't speed -- it was ads. Chrome was designed to send people to Google Search instead of websites. The address bar auto-completion in Firefox would always suggest actual URLs, but Chrome's would send people to Google Search to click on ads on the way to their desired destinations. The ads started to become camouflaged so that most users couldn't tell them from organic results, and Google continued to make the ads harder to distinguish over time. I'm sure that Google also had long-term worries about ad-blocking and wanted to control the browser.

"We just want to make the Web faster" is what they tell their employees so that otherwise ethical people will write code that does unethical things. (AMP/portals is another example.)

> The core motivation wasn't speed -- it was ads

Or also, faster ads. The explanation that faster web better compete with native apps and make for better revenue.

(I agree that it is likely not the only factor, but it a reasonable one)

As pointed out by another reply to your comment, Chrome was about pulling the users into googles ecoststem. By combining search bar with address bar, it blurred the line between a google search and a web address.

Just like Facebook, with its free basics internet deals with mobile providers in emerging markets, sought to confuse people into thinking Facebook is the internet, Google also sought to confuse people to think Google is the internet.

The investment in speed and other user benefits was a loss-leader for the goal of increased control. The speed and other benefits were indeed a net positive for users (and motivated Mozilla to focus on performance in Firefox) but they were investment made for payoff.

You've said it yourself: "the big selling point was being faster."

And yes, there is obviously some marginal value for Google in simply making web experience as fast as possible because it keeps people using the web. But that extended web use is of no good to them if users are doing so at non-Google properties that don't see Google ads, so it seems implausible that control was not a key motivator.

> That extended web use is of no good to them if users are doing so at non-Google properties

Extended web use is often punctuated by google searches, even if a lot of the engagement happens on non-Google properties. If slowness causes people to get bored and go do something else, Google suffers.

I agree with everything but Safari was never a contender for the status of "standard" browser. It's a browser limited to a single vendor platform and a relatively small one, expecially on the desktop. Apple never had plans to move it anywhere else, with the exception of an aborted version for Windows XP more than 10 years ago.

I thought Safari for Windows was a thing for a while? Never really took off but I think it existed

Yup, 5.1.7 was released in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history#cite_re...

Google was frustrated giving Mozilla tens of millions of dollars and all they saw was that Mozilla was dicking around with the UI. And every year Firefox got slower. By losing the browser wars, the Google business model could be put to death. There were efforts to make chrome faster and more portable but that wasn't the main idea.

Google considers itself the ultimate place for programming on Earth. The open Java reimplementation, the state of the art just-in-time compiler (I know the designer), and Octane and extension architecture were imho the main reason to take over the browser platform. Microsoft dominated PC programming. Google would dominate Internet programming. This is why they started the chrome team and de-funded Firefox.

disclaimer: ex-Googler 2013-2018

Reply on news.ycombinator.com