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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

> I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome.

Most people don't realize WHY google started to build their own web browser in the first place. It was actually because of google docs. Google wanted to dominate the office software sector, and Microsoft didn't let them on Windows. Therefore Google had to change the platform - to the web.

Regarding ad networks: google analytics is used among around 84.1% of websites. If that is not a monopoly, then I don't know what is. The rest is like a couple of pedestrians on the street that don't have a car already.

I mean, you cannot justify that this should be allowed. Not a single country on the planet should have access to THAT much data, and much less a single company without any moral obligations because they don't even pay taxes in the countries they are operating in.

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What was the action that prevented a Google-docs-on-windows?

Internet Explorer.

They could have contributed to Firefox... more than just monetarily, I mean. They used their dominant position in search etc to push Chrome out to the masses... They had, in fact, previously pushed Firefox. I remember cheering at this point: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-googl...

Firefox's architecture at the time was years behind WebKit. People forget how much faster and better Chrome was when it launched in 2008.

Google was able to build Chrome in-house faster and at lower cost than it would have been to rewrite Firefox from scratch under Mozilla governance. They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation.

The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier.

> They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox).

Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.

>No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks.

Chrome when released on September 2008 had the faster Javascript v8 engine. (Built by Lars Bak team in Denmark.) The improved performance was very noticeable on js heavy websites like Google Maps when scrolling the map and zooming in and out.

A paper[1] showing Chrome winning on various performance benchmarks matches my recollection of performance differences.

Also, Chrome's per-process isolation for each tab also made it more stable when dealing with buggy websites (bad javascript code leaking memory). Firefox would crash more often. The tradeoff was that Chrome used a lot more RAM than Firefox.

[I didn't downvote your comment.]

[1] https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf

This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not have made it easier for Google to do code drops upstream. In fact, the slower pace of upstreaming into WebKit is one of the reasons why Blink was forked off (years later)

I remember the launch of Chrome. It wasn't that better. The process isolation was nice (especially for flash) but not earth shattering. Their marketing was good however (see the linked comics).

The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.

> The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.

That's not entirely true. If memory serves me correctly, at the time V8 came out, Mozilla already had the TraceMonkey JIT implemented in Spidermonkey. However, the first version of Google Chrome (with V8) was released before the first version of Firefox with the new JIT.

And tab process isolation was not a Chrome innovation. IE shipped tab process isospin first.

> IE shipped tab process isospin first

IE shipped activex and jscript (MS scripting host) exploits first, too. Which made the whole tab isolation stuff useless.

I tried repeatedly to like Chrome back when it was young and cute.

Unfortunately for them I not at a single point has the difference been big enough to justify leaving Firefox behind.

Even today as broken as Firefox is compared to what it used to be it still outshines Chrome for my workloads it seemsm

I fail to understand why people call Firefox as broken. I exclusively use Firefox (with all the ad-blockers) and almost never have any issue in rendering a webpage or a need to switch to another browser.

It is not broken in that way and I'm actually annoyed at myself for writing that :-/

If Firefox was broken broken all other browsers would be beyond broken IMO as none of the mainstream browsers really hold a candle to it for my workflows even today.

But compared to itself a few years ago the advantage over other browsers has diminished in every aspect I care about except maybe security.

> They could have contributed to Firefox...

Actually I suspect that one of the major motivations was that to have a seat at the table of bodies like the W3C and CA/Browser Forum you had to be the party responsible for a browser. Merely having some of your employees contribute to Mozilla's browser wouldn't be enough.

It also meant that Google could try out new experimental technologies in their own browser which Mozilla might have different opinions on:

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

Since Google's delivery platform has been the web for over a decade, it was paramount to protect their revenue.

Consider if the world moved to first party apps (ie, news app, ebay app, amazon app) for _everything_, Google would lose their stranglehold. It's in Google's best interest to make the web be as rich and engaging as mobile apps. Google Chrome increased the expected performance of browsers substantially after it was released.

Their ad delivery network utterly eclipses all other revenue last time I checked.

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