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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

It's actually somewhat ironic, since chrome wasn't ever specifically intended to take over the browser market. It was intended to shake up browser development and get everyone building better, faster browsers that supported the lattest standards. I think it's fair to say they've succeeded tremendously. When chrome was launched web devs were looking at a landscape where maybe if they were lucky they could start thinking about html5 and css3 in another decade or so. Now things couldn't be more different, people are deprecating ie6 support left and right and lauching a business that uses bleeding edge web standards is far from a death sentence.

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If that's true, then their attitude of "we don't want to be the biggest player, we just want to change the game" seems to be a habit for them, as they've said the same thing with regards to their ISP service.

I think Chrome and Firefox, together, have really pulled the web out of the dredges and put it on a path of more frequent updates and a more diverse market. Kudos to the Chrome dev team and all the people who contribute to Chromium.

I'd save my biggest thanks to the guys who turned the cute little KHTML library into a seriously modern and scalable engine. Not only do their combined efforts power a full quarter of the desktop market, but probably something like 95% of the modern smartphone market.

Anyone who's ever had to develop for the shitty custom browsers written by LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens (etc etc etc) knows what I mean.

So yeah, thanks Apple.

Webkit team: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team

Webkit is a joint effort for very long time. Biggest contributors are Google, Apple, Nokia and RIM.

Nokia is often cited as a big contributor because they bought TrollTech. Much of Nokia's own work on WebKit for the S60 never got merged back into the mainline.

Similarly, RIM's contributions were actually Torch Mobile, who they acquired less than two years ago. Torch employed several long-time KHTML and WebKit contributors.

Google are (I believe) the biggest single contributor today, but their contributions aren't yet substantial overall.

Apple's contributions included extensive work on standards compliance, web compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and butt loads of major features. You know, the important bits.

You call finding-fixing most of the security vulnerabilities in Webkit "not substantial"?

Not this again, we were just over this a few days ago [1]. And even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit (which is beyond absurd)... what is your point?

Apple has a WebKit browser. They ship it. They shove it down your throat if you're an iTunes user... and yet it has pathetic share. It had a huge head start on Chrome and it's bundled with the OS on laptops that have exploded in the last few years. Yet Chrome beats it.

Chrome iterates faster. Chrome has forced others to up their anty. Chrome has a better auto-update model and a better, richer extension model and ecosystem.

So if we're being thankful of browser vendors for really pushing the web forward, even if we pretended that WebKit was all Apple's... it still doesn't make sense to be so snooty about thanking Apple.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631084

"even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit"

Straw man. Nobody said that. Nobody implied that.

"So if we're being thankful of browser vendors"

I wasn't been thankful of browser vendors. If I was, I'd be thankful to Google for Chrome. In fact I'm being thankful for WebKit which freed the world from a long tail of shitty in-house mobile browsers.

I don't want to be misconstrued as an Apple fanboy, but surely credit should be due when it's due. Apple (through David Hyatt and others) took a ghettoized library and turned it into a cross-platform, cross-ecosystem, cross-device library so good that companies like Google and Nokia can't help but contribute massively.

No question Chrome is the superior implementation of WebKit on the desktop. Chrome iterates faster, but it's iteration on the back of giants.

Similarly the KHTML team deserves recognition, but even they will admit their plans didn't go beyond the KDE ecosystem.

I'd start with thanking Mozilla, since if they didn't create the potential for a vendor-neutral web then Safari and the iPhone's compatability issues (which were already substantial, since they actually followed standards) would have been insurmountable and the hegemony of IE6 would have continued to this day (and incidentally prevented Apple's resurgence which was partly built on iPods, but partly built on having a semi-compatible version of IE and Office, then Safari after IE got killed.)

> It's actually somewhat ironic, since chrome wasn't ever specifically intended to take over the browser market

I remember that was the early line about Chrome, and I believed it then. I no longer believe it; Google is spending waaay too much money advertising Chrome for it to be true. I recently came back from Europe to Melbourne, Australia to discover the central train station with every available advertising space plastered with giant ads for Chrome. And I'm being quite literal about that - Google clearly went and bought out every spot in an entire section of the station.

I don't quite understand Google's full motives for Chrome but I now believe it matters very much to them that it gains substantial market share. Chrome is technically excellent and my browser of choice on any platform it is available on. But that is only half the reason it is succeeding.

To be fair, they probably pay another firm that actually owns the ad space and which throws all the ads up. Google likely isn't directly deciding to market Chrome like that.

I'm not sure if the one-space-full-of-ads is a strategy, or just laziness by the space owner. I've only seen it once for a local news station on the L in Chicago, and it seemed weird since no other car even mentioned the news agency. Made me think communication was warped somewhere along the line.

I can't speak to Google's actual motivations for developing Chrome, but I think it is safe to say that taking over the browser market is more than a nice side affect. Let's not forget that Google makes their money by targeting Ads, therefore there's a lot of money to be made by knowing _all_ of your browsing habits.

Yes, that made up strategy would be very profitable.

Here, I'll help you get started on a "yeah-huh!" rebuttal: http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/google-chrome-p... (pdf)

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