Hacker News Reader

Comment by spicybright | Hacker News Reader

You could definitely argue it's the most important piece of software in the world, possibly besides whatever popular OS is running it. For the vast majority of humans, it IS the internet.

View on HN

*for certain definitions of importance

If Chrome disappeared I think everyone would still have access to the internet and a lot of people would argue that we'd all be better off for it.

You are right though, it can and does have a ridiculously large impact on people's lives.

Sure, there are competitors so that if Chrome disappeared, we’d be fine.

But imagine if Chrome had never existed. Chrome was so much better when it came out that it saved us from Internet Explorer hell.

I don’t want to picture what Microsoft would have had in store for us if Chrome hadn’t come around.

I might be remembering the timeline wrong, but I was perfectly happy using Firefox when I first heard of Chrome. When I switched from Firefox to Chrome I was very impressed with the improvements in design, performance, and greater set of useful features. Definitely some steps in the right direction, but I believe we had already been saved from IE. These days there are many browsers to choose from (though most seem to be built on Chromium, which we wouldn't have without Chrome) and the competition is fun to spectate.

The big improvement for me that Firefox had over IE was tabs, though I'm sure there were many other UX improvements that my young mind didn't recognize or hold onto.

Your timeline is correct. But we all accepted that by switching to Chrome we were sending our entire browsing history to the biggest advertising giant to ever exist.

I feel like Firefox fumbled a bit in the early days of Chrome that many people switched over to Chrome.

I would argue that Opera were better than Chrome feature-wise.

The only interesting thing Chrome added was process per tab, which isn't particularly interesting. Firefox had at least 25% market share in 2010.

There was a recent post on HN where it was tangentially mentioned that Chrome has 3.1 billion users! There can't be much software in the world with that kind of reach. I guess stuff like curl, but certainly not end user software.

Not user facing, but there are estimated to be over a trillion SQLite databases in use

https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

Whatever Cisco IOS services comprise the networking stack of core backbone routers are effectively used by every single user that connects to the Internet. That's every human user but also all of the devices that connect without needing a user, which is probably a much greater number than the entire human population of the planet.

cough libc.so..

I only use it when some crappy site is only tested in Chrome and fails to run in Firefox. 10 years ago, I had to use Internet Explorer sometimes for the same reason.

What other software would appear in the top 100? I'd guess curl, the major C compilers, the major OS kernels, Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat to name a few.

I'd guess Firefox would make the list too, despite having a much lower install base than Chrome.

If you include hosted services, then I guess the major ones like Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. I guess email providers too: Gmail and Hotmail at least.

Nginx, Java jdk/jre

If mobile counts; Safari, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok?

No, but you could argue it's among the most used pieces of software in the world. That's a great distinction. Chrome is entirely replaceable.

I'd say the most important software is Excel.

No, that's the most abused software in the world. Poor lil' Excel forced to do things it really never should.

The same could be said for the browser

I mean, I don't think students are forced to run an operating system in Excel... (yet?) ;)

The browser is certainly being tasked as an operating system to run “web apps”

I mean.. For many many humans, the Internet is Facebook running on a mobile device. Also, do they use Chrome in China?

So I don't know about vast majority.

Definitely one of the most reliable pieces of software that I use though, no doubt about that.

> Also, do they use Chrome in China?

yes https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3103747/google-chro...

Nah, that was gcc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com