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Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company stuff".

But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy.

(And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.)

It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.

> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now

This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.

In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.

> My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees.

Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.

What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.

But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one would guess they must have done some good things with it (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also understand it can't all be because the big corp brainwashed everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).

Maybe they’ve achieved this position for Chrome leveraging Google’s strength, not because Chrome’s quality? I can name a few reasons, like an aggressive marketing campaign for Chrome circa 2012 (promotion on Google search, bundling Chrome with popular apps) and sabotaging Google web apps in rivals, specially Firefox, that makes Chrome look better for Google’s users (basically everyone online).

I'm not sure anyone is calling them evil simply for making a browser. Tactics like forcing it to be pre-installed and unable to be removed on Android are somewhat evil, especially if they're part of an anti-competitive strategy.

IE6 was the browser "most of the world used" too. But really, surely, there was absolutely nothing done well in it. The only reason it was the most used browser was monopoly abuse. And while we can discuss the exact terminology of "a monopoly" and whether the Ie6 hegemony fit in there theoretically, that it came with the most used OS, really was the only reason it was popular.

With Chrome it is different. But at least a large part of its popularity comes from abused monopolies enforcing this software on people. Less than IE6 i'd say, but still a large part.

That’s not true. When IE6 launched it was definitely the fastest of its contemporary competitors. The problem with IE6 was not that it was bad at launch, but that it wasn’t touched for five years after launch, and didn’t properly disappear until 2016 or so.

Yes. And in that sense it's also similar to Chrome.

IE6 might have been the best competitor at first. But it certainly did not grow into the 9x% usage and staid there by being the best competitor. It only grew popular once MSFT started using its monopoly to push it.

It really sucked by then, compared to its competition.

While I understand your argument about IE6 which was shipped with Windows, Chrome didn't have that advantage for a long time - it's only now that Android phones and Chromebooks are shipped with it, but I don't know of a single person who does not download Chrome on their Windows Desktop too - even now when Edge is based on Chromium! Firefox has always been my primary browser (it still is, I'm typing this in Firefox), but say what you may, Chrome has taken the internet forward in many aspects. I work on an in-browser CAD tool, and I can see how vastly better Graphics performance is in Chrome when compared to Firefox for example (and it's just one example).

As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes.

However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.

The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.

This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"

large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

> Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

I'm late in cleaning up old browser tabs, so I understand if there's no reply to this in a week-old discussion. How would you support the first half of this statement? Surely, there's far more CSAM on social networks than on iMessage (assuming that's where you were alluding).

Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]:

"[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools."

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...

The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.

Has it drifted?

I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.

Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.

Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't.

The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?)

Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.

As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.

Chrome isn't using all that RAM.

The web pages you visit are.

Did it really?

Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten.

Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.

Yes, feature creep has happened in a really big way because there is an obvious profit incentive to Google if every last bit of computing happens in-browser. Glossing over the thorny topics like “my browser shouldn’t care what hardware I run it on”, the Web* set of standards hasn’t stopped ballooning since the release of chrome. WebRTC made sense. But WebUSB? WebGPU? WebAssembly? etc. etc. Each can have interesting use cases individually, but in aggregate they have become a whole second operating system filled with compromise and bloat.

It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.

When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you?

Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." - Stanisław J. Lec

That's the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still does evil as a whole.

> No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products

Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to.

That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron.

I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead.

Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.

5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.

Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned.

Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.

I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling.

But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme.

I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.

Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.

The teams running products see it as an existential threat. Google shutting down the product is closer to an investor or board member forcing a startup to shut down because it's not long term sustainable. None of the things you mentioned could be run as independent businesses successfully, at least not at the levels of funding Google was giving them prior to them being shut down.

There's no clawback for sandbagging the future, no reward for present impact of past work. The people who flock to these projects are there to score a quick promo/raise and move on to the next new thing.

I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google.

I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.

   you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.

There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar.

But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.

It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.

Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.