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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

> Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail

What about Chrome? And Chromebooks?

Sorry if this was a joke and I didn't spot it. Chrome was based on WebKit which was itself based on KHTML if memory serves. Chromebooks are based on a version of that outside engine running on top of Linux which they also didn't create.

It's not a joke. Just because they didn't write everything from scratch (Chromebooks also are made with hard disks that Google didn't create from directly mining raw materials and performing all intermediate manufacturing stages) doesn't mean they haven't released successful products that they didn't just buy in.

They used the KDE-derived HTML renderer, sure, but they wrote the whole Javascript runtime from scratch, which was what gave it the speed they used as a selling point.

Chrome as a project was still a Google thing even if they used Konqueror's rendering library.

The process model was the novel selling point at the time from my memory [1].

[1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

The faster javascript runtime was what made it a success IMO.

The leveraging their search monopoly to push it and paying other software to sneak it into installs is what made it a success.

Nah. Safari did plenty of monopoly abuse and sneaking into installs, but still never got big on Windows. At some point the user experience does matter.

Webkit is not a browser.

If you have a Mac you can download the Webkit browser here: https://webkit.org/downloads/

Which uses the WebKit engine and is kindof a showcase for Safari, granted, but it still exists as distinct browser under that name.

Chromebooks are worse version of the netbooks from 2008, which ran an actual desktop OS. Chromebooks are OLPCs for the rich world, designed with vendor lock-in built in. They eventually end up at discount wholesale lots if not landfills because how quickly they go obsolete.

mmm, WebKit?

Chromium browsers do use WebKit

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/display...

That’s extremely outdated. There’s very little WebKit code remaining in Chromium today.

Ahh yep you’re right. Thanks

It was a fork from the beginning and it is blink engine for 10 years.

I laughed out loud for this one

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