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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

I think you should appreciate more how much the tens of billions of dollars Google has invested in Chrome has benefited the web and open source in general. Some examples:

Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.

V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.

Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.

Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.

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> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.

Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.

Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).

It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).

Not supporting H.264 was arguably what caused the downfall of Firefox usage. Unfortunately Mozilla didn't listen.

The finer point is where these tens of billions came from.

All of it was ad money, and a lot of these innovations were also targeted at better dealing with ads (Flash died because of how taxing it was, mobile browsers just couldn't do it. JavaScript perf allowed these ads to come back full force)

The net balance of how much web technology advanced vs how much ad ecosystems developed is pretty near 0 to me, if not slightly negative.

Isn't webrtc broken in Chrome? Or did they finally fix that? It used to be that everyone supported Chrome's broken implementation, leaving Firefox users with the correct implementation out in the cold.

If you are referring to the standards-based "Unified Plan" vs. the Google proprietary "Plan B" for handling multiple media tracks in SDP, I believe that "Plan B" was finally phased out in 2022.

> VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and

and paved way for Google monopoly. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if devices don't implement AV1 in hardware.

And refuse to support JPEG-XL

They are now no different to Microsoft with Windows Media.

You raise some good points but re: codecs, I was quite unimpressed with how they handled JPEG-XL.

No, there isn't a need for appreciation. We all cheered at that time where Google was building a great JavaScript engine and a browser around that. But in hindsight it is clear, that Google was just running the old embrace, expand, extinguish playbook on a scale that we where unable to comprehend. We would've be just fine with Firefox, webkit and maybe Microsoft would have made Internet explorer somehow not total shit. Google captured the whole web as a market and we used the opportunity to build endless JS frameworks in top and went wild with all the VC and advertising money.

Let's play devil's advocate:

> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.

Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

> V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.

No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.

That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.

> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.

> SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.

It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.

>Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.

And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!

> ActiveX called

You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.

Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.

> And no more zoom meetings

Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.

>You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.

>Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.

Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.

And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.

>> And no more zoom meetings

>Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.

Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on zoom? ;)

I can read and write just fine thank you, want o chat about it on irc? :)

IRC and other simple tech are the real losers in the modern tech ecosystem.

If the problem could add reactions and replies it would enable the clients to make it more engaging like it's modern contemporaries

> > Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

> Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.

They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.

> No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated (which is often not true) is the result of an entire ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.

So I consider your comment trolling.

Is have to agree to be honest. Whoever decided to run JavaScript in the backend should be committed to a mental institution. JavaScript is a nightmare. But you can't tell a man something his paycheck depends on him not knowing.

webrtc is awful, though

And then they removed

Don‘t be evil.

At some point the stopped improving the browser for the users and changed to improving the browser for Google.

Maybe they were actually lying when they originally said "Don't be evil," and removing it was only being more truthful?

There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.

That’s what mattered.

>There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.

Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.

There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.

They never removed it.

You are right, they moved from the preface to the end.

Seems they don’t read to the end.

> V8

Great we have fifty bloated front-end frameworks powered by ten bloated back-ends written by novice devs who need to use left-pad dependencies

Of all the things you've mentioned, the only one that genuinely stands out to me as a positive contribution from Google—something that wouldn’t have happened had Chrome never existed—is the codec situation. They leveraged their scale and influence for good in that instance.

That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.

> That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation

Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.

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