
Google claims they made Chrome "from scratch" (Japanese ad campaign) - kazuya
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/ja/landing_ch_yt.html?hl=ja&hl=ja&brand=CHPN
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rriepe
....and?

Translation issues aside, they did make it from scratch. Sorta. It's hard to
point to any software written in the past two decades and say it was made
"from scratch."

I guess it really depends on what you define as an ingredient. But I'm gonna
say this is okay.

~~~
rimantas
Yup, rendering engine in the browser is a minor ingredient, right?

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delackner
ゼロからdefinitely means "we did everything ourselves" aka from scratch. They've
been running ads on the little video-panels on at least some of the subway
trains in Tokyo recently, pushing the idea that Chrome makes your browsing
experience super fast. I'll leave the judgement of whether this is
intentionally deceptive or an innocent marketing goof to you.

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gcr
Sure, they used webkit, but they made most everything on top of that
themselves. What's the issue?

~~~
ori_b
Well, the stuff around webkit is kind of secondary, for the most part

~~~
pyre
When Chrome came out everyone was excited about how each tab was a separate
process, and how _fast_ the JavaScript was compared to Firefox/IE/Safari.
Apparently none of that matters anymore? It's all just 'boilerplate?'

~~~
rimantas
So the main ingredient in the browser: rendering engine does not matter enough
and you can claim making your browser yourself if you did everything around
it? Cool, I can code my own browser from scratch in about an hour, just drop
in WebView and add some controls.

~~~
pyre
From the comments that some people are making here you would have to think
that the content of the Chrome binary was:

    
    
      #!/bin/sh
      exec webkit
    

Which is not the truth. If you're going to rail against Google's claims, then
go ahead, but don't start making up crap and/or _under_ -estimating the amount
of work that they did just because you think that it makes your argument look
more appealing.

~~~
rimantas
Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into Webkit
development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor compared to
everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we made everything from
scratch" makes sense.

I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components was not
developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".

~~~
pyre

      > Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into
      > Webkit development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor
      > compared to everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we
      > made everything from scratch" makes sense.
      >
      > I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components
      > was not developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".
    

You fail to understand my comment. I was commenting on people claiming that
the non-WebKit parts of Chrome are (effectively) boilerplate. The difference
between claiming that Chrome is 95% WebKit, 5% Google code and a reality of
(probably something like) 70% WebKit, 30% Google code is meaningful. Maybe not
meaningful when talking about 'everything from scratch,' but let's not lower
ourselves by resorting to overstatements just because it makes us feel better
when we are ranting against something, no?

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kevinpet
If Chrome is "from scratch", then I'm having trouble understanding what making
something not from scratch is. It's got to contrast with something to have any
meaning.

Where to draw the line?

1 Tool written as an Excel spreadsheet. 2 Custom IDE built on Eclipse. 3 Web
browser using someone else's rendering engine. 4 Banshee music player running
on Mono. 5 Pure native app calling only operating system supplied libraries.

But I suppose you could also read it in the sense of "from a blank slate". It
seems to make more sense this way.

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InclinedPlane
If someone claims they made a video game "from scratch" should we bust them
for not having written opengl/directx?

~~~
kazuya
Webkit is the primary and integral part of Chrome, isn't it? At least being
Webkit-based is one of its defining features.

Likened to video games, it is sorta well done MOD based on a great game. I
don't call it "from scratch".

~~~
InclinedPlane
RDBMS functionality is a primary and integral part of almost all web
applications, could any web app that uses a database back-end be said to be
"written from scratch" then?

Was Facebook written from scratch? The amount of work that went into creating
Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Memcache, the x86-64 instruction set, etc. is
almost certainly vastly greater than the work that has gone into creating
Facebook.

When I tell somebody I made bread "from scratch" I don't mean that I coded the
DNA sequences for wheat in my spare time and then planted, grew, and harvested
the wheat myself, nor that I ground the wheat into flour. Nor that I grew,
harvested, and processed sugar cane myself. Etc. You have to draw the line
somewhere.

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kazuya
Translated to English:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/ja/landing_ch_yt.html%3Fhl%3Dja%26banner%3Dyt%26brand%3DCHPN%26variation%3Dimpressheadtext%26hl%3Dja&act=url)

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adamdecaf
I don't know Japanese, but does that string really translate to the equivalent
of "from scratch"? I know that Google Translate has had issues.

Also, what does that phrase mean in the context of Japanese? Does "from
scratch" in Japanese mean what it does in English?

~~~
kazuya
Yes, the Japanese headline expression simply but strongly suggests Google made
everything, including WebKit, SQLite etc.

~~~
codefisher
I guess they mean they made everything that the user is aware of. Uses don't
see, or even need to know about WebKit or SQLite.

But since when was advertising honest?

~~~
rimantas
Without WebKit users would not see any web pages. Kind of lame behavior for
the web browser.

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yoshiks
"Google built chrome, a new web browser from scratch", or "It is not just a
usual (IE), try this google's _new_ chrome browser", which context do you
prefer, esp when they put 'what is opensource?' column in detailed page?

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vsync
Does Japan have laws about false advertising? How about plagiarism? At the
very least Google should be made to feel shame and lose face, something
significant there.

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kazuya
Hmm, Google seems to have removed "from scratch" part.

