Chrome team co-founder/engineer/etc. here. Glad you found it useful! Some components like our net stack are particularly cleanly factored. Others have more room for improvement.
I would say that at the beginning of the project (2006-2008) we didn't have so much of a focus on platform design, just on shipping a browser as quickly as possible. Some of the abstractions from that era haven't stood the test of time as the project has scaled to many platforms, features etc.
Over the course of time we've had various refactoring projects to try and pay down some of the technical debt. The first major one was the "content refactor" from 2011. This led to the separation of the multi-process browser shell from the UI layer, which has allowed for other chromium-derived browser apps to emerge.
Today, we've observed that even this layer is a bit too complicated, so we're running more projects to try and modularize it a bit more. My mental model is that the browser is kind of like a set of system services for an ephemeral app runtime, and it's good to imagine what the APIs & separation between those things should be. To aid this we've developed a new suite of IPC tools which are way more useful than the original stuff we have used for much of the lifetime of Chrome.
Anyway this kind of thing requires an ongoing investment and a set of people who thrive on the art of API design and in grungy, challenging refactoring work. I probably have many more thoughts on this topic but this'll do for right now :-)
I would say that at the beginning of the project (2006-2008) we didn't have so much of a focus on platform design, just on shipping a browser as quickly as possible. Some of the abstractions from that era haven't stood the test of time as the project has scaled to many platforms, features etc.
Over the course of time we've had various refactoring projects to try and pay down some of the technical debt. The first major one was the "content refactor" from 2011. This led to the separation of the multi-process browser shell from the UI layer, which has allowed for other chromium-derived browser apps to emerge.
Today, we've observed that even this layer is a bit too complicated, so we're running more projects to try and modularize it a bit more. My mental model is that the browser is kind of like a set of system services for an ephemeral app runtime, and it's good to imagine what the APIs & separation between those things should be. To aid this we've developed a new suite of IPC tools which are way more useful than the original stuff we have used for much of the lifetime of Chrome.
Anyway this kind of thing requires an ongoing investment and a set of people who thrive on the art of API design and in grungy, challenging refactoring work. I probably have many more thoughts on this topic but this'll do for right now :-)