Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.
Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
> I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
I wish browsers moved faster so that I don't have to download so many native apps. Native mobile apps are monitoring me continuously, and way more opaquely than web apps. More importantly, they can't be thwarted by plugins. As a mobile Firefox and Desktop Chrome user, I wish browsers (especially FF) moved faster.
So, no - for privacy reasons I don't agree with your view.
I'm not sure browser improvements would help here. App authors need discoverability and a sales channel. Android and iOS could provide that for web apps without wrappers, but they don't. So developers don't have any incentive to go with browsers. This is a business/social issue, not a browser tech one.
A significant number of my "native apps" on mobile are just webview wrappers. Some are really fancy and slick, but still. I think the mobile OS handling web apps in a more integrated way would help here more than making browsers more complex.
All the features that Google ships are necessary for web apps. E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/ — Note that Firefox was once on top of this development, during the days when they also had an interest in developing FirefoxOS. Those days are long gone.
As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web.
You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides.
Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much needed functionality, such as notifications. Firefox, BTW, still has unfixed bugs on Android and provides no SSB support for the desktop.
> On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser.
Re-read what I wrote. I was talking about the speed of releasing new features and APIs. They ship ~1000 new APIs a year
> Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop.
There's no such thing as PWA. It's a marketing term used extremely loosely to prove anything, and nothing. It's a random collection of 20 or so standards, and everyone choses their own favorite subset to say ah yes, this is crucial for PWA support".
> ... and see a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards
That's one way of putting it. The other perspective is that those are necessary features and that Safari and Firefox are now holding the web back. When IExplorer 6 was the most popular browser, with Firefox being the underdog, I don't remember people complaining that Firefox was implementing non-standard features.
Let's also remember that by standards, we mean W3C standards, that organization that was once deemed so slow and irrelevant that Mozilla, Apple, and Opera decided to just initiate WHATWG (back when Opera still existed and Apple still wanted a better web).
And it's understandable why because the alternative is a web centralized in closed gardens (Facebook), locked behind paywalls, or a dead web.
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I mean no disrespect, but the people advocating for a slower web progress sound just like the people advocating for degrowth, all being a bunch of nonsense that only a tiny elite minority actually wants.
JS has been moving at excellent speeds and Google has moved the web to evergreen. If anything I’d argue that without the specter of regulation then we might’ve had Dart or something new in the browser by now.
The biggest existential risk to the web is that it’s not good enough. It’s being threatened by sharp innovation in other spaces - may the Vision Pro never come down in price or improve in UX.
What do regulations have to do with Dart? You got WASM in the browser which is a much better outcome than a language even Google doesn't know what to do with.
The biggest existential risk to the web is Google themselves: it's the world's biggest advertising and user tracking company having outsized influence on where the web is headed, and moulding the web for its own profit.
I don't disagree that Google is a risk; however, note that all browser engines are right now funded by Google's Ads, yes, Firefox and Safari included. If that search deal is undone, at least Firefox is as good as dead.
And while they are "moulding the web for their own profit", at least they are interested in keeping the web alive, and I don't think anyone interested in the health of the web will like the alternatives, which are actually winning right now (closed app stores delivering native apps with spyware and unblockable ads).
By doing this, the DOJ may invalidate one business model that keeps certain FOSS projects alive — commoditized complements to proprietary products and services. You can hate Google, and still see why this will be a huge problem, especially for projects as complex as browsers are.
I, for one, do not prefer native mobile apps, I'd be happy to use web, but companies actively degrade my experience there, and shove their apps in my face because this way they can track me and serve ads.
Simpler browsers sound not good to me. It's a bit of a rallying cry on HN it feels like, often in sharper terms.
But computing is so intermediated. There's so many checks to do anything on an iPhone that isn't in the dead code your phone already runs. An Oculus has cool experiences, but we can't shape and share our own easily. There's always someone else's data center between you and your device today.
The web is largely still an experience of data centers too. But it's a neutral platform. Where we can go to any data-center we please. Where anyone can tap the amazing web platform & it's amazing APIs to build all kinds of cool experiences.
In a world where tech defines what the user wants for them, I feel so much like the web & every web platform API is stealing just a little more fire from the gods. It's promethean, giving to humanity prowess & capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.
The pace is confusing. Sometimes things happen fast. Often they are left sort of unfinished. Fast & slow, fast & slow. I'd love if there was a huge source of funding the societies of the world were putting up to help make this critical human capability, to to fund long careful slow healing and helping as well as fancy new features (es2015/esm modules in the browser tool sooo long & still has so much to fix for example). These things are hard, complicated, and we try so hard to keep going forward without causing too much unfixable undislodgesble bad. But this spirit of bravery is necessary, to keep going. Simpler isn't good. The versatility of the web is too important. There's no other viable substitutes for the capabilities being available on the web, no other paths we have to stealing fire from the gods, no other Promethean dreams. This platform is it, and we need the persistence & drive as a society to keep ourselves improving our shared interactive media form, to keep from being swallowed by the darkness that most computing brings in.
I agree. They jam everything but the kitchen sink into the damn browser these days. Chrome being so well staffed and fast moving means everyone else gets to play catch up and it's bullshit.
Google is entirely where they are because the web is a powerful capable rich interesting place, that was able to rise & grow & flourish without the typical platform gatekeepers.
In my view, Google's whole reason for making and continuing to fund Chrome have never ever changed: they want a great (and powerful, not small/retrogressive) open web. Because if the web falters, the proprietary platforms from yesterday can come back & reassert their control. Because if the web falters, information will be someplace where a Google can't index and link you to it.
Google's existence depends entirely upon the web being a good place, a place for good sites, that people want to find & go to. The couple hundred million a year Google pays engineers to make the web good is a very affordable existential hedge, upon which the entire company of rests.
A corollary to this is that attempts to tilt the web towards themselves - to take advantage o Chrome - risk poisoning the web & killing the golden goose. Which is why - imo - Google has taken web standards so seriously, and gone to such lengths to create an air of transparency around browser standards, starting the Intent to Ship process.
Linux is foundational to everyone and there isn’t an obvious alternative. What companies care about Safari vs Chrome? From the perspective of other companies, what’s wrong with Safari and Edge taking command?
> Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does.
Are you sure? Do you know how many people work on Chrome? 2,000 people contributed to Linux 6.12. only a small portion of those will be full time but it's still likely many hundred full-time-equivalent engineers.
I think so. About a decade ago I remember hearing that the chrome team had about 1000 full time engineers. I suspect the number has grown over time.
Looking at the number of lines of code, the linux kernel is just barely ahead of chromium now (39m loc vs 36m). But that doesn't include all the proprietary parts of chrome that aren't in chromium - like their binary updating system, h264 decoder, built in google account support, and so on.
That may be, but Firefox certainly doesn't, and it's not that far from Chrome in terms of feature set, particularly in terms of supported web standards, or security. So I don't feel that a smaller Chrome team would be a catastrophe for Chrome.
