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My pet theory is that Google actually developed chrome as a web crawler and that consumer release was to ensure that Google would always be able to crawl pages

My pet theory is that Google actually developed chrome as a web crawler and that consumer release was to ensure that Google would always be able to crawl pages (since sites would always want to work properly with chrome) It also explains why they effectively killed flash and Java applets. They were competing technologies that weren't owned by Google and not crawlable. If they would have taken off, Google's position as top search engine could have been in danger

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Gigablah 10y ago
And here I was thinking that it was Apple and the iPhone that effectively killed Flash. Silly me.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  They disliked flash for different reasons. Google for search and apple because flash games were too powerful, jobs wanted those games turned into iPhone apps. The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well. They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime. Apple may have fired first on flash but google recently disabled all NPAPI plugins in chrome as well. The reason... "Security". I guess code not made by Google isn't secure enough to be used on the internet?
  - morganvachon 10y ago
    I modded you up, not because I agree with everything you wrote, but because I want people to post counterpoints instead of brigading you. I think you're mistaken about Google not being able to index Flash; they've had that capability for about eight years to my knowledge. I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
      Thanks, I might not be right about any of it but saying bad things about apple and google, or both at the same time :) tends to result in downvotes. As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.
  - scarface74 10y ago
    Well let's remember that while Adobe claimed that they could have gotten Flash to run on an original iPhone in 2007, that when Flash finally came to Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1 gig of RAM. The first iPhone had a 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. it wasn't until 2012 that the first iPhone had 1Ghz+ processor. The very reason that Apple could get away with slower processors was because Apple was dependent on slower more processor intensive VM solutions like Java and Flash.
    - frivoal 10y ago
      I was maintaining a port of the Opera browser for Japanese feature phones in 2007. We supported flash in 11Mb of RAM: 6 for the browser, 5 for flash. That included the screen buffer IIRC. We ran regular desktop web sites under these conditions just fine (with 2007 expectations regarding interop). The experience may not have been great, but that was much more an issue of tiny screens without touch support than anything else. Had Apple wanted to, they would absolutely have been able to support flash on the iPhone. We could on much worse hardware. Not doing so was about controlling the platform, not about technical limitations. http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-delivers-the-web-on-kddi-s-2007-summer-series http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-del...
      - scarface74 10y ago
        That was Flash Light not real Flash. If Adobe could get full fledged Flash running in a 128Mb/400Mhz first generation iPhone then why couldn't they get it running on similarly equipped Android devices when they had the opportunity?
        thesandlord 10y ago
        You can run real Flash Player 9 on a Nokia N800/N810, which had the exact same specs (128Mb/400Mhz). It ran Debian Linux with a Firefox based browser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    This is ridiculous. Flash is a hack on a cludge, 20+ years of legacy code, fiddling with raw chunks of memory for speed and with no type system enforcement. You couldn't do animation or FMV with javascript in the past, these were features only recently supported by browser or standards. The only spec for flash is the implementation. Google went to significant efforts to sandbox it, but that still caused problems, not least with additional complexity. As for this idea that NPAPI should continue to live... Yes "security" is a problem with NPAPI. As for Google fixing Java... You may have heard of Oracle? And the fact that they are .... not nice?
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    >They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime. Yup, Google should: 1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash). 2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target. or Get everyone to use an open, standardized tech (HTML5/js). Can you give me one reason Google should prop up Flash?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    >The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce Security wasn't a farce at all. "Flash is a big hole" (which is true) translates to "Chrome is a big hole".
teddyh 10y ago
If that was true, you would think they would have responded better to the threat of Facebook than with Google+ and their distasteful pushing of it on all their platforms. What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine. Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  The web closing off is very bad for Google but I'm rooting for them to try stem the trend since it's also bad for users. Putting walled gardens around large portions of the net will inevitably result in endless mergers and an eventual "website fee" that users pay to one of three highly entrenched monopolies that control all the content. It will be back to the cable TV days in no time
icebraining 10y ago
Nope, Googlebot has been able to crawl Flash for almost a decade: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...
- Girlang 10y ago
  and Chrome supports Flash out of the box!
ebbv 10y ago
Google did not kill Flash. Chrome came bundled with Flash already installed. Apple made the biggest push to kill Flash and once support for HTML5 video was solid and widespread the main use case for Flash was gone. Java applets just always sucked and only masochists/sadists ever used them.
- camus2 10y ago
  Adobe killed Flash itself, not Apple, not Chrome,not anti-flash troll X or Z on the internet.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    You're arguing from a different definition under which nobody but Adobe ever had the possibility to "kill" flash. I doubt there's much disagreement that Apple's refusal of flash on iOS was the most significant factor in its demise. Without it, Adobe would to this day happily rake in the cash. It's also a good reminder of the positive influence Apple has often had. Remember that "no flash" was the "no Esc" of its time, and that they had to go all-out to defend it (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). 6 years later, it stands as one of the rare cases where a proprietary technology was replaced by an open standard.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      I read the comment as implying that Adobe killed flash by releasing it as a steaming pile of insecure resource-hogging shit, rather than as a secure, efficient plugin. If Flash didn't kill your battery and expose you to new security vulnerabilities every few weeks, it likely would have continued to this day.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Eventually, they pulled the lever, yes. But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap. If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...
jamiesonbecker 10y ago
Steve Jobs killed Flash by refusing to put it in the iPhone.. Google nailed down the coffin. (And we owe both our eternal gratitude)
heipei 10y ago
I'm using Google Chrome in an instrumented fashion on https://urlscan.io/ https://urlscan.io/ and I've always thought that using Chrome that way would make a pretty good crawler. Maybe this is me being naive, but it's certainly not surprising that crawlers do execute JavaScript at this point in time.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Gigablah 10y ago

And here I was thinking that it was Apple and the iPhone that effectively killed Flash. Silly me.

nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
They disliked flash for different reasons. Google for search and apple because flash games were too powerful, jobs wanted those games turned into iPhone apps. The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well. They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime. Apple may have fired first on flash but google recently disabled all NPAPI plugins in chrome as well. The reason... "Security". I guess code not made by Google isn't secure enough to be used on the internet?
- morganvachon 10y ago
  I modded you up, not because I agree with everything you wrote, but because I want people to post counterpoints instead of brigading you. I think you're mistaken about Google not being able to index Flash; they've had that capability for about eight years to my knowledge. I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
    Thanks, I might not be right about any of it but saying bad things about apple and google, or both at the same time :) tends to result in downvotes. As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.
- scarface74 10y ago
  Well let's remember that while Adobe claimed that they could have gotten Flash to run on an original iPhone in 2007, that when Flash finally came to Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1 gig of RAM. The first iPhone had a 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. it wasn't until 2012 that the first iPhone had 1Ghz+ processor. The very reason that Apple could get away with slower processors was because Apple was dependent on slower more processor intensive VM solutions like Java and Flash.
  - frivoal 10y ago
    I was maintaining a port of the Opera browser for Japanese feature phones in 2007. We supported flash in 11Mb of RAM: 6 for the browser, 5 for flash. That included the screen buffer IIRC. We ran regular desktop web sites under these conditions just fine (with 2007 expectations regarding interop). The experience may not have been great, but that was much more an issue of tiny screens without touch support than anything else. Had Apple wanted to, they would absolutely have been able to support flash on the iPhone. We could on much worse hardware. Not doing so was about controlling the platform, not about technical limitations. http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-delivers-the-web-on-kddi-s-2007-summer-series http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-del...
    - scarface74 10y ago
      That was Flash Light not real Flash. If Adobe could get full fledged Flash running in a 128Mb/400Mhz first generation iPhone then why couldn't they get it running on similarly equipped Android devices when they had the opportunity?
      - thesandlord 10y ago
        You can run real Flash Player 9 on a Nokia N800/N810, which had the exact same specs (128Mb/400Mhz). It ran Debian Linux with a Firefox based browser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- angry_octet 10y ago
  This is ridiculous. Flash is a hack on a cludge, 20+ years of legacy code, fiddling with raw chunks of memory for speed and with no type system enforcement. You couldn't do animation or FMV with javascript in the past, these were features only recently supported by browser or standards. The only spec for flash is the implementation. Google went to significant efforts to sandbox it, but that still caused problems, not least with additional complexity. As for this idea that NPAPI should continue to live... Yes "security" is a problem with NPAPI. As for Google fixing Java... You may have heard of Oracle? And the fact that they are .... not nice?
- dispose13432 10y ago
  >They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime. Yup, Google should: 1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash). 2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target. or Get everyone to use an open, standardized tech (HTML5/js). Can you give me one reason Google should prop up Flash?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  >The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce Security wasn't a farce at all. "Flash is a big hole" (which is true) translates to "Chrome is a big hole".

teddyh 10y ago

If that was true, you would think they would have responded better to the threat of Facebook than with Google+ and their distasteful pushing of it on all their platforms. What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine. Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.

nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
The web closing off is very bad for Google but I'm rooting for them to try stem the trend since it's also bad for users. Putting walled gardens around large portions of the net will inevitably result in endless mergers and an eventual "website fee" that users pay to one of three highly entrenched monopolies that control all the content. It will be back to the cable TV days in no time

icebraining 10y ago

Nope, Googlebot has been able to crawl Flash for almost a decade: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...

Girlang 10y ago
and Chrome supports Flash out of the box!

ebbv 10y ago

Google did not kill Flash. Chrome came bundled with Flash already installed. Apple made the biggest push to kill Flash and once support for HTML5 video was solid and widespread the main use case for Flash was gone. Java applets just always sucked and only masochists/sadists ever used them.

camus2 10y ago
Adobe killed Flash itself, not Apple, not Chrome,not anti-flash troll X or Z on the internet.
- matt4077 10y ago
  You're arguing from a different definition under which nobody but Adobe ever had the possibility to "kill" flash. I doubt there's much disagreement that Apple's refusal of flash on iOS was the most significant factor in its demise. Without it, Adobe would to this day happily rake in the cash. It's also a good reminder of the positive influence Apple has often had. Remember that "no flash" was the "no Esc" of its time, and that they had to go all-out to defend it (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). 6 years later, it stands as one of the rare cases where a proprietary technology was replaced by an open standard.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    I read the comment as implying that Adobe killed flash by releasing it as a steaming pile of insecure resource-hogging shit, rather than as a secure, efficient plugin. If Flash didn't kill your battery and expose you to new security vulnerabilities every few weeks, it likely would have continued to this day.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Eventually, they pulled the lever, yes. But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap. If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...

jamiesonbecker 10y ago

Steve Jobs killed Flash by refusing to put it in the iPhone.. Google nailed down the coffin. (And we owe both our eternal gratitude)

heipei 10y ago

I'm using Google Chrome in an instrumented fashion on https://urlscan.io/ https://urlscan.io/ and I've always thought that using Chrome that way would make a pretty good crawler. Maybe this is me being naive, but it's certainly not surprising that crawlers do execute JavaScript at this point in time.