5 ms·

> I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome. Most people don't realize WHY google started to build their own we

> I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome. Most people don't realize WHY google started to build their own web browser in the first place. It was actually because of google docs. Google wanted to dominate the office software sector, and Microsoft didn't let them on Windows. Therefore Google had to change the platform - to the web. Regarding ad networks: google analytics is used among around 84.1% of websites. If that is not a monopoly, then I don't know what is. The rest is like a couple of pedestrians on the street that don't have a car already. I mean, you cannot justify that this should be allowed. Not a single country on the planet should have access to THAT much data, and much less a single company without any moral obligations because they don't even pay taxes in the countries they are operating in.

GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
What was the action that prevented a Google-docs-on-windows?
- wiredearp 6y ago
  Internet Explorer.
  - lstamour 6y ago
    They could have contributed to Firefox... more than just monetarily, I mean. They used their dominant position in search etc to push Chrome out to the masses... They had, in fact, previously pushed Firefox. I remember cheering at this point: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-google-homepage/3333/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-googl...
    - dfabulich 6y ago
      Firefox's architecture at the time was years behind WebKit. People forget how much faster and better Chrome was when it launched in 2008. Google was able to build Chrome in-house faster and at lower cost than it would have been to rewrite Firefox from scratch under Mozilla governance. They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
      - Yoric 6y ago
        No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation. The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier. > They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox). Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.
        jasode 6y ago
        >No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. Chrome when released on September 2008 had the faster Javascript v8 engine. (Built by Lars Bak team in Denmark.) The improved performance was very noticeable on js heavy websites like Google Maps when scrolling the map and zooming in and out. A paper[1] showing Chrome winning on various performance benchmarks matches my recollection of performance differences. Also, Chrome's per-process isolation for each tab also made it more stable when dealing with buggy websites (bad javascript code leaking memory). Firefox would crash more often. The tradeoff was that Chrome used a lot more RAM than Firefox. [I didn't downvote your comment.] [1] https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf
        cromwellian 6y ago
        This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not have made it easier for Google to do code drops upstream. In fact, the slower pace of upstreaming into WebKit is one of the reasons why Blink was forked off (years later)
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > They could have contributed to Firefox... Actually I suspect that one of the major motivations was that to have a seat at the table of bodies like the W3C and CA/Browser Forum you had to be the party responsible for a browser. Merely having some of your employees contribute to Mozilla's browser wouldn't be enough. It also meant that Google could try out new experimental technologies in their own browser which Mozilla might have different opinions on: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
omegabravo 6y ago
Since Google's delivery platform has been the web for over a decade, it was paramount to protect their revenue. Consider if the world moved to first party apps (ie, news app, ebay app, amazon app) for _everything_, Google would lose their stranglehold. It's in Google's best interest to make the web be as rich and engaging as mobile apps. Google Chrome increased the expected performance of browsers substantially after it was released. Their ad delivery network utterly eclipses all other revenue last time I checked.

GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago

What was the action that prevented a Google-docs-on-windows?

wiredearp 6y ago
Internet Explorer.
- lstamour 6y ago
  They could have contributed to Firefox... more than just monetarily, I mean. They used their dominant position in search etc to push Chrome out to the masses... They had, in fact, previously pushed Firefox. I remember cheering at this point: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-google-homepage/3333/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-googl...
  - dfabulich 6y ago
    Firefox's architecture at the time was years behind WebKit. People forget how much faster and better Chrome was when it launched in 2008. Google was able to build Chrome in-house faster and at lower cost than it would have been to rewrite Firefox from scratch under Mozilla governance. They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
    - Yoric 6y ago
      No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation. The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier. > They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox). Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.
      - jasode 6y ago
        >No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. Chrome when released on September 2008 had the faster Javascript v8 engine. (Built by Lars Bak team in Denmark.) The improved performance was very noticeable on js heavy websites like Google Maps when scrolling the map and zooming in and out. A paper[1] showing Chrome winning on various performance benchmarks matches my recollection of performance differences. Also, Chrome's per-process isolation for each tab also made it more stable when dealing with buggy websites (bad javascript code leaking memory). Firefox would crash more often. The tradeoff was that Chrome used a lot more RAM than Firefox. [I didn't downvote your comment.] [1] https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf
      - cromwellian 6y ago
        This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not have made it easier for Google to do code drops upstream. In fact, the slower pace of upstreaming into WebKit is one of the reasons why Blink was forked off (years later)
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > They could have contributed to Firefox... Actually I suspect that one of the major motivations was that to have a seat at the table of bodies like the W3C and CA/Browser Forum you had to be the party responsible for a browser. Merely having some of your employees contribute to Mozilla's browser wouldn't be enough. It also meant that Google could try out new experimental technologies in their own browser which Mozilla might have different opinions on: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

omegabravo 6y ago

Since Google's delivery platform has been the web for over a decade, it was paramount to protect their revenue. Consider if the world moved to first party apps (ie, news app, ebay app, amazon app) for _everything_, Google would lose their stranglehold. It's in Google's best interest to make the web be as rich and engaging as mobile apps. Google Chrome increased the expected performance of browsers substantially after it was released. Their ad delivery network utterly eclipses all other revenue last time I checked.