Yah and that "handful" happens to be the hand picked team that used to be the Google Firefox development team. Not exactly a random group of developers hacking

Yah and that "handful" happens to be the hand picked team that used to be the Google Firefox development team. Not exactly a random group of developers hacking on their free time. These guys have been doing Browser work for a long time and knew exactly what they were getting into. Chrome is a project that is over two and a half years old. Not many would say that is an "incredibly short period of time". It is going to take another year before Linux/OS X support is stable. That is more then three years. Take a look at the Linux code. They are reworking strings, keyboard events, clipboard, window management, pretty much everything. It is like starting work on a whole new application. There is a reason why so many people buy Qt licenses (or use the lgpl version these days), cross platform isn't exactly easy. From conversations I have had with hackers: - Google acts like they are all Linux developers, but at least the Chrome team used Visual Studio and use Windows primarily. They don't seem to care about my platform so why should I care about their app? - Google ports webkit to Android and then separately to Chrome, clearly they have extra resources to burn, but not for a Linux/OS X port so it must be really low on their list. - Internally all the Linux Google devs knew about Chrome for two years, but didn't bother to help in their 20% free time. Not even to help make it compile. If all of them didn't find Chrome worth their time (and they are all really smart guys) they must know something. - Apple, the company that locks you down to their platform more then Microsoft has a cross platform browser! Opera and Firefox are on all three. Even the little Arora browser is cross platform. A new browser that wants to be big cannot have cross platform be an afterthought as it clearly was with Chrome. Chrome is cool yes, I have hacked on the code and even submitted patches to help get it compiling on Linux. It has a lot of nice things going for it design wise and it will do ok in the long run, but as it is today sitting only on Windows it is very hard to attract the early adopters, the ones who buy every new geek toy and tells all their friends about it. Once it can get past this hump it will do ok. The marketing seems to indicate that this early adopter group the very group they are trying to attract and yet the product as it is today is really for mainstream joe average users. It really is no surprise when the early adopter group trashes a product that isn't useable for them. HackerNews isn't exactly known for being a Windows hangout. There is a lot to cleanup in the Chrome source and I wouldn't be surprised if the next twelve months (minimum) was spent cleaning up all the windows specific code before they can really start on new and innovative features. They decided their technical debt would be Windows during initial development and now they are paying it. But they are a good team with smart developers. Or as I heard from someone else: Chrome is a snowball at the top of a hill. It might be not much now, but with google's cash behind it Chrome will keep on rolling down the hill and getting bigger and eventually you will have to deal with it.