Contrary to many, I'm profoundly concerned about the culture around Chrome development, and the attitude here is indicative of that. There really is a belief by

Contrary to many, I'm profoundly concerned about the culture around Chrome development, and the attitude here is indicative of that. There really is a belief by those that work on it, or have worked on it, that it's much better than it really is, when what actually happened was it was much better than the competition at launch, but now there isn't much between them at all. This notion that Chrome is decent on mobile is still absolutely bizarre. The more long term concern is the way it's creating a sort of development priesthood. You have the chosen few that are making decisions and developing the platform largely in secret and pushing the code out to mere mortals from on high. This wouldn't be so bad, except the decisions are not made in the interest of the mortals, but of the priesthood and the strategic interest of their Googly God, and they exhibit a level of contempt for the mortals by disallowing them direct access to things such as the components so lauded here. In an ideal world most of what's mentioned should not be in the C++ layer, but in JS, except the hooks to provide that are simply never going to be exposed (at least in the near term because of the JS performance it would be technically dubious), leading to this them and us situation where they get to develop all the low level stuff, and no one else does, especially if any patches would conflict with the interest of their lord and master. They simply aren't dogfooding their entire development stack. Mozilla, for all their flaws, do actually engage the rest of the world in what they're doing, and early Java, while slow, did have a relatively small JVM with an enormous class library which was mostly written in Java itself. You could argue Sun's error was to Swing too far in the other direction by insisting on being all Java where at the time it really should not have been. So yes, sadly I've come to view many Chrome devs as smug self serving slightly delusional types persistently confused that the masses don't acknowledge their brilliance, and this piece is evangelism to try and persuade us of this. The truly scary part of this is they just might be right to have this point of view in order to prevent what happened to Android where groups outside succeeded in nullifying many of the expected advantages of a standard open mobile platform, and I suspect it's this which has led to their open but closed approach to things.