Chrome is obviously better than IE. Not just based on open source Chromium but generally easier to work with.

I use Firefox because the addons are superior but even if we traded a downright terrible browser dominating the web for a somewhat crappy browser dominating the web, it was still a good move.

Chromium is open source, not Google Chrome.

And much of the documentation about Chromium and V8 is not public.

> And much of the documentation about Chromium and V8 is not public.

Nearly all the documentation is public... Private stuff is mostly accidentally created google docs where the engineer has selected "anyone within google.com with the link" instead of "anyone with the link". Anytime I request one of those documents be opened up, it has been done within a matter of hours.

Former V8er. We moved the vast majority of V8 documentation to public sites. What is non-public is mostly design docs, proposals, strategy, experiments, etc, i.e. the inner workings of the team mechanics. The technical details of V8 are not secret in any way. They may be radically complex, but not secret.

Keeping proposals and design documents private is essentially the same as making a project "source available". It prevents people from participating in the extension of functionality and limits them to being bug fixers.

What Microsoft is doing with .NET is true open source where all proposals are being discussed in public with volunteers improving proposals and suggesting new ones.

> Keeping proposals and design documents private is essentially the same as making a project "source available".

Nah. There are plenty of contributors to V8 that are not part of Google. IBM and MIPS and ARM all contributed significantly to specific machine ports, and we had no trouble keeping them abreast of changes and plans. There are several people who have contributed from Igalia as well. And that's just the people I can think of.

It is harder to contribute to V8 than other open source projects. You have to accept a contributor agreement and use the Chromium code review tools. V8 is a big codebase and slow to build, but it's nothing like what you say.

Correct, that doesn't change the arguments that were being pushed around as defence why Chrome isn't IE.