I think there's a strong argument to be made that modern web browsers are a good deal more complex than operating systems -- or at least most kernels.

It all depends on how you draw your Venn diagrams, I suppose. Is Chrome a massively complex browser, or is it some window dressing and bookmark syncing sitting on top of Chromium, that itself is really just a simple UI around the Blink rendering engine. GNU/Chrome, anybody?

Tbh I kind of see the whole chrome/chromium/blink stack as a single team at Google.

ChromeOS makes those delineations pretty clear.

Maybe engineers might be enamoured by it. Whatever.

On my GFs computer Chrome starts in about 7 minutes after fresh boot, no other programs running, yet. From a fricking Samsung SSD, 8GiB RAM. All it has to do is show some fake tabs and render a single page content.

Tell about its quality to my GF. She's used to it, but some of these days, I'll check the DNS logs, to see if it's really loading all the 1000 tabs (she keeps open at once), for 0 reason whatsoever, or if it's just that slow to start one page.

> On my GFs computer Chrome starts in about 7 minutes after fresh boot, no other programs running, yet.

There is something wrong with your GF’s computer. I have no idea what but a seven minute start time is absolutely atypical.

They mentioned 1000 tabs which may go some way towards explaining it. If that's not how you're supposed to use Chrome (I'd understand if it wasn't) then I'd imagine some kind of notification to the user would be helpful. Something like: "Chrome may be a little slow, you have 1000 tabs open" including perhaps a table suggesting tabs that could be closed (i.e. if she's opened https://bbc.co.uk/news in 20 different tabs that were last accessed a month ago) and an easy mechanism to quickly do so.

I actually know of quite a few people who use browsers this way, so it may not be a terrible idea to have something like this.

The computer is fine, judging by Firefox starting resonably fast with very many tabs to restore for her on that computer.

Also the same chrome profile starts very fast when she uses the "private browsing mode" which doesn't restore any tabs. So it really just seems like chrome having perf issues with tab restore with many tabs.

Maybe it’s extensions.

But anyway the point still stands: an outlier user with 1000 tabs open had a slow startup time doesn’t mean Chrome is horribly engineered. If it isn’t an extensions issue then it’s a minor bug.

Chrome wasn't built for 1000 tabs. You need firefox for that.