And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
Chromium was simply a continuation of innovation that had started before Google even existed.
But in parallel it was Firefox that broke the Internet Explorer monopoly that made 3rd party browsers technically possible in the first place.
But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t from anti trust actions that prevented MS from doing the stuff they’re doing now (now that the antitrust probationary period is over) such as forcing their browser to be the default browser.
If it wasn’t for antitrust action against MS they would have taken these actions when they were much stronger and the other browsers were not as advanced and Chrome would likely have been nowhere to be seen.
Anyways, you’re wrong even with the idea that chromium has innovated the most. Most of the ideas that Chrome has today were implemented in other smaller browsers such as Opera well before Chrome ever integrated them.
I suspect if Chrome were to disappear tomorrow, browser technology would be far more innovative 2 years from now than it will be with Chrome as the dominant browser.
Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
All of it was ad money, and a lot of these innovations were also targeted at better dealing with ads (Flash died because of how taxing it was, mobile browsers just couldn't do it. JavaScript perf allowed these ads to come back full force)
The net balance of how much web technology advanced vs how much ad ecosystems developed is pretty near 0 to me, if not slightly negative.
That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.
Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.
> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.
Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.
> V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.
No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.
That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
> SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.
It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.
And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!
You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.
Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.
> And no more zoom meetings
Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
>Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.
Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.
And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.
>> And no more zoom meetings
>Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.
Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on zoom? ;)
> Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.
They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.
Well that's just biased. Saying application is bloated (which is often not true) is the result of an entire ecosystem, has something to do with an interpreter, is ridiculous. Any qualified software engineer can see the fault in such a comment. You probably know that as well.
So I consider your comment trolling.
Don‘t be evil.
At some point the stopped improving the browser for the users and changed to improving the browser for Google.
That’s what mattered.
Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.
There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.
Seems they don’t read to the end.
Great we have fifty bloated front-end frameworks powered by ten bloated back-ends written by novice devs who need to use left-pad dependencies
Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.
Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.
Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).
It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).
and paved way for Google monopoly. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if devices don't implement AV1 in hardware.
They are now no different to Microsoft with Windows Media.
Chrome would still have won because it was force pushed by google.com, every google service, every google software nad large part of 3rd party software had it as bundled (checked by default) install.
And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.
Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
Which incidentally also made it much more complex to implement, giving Google control over the web.
By LOC: Windows 95 is estimated to have 10-15 million LOC, Chrome 30-40 million.
By binary size: Windows 95 took about 50 MB, Chrome 200-300 MB.
By architecture design: the codebase of Windows 95 is fairly shallow and monolithic, while Chrome is very modular (think V8, Blink, WASM, sandboxes...) and uses other dependencies.
It's like saying that a modern car is hitting more than a model T from 100 years ago.
Google crippled ad blockers on their platform and ads are getting through with increasing frequency.
Stuff that really should be working on my browser or did before is now getting blocked because I apparently should be using a webkit browser. One example is my credit card is getting rejected more and more often lately. But things work fine when I open up Chrome and make a payment.
What things do I want improved? Popups/popunders still happen sometimes. There's still no real solution to block those annoying mailing list popovers either. The dominance of Chrome seems to have frozen the internet in time around 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed between then and now, while before there always seemed to be a feature to look forward to. I guess the last big thing was web assembly, and even that was released nearly a decade ago.
It’s all been downhill from there.
What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.
On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.
To me, it's been downhill pretty much before it got started. I'm always feeling "behind" having missed the fun at any stage.
In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.
So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.
I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're basing that off.
00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.
10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.
Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.
But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
Sigh, yes, even keeping copy/paste working is problematic for the last several years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886954
Luckily the top comment in that thread says "this is the process working" so I guess we're good
they should never be disabled. If I want to copy the letters from the OK/Cancel buttons—which you also tried to eliminate—or the keyboard keycaps you are displaying, I should be able to; what's it to you what I want to do?
How much do you love it when you are using a PDF of a scanned ancient text or a cellphone snapshot you just took of a streetsign, and your device lets you copy the text? This is what computers are for, to be our servants, not to be Google's overseer.
step 1: HN, make article titles selectable. wtf!?
But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.
I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.
But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.
That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...
That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks.
Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari.
It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.
But now, we're stagnating again. So maybe drying up those funds will be part of the cure.
Yes, it definitely took the big slap from Apple to kill Flash once and for all.
It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.
The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.
I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?
It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.
I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
Just because an entity happen to output also some positive social impact doesn't mean its current global influence on society is overall extremely toxic. Pablo Escobar is classic example.
I would call it one of the most important innovations of the last 20 years. Name another true write-once-run-anywhere universal VM that is installed in billions of consumer devices and costs nothing. It doesn't exist. The only way the entire modern software ecosystem is even possible is because of the web as a platform. Literally everything else is a non-portable closed proprietary stack.
Java certainly meets your criteria and exists. But much like the person you are replying to, I consider the "modern software ecosystem" to be utter garbage. Web browsers are just a terrible user experience for applications compared to the desktop. We have regressed greatly in user experience, not progressed.
It does not. Nothing about Java provides a sandboxed runtime environment.
the benefits have already been contributed to chrome, and is easily available even if funding is cut today.
However, google didn't give chrome and their money away altruistically. They wanted something back - control of the browser market, and ability to dictate certain aspects of the web. I do not believe they should have this ability. Taking away monopolistic practises with the browser market can help with this aspect.
It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
I am not suggesting that browsers would not evolve without Google. I am looking at the impact on web today. Perhaps new technologies will emerge, perhaps browser development will adopt different model or perhaps native apps will get a boost.
[1]: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
The web doesn't need standards evolving at the speed of light, it's only happening because Google's strategy with Chrome has always been to set a pace that others can't follow, not about designing things right.
Some people think innovation mostly happens in startups, but Big Corp monopolies have a unique and important role to play. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC did stuff no startup has the money for.
We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.
Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
Everything in the early 2000s was insecure and critical.
Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.
It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.
Browsers used to be one of the most critical and insecure software. All the major security enhancement in terms of isolation, sandboxing, privilege separation happened IMHO due to a Google backed browser security research. This benefitted the community because other browsers either adopted Chromium as the base or implemented similar security improvements.
I think it’s not just the browser anymore, the core building blocks like v8, blink etc. forms the foundation of modern web. It will be interesting to see the benefits of anti-monopoly laws when it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium.