> All the major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards Chromium.
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.
> And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.
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.
This is so important to look at, when we talk about this topic. I was there, 3000 years ago, when browser where kind of simple software. We could go back to that state and would loose almost nothing. All the complexity that is now in browsers was in the operating systems at that time. The millions of fronted-devs of today would just be "normal" devs three decades ago.
I know, that that will not happen. But it helps looking through all the bullshit that Google has created, where they've build and control the platform (the web with chromium), that Microsoft and Apple used to control (their oses).
FWIW i have a feeling (and it is just a feeling, not something i can confirm) that the entirety of Windows 95 was simpler than Firefox or Chrome today :-P.
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.
I think you should appreciate more how much the tens of billions of dollars Google has invested in Chrome has benefited the web and open source in general. Some examples:
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.
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.
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).
The finer point is where these tens of billions came from.
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.
Isn't webrtc broken in Chrome? Or did they finally fix that? It used to be that everyone supported Chrome's broken implementation, leaving Firefox users with the correct implementation out in the cold.
If you are referring to the standards-based "Unified Plan" vs. the Google proprietary "Plan B" for handling multiple media tracks in SDP, I believe that "Plan B" was finally phased out in 2022.
No, there isn't a need for appreciation. We all cheered at that time where Google was building a great JavaScript engine and a browser around that. But in hindsight it is clear, that Google was just running the old embrace, expand, extinguish playbook on a scale that we where unable to comprehend. We would've be just fine with Firefox, webkit and maybe Microsoft would have made Internet explorer somehow not total shit. Google captured the whole web as a market and we used the opportunity to build endless JS frameworks in top and went wild with all the VC and advertising money.
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
> No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.
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.
Is have to agree to be honest. Whoever decided to run JavaScript in the backend should be committed to a mental institution. JavaScript is a nightmare. But you can't tell a man something his paycheck depends on him not knowing.
>Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.
>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!
>There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.
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.
Of all the things you've mentioned, the only one that genuinely stands out to me as a positive contribution from Google—something that wouldn’t have happened had Chrome never existed—is the codec situation.
They leveraged their scale and influence for good in that instance.
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.
> That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation
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.
That antitrust case is what made Microsoft stop developing their browser.
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 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.