FAQ on Leaving Google

Google Chrome seems like a success as well.

Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)

1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.

Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.

And Apple forked WebKit from KDE!

I think v8 and the multi-process model were the big differentiators of Chrome when it first launched, and how it originally got marketshare! Regardless, I think "ground-up" building isn't a great way to measure product building; after all, macOS is "just" a BSD fork, as others have pointed out Webkit was originally a KHTML fork, etc. And just about any web product runs on Linux and is effectively a wrapper around libc, which wasn't ground-up built by any modern tech co.

That’s like saying os x was just a fork of bsd

The original genius in Chrome was not the renderer built out of webkit. It was:

1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model.

Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall:

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

My guess is Google Chrome spends well over a billion dollars a year and comes up with ridiculous rules like this https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_... because Google Chrome is Google first and a web browser second.

It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.

This is an interesting point. Can anyone from the inside estimate the annual budget for Chrome? A billion sounds like a lot. That implies: 1b / 250k = 4,000 (expensive) developers. I guess at least 1,000 well-paid people are involved, so hundreds of millions sounds more likely.

Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome.

Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.

There is also advertising and cross promotion. I am also counting the opportunity cost of ads not sold because the spot went to Google Chrome.

Disclaimer: I’ve never worked at Google and have no insider information.

MacOS is not a fork of BSD but uses some of its use land. I think it’s considered a BSD because of that, but the kernel and graphics libraries are all Apple.

> Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.

Mozilla at least at one point had 1,000 and is and always was chronically underfunded. 4,000 seems about reasonable. Keep in mind it's not 4,000 engineers, it's PMs, managers, UX, Infra, there's a lot more to software development that just line engineers.

I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit.

I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.

Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.

The kernel isn't all Apple, it's a fork of the open-source Mach kernel developed at CMU (which was a replacement BSD kernel). "Ground up" just isn't real!

The graphics libraries are definitely more custom... Although in total fairness they're not entirely ground-up Apple either; Quartz was based on Display PostScript, which was acquired from NeXT, and which NeXT built in collaboration with Adobe based on Adobe's earlier work on PostScript. It's obviously true Apple's done a lot of work since then (e.g. Metal), but in that case, so has Google since forking Webkit.

Google engineers cost closer to $500K/head all in.

250k is conservative for employee cost. A staff engineer at Google can reach 1 MM total comp. And add in all the overhead a company has (real estate, free food, perks, taxes, etc)

500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number

A billion dollars is cheap considering it saves Google from having to pay Apple or Mozilla more money to stay the default search engine. Google gives Apple 10 billion a year just in traffic acquisition payments.

Quartz isn't based on DPS - CoreGraphics drawing commands are similar to PDF but the window management was always all pixel based - and IIRC DPS was almost all Adobe and NeXT didn't even have source for it.

Quartz was originally based on PDF and was marketed early on as "Display PDF" (a reference to being a more advanced version of "Display PostScript"): https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/mac...

Well, it wasn't really based on PDF to the point it stores PDFs in memory or anything. Like I said, it just has compatible drawing commands.

It's turned out that vector images aren't that performant or easy to deal with for various reasons, although they are still used in some places.