I'm certainly not a Google fan-boy (read some of my other posts if you want to check, I'm very skeptical of google), but Chrome really is a great achievement and it's silly to disrespect what Google has done with Chrome considering the difficulties so many other development teams seem to be having with browsers.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them.
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made.
Not pointing any fingers (cough Microsoft cough Apple cough) but the problem that most people have with 'copying features' is when the copier tries to claim that it was their 'innovation' or that they've got some claim to fame because they 'copied it better.'
They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.
What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.
There is no browser as fast as chrome anywhere for javascript, not even safari, not by a factor of 2x. The "omnibar" in chrome is a legitimate innovation, every browser should work that way in my opinion (it's not too difficult to tell the difference between a search string and a url automatically). How many browsers implement web-sockets? Hrm, not too many. The Chrome dev team's amazing pace of development has been spent in the last year putting together a solid, full-featured browser (extension support is almost there, that's the only real lacking element), it looks like they will continue that pace into implementing state-of-the-art features (like web-sockets) before anyone else.
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
Ironic, since indiejade has been here about 10x as long as you. Perhaps if you can't stick to the issues and avoid childish flamebait like that, this isn't really the community for you.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them.
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.