| HN Mirror

Yeah but many of those things are a direct consequence of budgets. If you are willing to throw 100 incredibly well paid engineers at nothing but testing infrastructure then you can get that sort of result but it's implausible to expect a normal company to invest the same amount. Even today Microsoft couldn't match Google's investment in Chrome and simply gave up.

It's worth observing here that Chrome was not just unusual in having access to a huge budget and highly experienced senior engineers, but also in the fact that it was the passion project of Larry Page. The Chrome team could take their time, because Page simply wanted to do a browser and always had, end of story. I worked at Google at the time and I recall vividly that Page/Brin never emailed the entire company in the way most CEOs do. They appeared at TGIFs but emailing the whole firm at once? They just didn't do it. With one exception (that I can recall at least): the day Chrome launched. Not only did Page email the whole firm but he sent a short, informal and clearly ecstatic note proclaiming that Chrome was "spectacular".

Schmidt opposed the idea the entire time, so Page and Brin just hired a bunch of browser engineers behind his back and funded what was basically a black project. Schmidt later stated he was basically forced to change his mind "because it was so good". In reality he was forced to because he'd been there before and it would have been self destructive to try to cancel an already running project the company founders were so in love with.

Remember, at the time Chrome launched it:

1. Only ran on Windows.

2. Couldn't print, amongst many other missing features.

3. Had no extensions and wouldn't for quite some time.

4. Had numerous page compatibility problems with many major websites that simply didn't work at all, due to its KHTML heritage, UA sniffing etc.

5. Had a pitch so complicated and developer centric you needed an entire comic book with the developers in it to try and explain why anyone should care.

Not surprisingly given the above, it had a brief usage spike as people tried it out and its usage then collapsed to nearly nothing, taking (iirc) years to rebuild to its initial launch spike level despite being heavily pushed via the google.com homepage.

Also, Chrome was entering a market with largely stagnant competitors, unlike the IE3 team, who were (or believed they were) fighting a successful, energized, passionate company that posed an existential threat to Microsoft's business. The IE team faced time pressure. When Chrome appeared there was Safari, which didn't care about the Windows market and was there mostly as a feature tick box for Apple's operating systems. The IE team was still disbanded at that point. Firefox was an inspiration but basically funded by Google anyway, and was struggling with tech debt.

I'd say Chrome 1.0 was competently executed but in any kind of normal company, with normal goals (like usage or profit), in which the project wasn't the passion project of an invulnerable CEO, they would absolutely have had to crunch like crazy and would then have certainly been cancelled or gone bankrupt despite that, due to the near total focus on engineering over all else.

It worked, in the end. I'm writing this from Chrome after all because Safari is inexplicably buggy even though I'm using a Mac, and with time they did get to add plenty of compelling features. Also being able to outspend their competitors meant taking control of HTML5 and putting other companies in a position where all their budget is taken by trying to keep up with whatever random features they threw into the spec. But anyway, the reason the Chrome team could live normal 9-5 lives is nothing to do with senior engineering leadership. To claim otherwise seems kinda unfair on everyone building new products who does not have a time/money budget set by a near-obsessed CEO who also happens to control the google.com homepage. A good example of a team it'd be unfair to was the Android team, who also had very experienced senior engineers with OS dev experience, but whose position was far more similar to that of the IE3 team. Android's creation was typified by enormously punishing hours and huge amounts of crunch.