Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by esbwhat 5043 days ago
Google does have a conflict of interest. The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them.

People love google, but it's a for-profit company, not a foundation. Chrome would not be the first abandoned project, either. Anything can happen. Competition is good.
2 comments
evilduck 5042 days ago
Google may be motivated to attempt things like Dart and NaCl which help drive forward their own products first and foremost, but they have a consistent reputation of making their web-advancing client-side technologies open source too (Dart, NaCl, WebM, SPDY, Chromium, Webkit, etc are all open source). They also have Mozilla, Opera and Apple pushing forwards as well (though I'd argue that IE9/10 isn't putting much competitive pressure on anyone).

If Chrome is abandoned by Google you're free to fork Chromium, acquire licenses for it's restricted plugins and it'll only slow the web's march forward, not actively hinder it. It's entirely possible for another group to carry the Chromium torch, and Google/Chrome has never yet intentionally damaged the quality of standards-compliant competing web products (though they don't offer quirks-mode fixes for crap tailored only to IE).

link
pcwalton 5042 days ago
IE9 and IE10 certainly are putting competitive pressure on others (including Mozilla, my employer). For example, at the time of release IE9's vector graphics performance was far ahead (we're talking on the order of 5x) of any other browser, including Chrome and Firefox, and IE also led the way with background compilation of JavaScript (a very important feature, arguably more important to users than raw JS performance).
link
wickedchicken 5042 days ago
> The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them.

Google operates a search engine, meaning most of the time it points people to other websites. Many of these sites are not under Google's control, but many of them run AdSense. The more pages you visit, the more ads you see. If the internet gets generally faster, Google sites or not, that works in their favor.

link