[IvyMike]

> There never was a good reason for Chrome to exist in the first place.

Chrome kicked off the browser performance wars, especially javascript. A fast and performant web was important to any strategy Google could have had, regardless of their status as a good or evil company.

[bzbarsky]

Please check your history. There was a JavaScript performance war in full swing, with both Firefox and Safari producing new JITs and working on improving them, before Chrome ever appeared.

[IvyMike]

My memory was that there was a cold war, but not hot-and-heavy competition until chrome, although this article seems to agree with you.

But man, Chrome sure got good fast.

http://www.cnet.com/news/browser-war-centers-on-once-obscure...

[bzbarsky]

Your memory might be based on press releases, not what was actually going on. Safari and Firefox had the jits in their development builds, and were actively competing with each other, but hadn't shipped them in a final release yet at the point when the existence of Chrome was announced. Those JITs shipped a few months after that, with the attendant press hoopla.

[cromwellian]

Safari never had the marketshare to make its JIT a 'threat'.

Besides, Chrome didn't just introduce V8, it also introduced a cleaner UI, sandboxed tabs, and eventually, a much better set of DevTools than any other browser.

To deny that competition from Chrome didn't put pressure on other vendors I think is trying to willfully discount it's contributions for political, not technical reasons.

[bzbarsky]

There's a difference between "Chrome put pressure on other vendors" (which is clearly true) and "Chrome kicked off the browser performance wars, especially Javascript" (which is the statement I was responding to upthread).

Chrome obviously put pressure on other vendors in various areas, including performance. What just isn't true is that without Chrome there would have been no JS performance competition. Whether the competition would have been as intense as it ended up being is a debatable counterfactual; I believe it would have been.

One other historical note, since you brought it up: Chrome was first announced publicly Sept 3, 2008. The first public beta of IE 8, with tabs in separate processes, was released on March 5, 2008. These processes ran in a low-privilege sandbox, as in fact did the entire browser starting with IE 7 (released October 2006), on Windows Vista or newer. Chrome did provide the first browser sandbox on Windows XP and non-Windows platforms, which was a big step up, of course. Again, there is a difference here between "introduced a new ground-breaking concept" and "incrementally improved on what was already going on".

Oh, and V8 was clearly considered a "threat" by other browser makers way before Chrome had any market share to speak of, so I'm not sure what your remark about Safari is supposed to mean.

[magicalist]

To be totally fair, Brendan Eich has stated that he was well aware that Lars Bak et al were working on V8 years before Chrome was announced (and Bak's involvement implied the implementation direction that V8 was likely to head towards). I'm sure that knowledge was known elsewhere as well.

The problem with this discussion is inherent in any counterfactual history, as you point out, and the common issue of what appears to be revolutionary to people outside a domain vs merely implementing things people have discussed for years, as the same "revolution" appears to people inside that domain.

The reality is that circa-2008 JS engines were fairly rudimentary, including (or especially) V8, and your average JIT compiler writer at the time would have been less impressed and more compelled to question why this "revolution" hadn't happened years earlier (and several did ask exactly that).

All that said, "Chrome put pressure on other vendors" has been extremely important to the evolution of JS performance, especially with Crankshaft -- I think it's extremely likely that shipping Firefox would still have a tracing JIT today and would be just starting to move past it without Crankshaft having existed -- but Chrome in that slot vs the other major browsers is really not that meaningful a distinction either, as without SpiderMonkey existing, it's likely that V8's major strides forward would have stopped with Crankshaft in 2010. Performance would have continued to improve in either (especially with JSC making big improvements), but I don't think we'd have seen the major architectural changes as often as we have without that pressure. Competition is great.

[sphink]

I agree. IE kicked everyone else's butt first (in terms of market share), and the Web stagnated. Then Firefox kicked IE's butt, and the Web didn't stagnate quite as much, but let's be honest -- it stagnated. At the moment, Chrome is dominant but no browser is really trampling its competition, especially not in terms of overall quality. And the Web is improving faster than it ever has. (Well, not quite -- the "catch up" phases of the browser wars probably saw faster improvement while they were happening.)

[jacquesm]

Chrome does not exist to give the world a fast and performant web, it exists to give google full control over the audience from request to delivery, it exists to increase google's control and serves as a collection mechanism for data that it would not otherwise get at.

That it's a performant browser is a side-effect.

[kalleboo]

There could be multiple equally valid reasons for Chrome to exist.

[IvyMike]

> data that it would not otherwise get at.

My argument is that nobody would have put that data online in a slow and sucky web. If you think Google wants full control over the audience, surely they also want a large audience.

(Note that I do not think that Google is evil. But if they were, I don't think they would need chrome to get most of that information anyways, given all the other ways they are collecting data. Sure, there are some corner cases they would miss but I don't think the incremental coverage would be worth the effort.)

[jacquesm]

The web wasn't 'slow and sucky' before chrome appeared.

[IvyMike]

Christ: my slightly hyperbolic rhetoric aside do you really disagree with anything in the logic chain that a faster web = a more usable web = a more used web = a larger audience = better for google?

[PavlovsCat]

It wasn't even even slow and sucky before Firefox appeared; Opera was pretty nice even in 2000 :)