Hacker News Reader

Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Well, the stuff around webkit is kind of secondary, for the most part

I'd hardly consider the V8 JavaScript engine a second-class citizen in Chrome at this point.

When Chrome came out everyone was excited about how each tab was a separate process, and how fast the JavaScript was compared to Firefox/IE/Safari. Apparently none of that matters anymore? It's all just 'boilerplate?'

So the main ingredient in the browser: rendering engine does not matter enough and you can claim making your browser yourself if you did everything around it? Cool, I can code my own browser from scratch in about an hour, just drop in WebView and add some controls.

From the comments that some people are making here you would have to think that the content of the Chrome binary was:

  #!/bin/sh
  exec webkit

Which is not the truth. If you're going to rail against Google's claims, then go ahead, but don't start making up crap and/or under-estimating the amount of work that they did just because you think that it makes your argument look more appealing.

Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into Webkit development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor compared to everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we made everything from scratch" makes sense.

I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components was not developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".

  > Don't you think you underestimate the amount of work that went into
  > Webkit development? Or are you claiming that it is really minor
  > compared to everything else in Chrome? Because only then claim "we
  > made everything from scratch" makes sense.
  >
  > I really fail to see how pointing that one of the main components
  > was not developed by Google from scratch counts as "making up crap".

You fail to understand my comment. I was commenting on people claiming that the non-WebKit parts of Chrome are (effectively) boilerplate. The difference between claiming that Chrome is 95% WebKit, 5% Google code and a reality of (probably something like) 70% WebKit, 30% Google code is meaningful. Maybe not meaningful when talking about 'everything from scratch,' but let's not lower ourselves by resorting to overstatements just because it makes us feel better when we are ranting against something, no?

It's not just boilerplate. However, webkit is not an insignificant part of the browser. It's easily the hardest and most complex part, especially when it comes to dealing with all of the broken web pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com