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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.

Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.

The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"

I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.

It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.

I blame how things turned out more on Mozilla being distracted and forgetting about their own user base, to be honest.

The fact that it made the browser itself impossible to monetize to fund development was a part of it. They were an antitrust insurance to Google and tried lots of stuff to improve its position. Granted they failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, but I still drive Firefox for personal use.

The money earned with Firefox should have gone to Firefox but went to vanity projects instead. Firefox OS, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send / Persona, acquiring Pocket, etc etc. And all of it failed.

Nevermind the controversies of silly ad campaigns and CEO salaries and whatnot.

Mozilla should have just reinvested all the money into Firefox. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their rust-based rendering engine.

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