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Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?

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Re: Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?

#51
post #13

Chrome will not interest me until there is some ad-blocking available. Yes, it is superior to anything else out there, but my killer app for the web is still being able to surf the web sans irritating advertising.

why is ad-blocking so important?? please someone explain me...

Re: Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?

#52

Chrome is a good app. I played around with it yesterday. Sad that they are doing it "open source". They should license it, then they could get the revenue they need to be a serious competitor to IE. As it is, nor matter how good technically Chrome is, it will be a curiousity. Without revenue from licensing you can't play with the big boys. "Open source"/free software sounds good in a college sociology paper, but suck…

I'm a bit confused about where you're coming from here. They could certainly have attempted to license v8 but since the bulk of what they have going on are extension of the already open sourced WebKit rendering engine that would have been difficult.

Now they certainly could have written their own rendering engine, but if time has shown anything it's that this is not easy task (look at the lag time between release to market and efficient rendering for any of the big engines). And in this case it would have likely meant the death of the project to step out with an inefficient root rendering engine.

Okay... so let's assume the above. They are forced to open source the components that link in with Web Kit, but they keep the Javascript VM closed and license that. We now get to throw into contention that there is any significant cash flow available to license. I think that's certainly suspect.

So finally let's think about why google might not care. This isn't about making a money move. Much like releasing IE back in the 90's wasn't a money move for MS. It is however a platform move. Google has a number of very resource intensive javascript applications, a number of which are common for people to have open at the same time. That requires have a better framework for dealing with these kinds of tasks. Chrome is an attempt to provide that.

It's not even clear if this is a serious browser bid, or more of a road map for other browser vendors to emulate. In the end it doesn't matter. Google's revenue stream requires eyeballs, lots of them. And the eyeballs are asking for better performance, Chrome is a means to that end.

Re: Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?

#53
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found it somewhat contradictory and hypocritical that the very people that live off ad-based websites (webbased entrepreneurs and founders) are so highly correlated with the group of people that absolutely cannot live without adblocking software - thereby robbing the siteowners of their income model. Note: spydez - this isn't in any way meant as a personal attack, it just seemed like the right place to put m…

This really isn't fair. Since we also consist of the demographic least likely to actually click on ads. Since impressions bring in such small amounts of revenue compared to clicks we're really not shitting the scales very much. In the end advertisers have found it an effective strategy at reaching people /not/ in our demographic.

Being a small demographic that isn't the primary income for many sites doesn't justify taking away their income.

While I agree that hackers often don't click ads some do - particularly if the ads are targeted to this demographic. In this respect it's noteworthy that sites such as Reddit and Slashdot derive their income from showing ads. And their primary audience is hackers.

Re: Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?

#54
I'm using it as soon as I get a Linux version, stable or not. If the core is solid, then crashes will be confined to tabs. Of the three extensions I use, one is already built into Chrome (incognito mode), one is a proxy extension, and one is NoScript. I use NoScript to keep my browser from crashing all the time, but hey, if it has the process isolation, then I'm not going to worry about it.
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