It’s neat to ponder over how for however many people you know about from their internet presence, there is a sort of “dark matter” of other super smart people you never hear about. For one example I think of the very talented Antoine, author of gnarly comments like these and seniormost person on ChromeOS, who appears to be otherwise mostly invisible on the internet.
I mention this because when we learned we got the award, and each person was told how much they would get, one of the most senior people on the team announced soon after that he was leaving the company. I remember being surprised by it and asking him about it. His response has stayed with me, something along the lines of: “Once I knew the highest upside I would get for staying, I could better evaluate it against my other options.” I think there’s a lesson there about how rewards can have the opposite effect you intend.
At one point the question came up: how many redirects should a browser follow? Say you try to load A, but it redirects you to B, which redirects to C, and so on; at some point you should give up and say something is broken. Someone picked some reasonable-seeming threshold, like 10 or so, after which Chrome would give up. Then Darin, who had previously worked on Firefox, said “no, it has to be 30, or it breaks the New York Times â I know this from experience”. (Today Darin is working on another browser, hopefully getting a third use out of that hard-won lesson.)
At the time Iâd joke that “Chrome 12 [an old version] was the best Chrome”, but since Iâve come to see underneath that for me what I wanted was a fast tight browser, and once I had that, pretty much by definition most subsequent work was just gonna make it worse. Sure, thereâs work like fixing rendering crashes or improving scroll performance, but most work involves adding features that make it bigger or slower.
Longer term, what I have come to appreciate about this is that I put a lot of myself into the product and I am proud of what I made at the time, but that product is a living thing that I do not control and it has gone on in directions I wouldnât have taken it.
It’s also funny to reflect on how much time we spent agonizing over making the most minimal thing â Chrome initially had no “Home” button and I remember there being long arguments about whether adding it even as an option was contrary to the goal of the thing â vs today’s browser which is covered with buttons and settings, just like the browsers it was intending to revolt against.
All from Chrome, 10 years later by Evan Martin
