Comment by dmazzoni
8 hours ago
When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had many hundreds of engineers working on it.
Also, you're comparing the number of engineers working on one product, to the number of engineers working at Shopify across their entire company today, which includes far more than just one app.
You're entitled to your opinion that Shopify is a poor app or that it's overengineered, but clearly it's not simple. That's just a fact. If it looks like a simple app to you, that's because you're not seeing most of it.
It's like looking at the YouTube mobile app as someone who watches videos and saying that the app frontend looks simple. You're only seeing 5% of the app. The other 95% is for video creators and advertisers, and it is decidedly NOT simple. I think that's the same here.
I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple.
However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current chrome team or in total if you account for open source contributors as well. If robot is to believed that's also a headcount of windows and macos core teams. What is even going on, I don't even..
Taxes, compliance, regulatory bodies, logistics multiplied by X countries X products has an amazing way to bog you down. If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem (except for people on the internet making arguments from personal inexperience)
> If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem
If you have money there's a greater chance that someone in that X by X matrix might see you as a juicy target to go after so your expensive handling of every item in that matrix needed to be better still.
And Chrome doesn't even need to support millions (billions) of users on a single, coherent "system". There's no scaling, it's just people running it on their computers and phones.
I suspect the vast majority of Shopify engineers never touch the core Shopify experience, but work on the long tail of invisible things that are nevertheless considered important. I'm talking along the lines of "direct integration with bank X for UPI in India to save 0.3% on payment costs in scenario Y."
> When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations.
It also was reusing the WebKit browser engine, work on which started in the 20th century (as KHTML)
As to Shopify needing zillion of engineers: does their backend query seller APIs? If so, I expect many of their engineers work on keeping that working.
And, importantly, this was 2008.
Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.
Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.
Yes, IntelliJ 8 was out in 2008. From my experience most of the progress since then has been keeping up with language and library updates.
1 reply →
Sounds like you're describing the shit show that is web development
And it was a fork.
Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).
Okay, since it might’ve been confusing from my comment: I meant mobile apps, not Chrome or browser. Mobile frameworks abstract all of this.
The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.
> ...this is Microsoft we are talking about.
Exactly!
More seriously, it not just about building a compliant web browser engine, it is about tracking the dominant browser engine which introduces their own "standards" along the way too.
Microsoft could have easily continued to invest in maintaining their browser engine, but it would have to be comparable to what Google is doing, and yet they'd always be perceived as "behind" due to non-dominant position they have.
I'd say strategically they do not want to invest in tech that's not winning (in marketshare), so when they are not dominant, they'll instead adopt and extend (not just web browsers, look at WSL too).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up
The didn't had to, MS Browser team was incompetent from the beginning of internet
1 reply →
We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.
Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.
> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good.
Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?
A browser isn't drawing its content using OS frameworks, so A11Y is a major undertaking. Much more so because A11Y for web content specifically is a bit of a different beast than native widgets, and the amount of stuff you have on the web these days means that you have to pay a lot more attention to performance.
This is plain wrong. For a browser, a11y doesn't just get handled by the OS automatically. In general, claiming a11y is easy or will be done by someone else is bordering on evil.
[dead]