<story><title>Go That Way, Really Fast</title><url>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/go-that-way-really-fast.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bldg46</author><text>The first meetings about Chrome were held in 2006.&lt;p&gt;The entire project is based on Apple&apos;s WebKit, which was a cross-platform, arguably best-of-breed browser toolkit on the day they started.&lt;p&gt;Lars Bak, the architect of V8, has been working on language technologies since the early 90s, including Smalltalk.&lt;p&gt;A key Chrome team member, Ben Goodger, had already been working on browsers since the Netscape era, and was an early participant in Firefox.&lt;p&gt;There really are no miracles in software. People used to talk about &quot;Netscape time&quot; or marvel at how Google seemed to come out of nowhere. But even in those cases you can see how prior to those projects becoming household words, they had a long gestation period, during which time they were  protected from competition. Netscape included a lot of people from the earlier NCSA Mosaic effort. Google was an academic project that, as an economic entity, grew up in the sheltering shadow of Yahoo.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not saying these people didn&apos;t work hard, or aren&apos;t brilliant, or don&apos;t deserve their success. It&apos;s just that whenever you see someone moving much faster than is normally considered possible, don&apos;t assume that it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; due to skill. It&apos;s far more likely that they had some history of working on the problem, for far longer than you think.</text></comment>
<story><title>Go That Way, Really Fast</title><url>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/go-that-way-really-fast.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alextgordon</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google went from nothing, no web browser at all, to best-of-breed in under two years&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s obviously wrong. The Chrome beta was over two years ago, and you can bet V8 didn&apos;t just appear overnight. Chrome is older than its 1.0. Not to mention that it&apos;s based on WebKit, which has been in development for a decade (if you start from KHTML).</text></comment>