[conspire] Chromium vs. Google Chrome feature (and antifeature) comparison

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, at 7:47 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> 1.  Nobody's cared about Macromedia^W Adobe Flash since the famous Steve
> Jobs letter in 2010, which among other things reminded the world of how
> incredibly buggy the stuff is, and the software world pulled together
> and collectively said 'You know, we actually don't need this stuff.'
> 
> (Fun fact:  My wife Deirdre provided pretty much all of the inside data
> on which Jobs based his letter.  She was a software engineer on the
> Apple Safari team at the time, and was able to document that an
> amazingly high percentage of Safari crashes were in the Flash
> interpreter and not in Safari.)

Also a fun fact: at that time I was literally spending half my day on Flash crashes. I've never felt so backed up by a CEO before, that's for sure.

The Flash crashes that boggled me, though? Worth a mention.

So you could run G4 code on Intel back in the day, and that was called Rosetta. Written in part by a guy who went on to become one of the JavaScriptCore compiler people.

There were occasionally people trying to run, on Intel, a G4 version of Safari (so, from an older OS version) with a G4 version of Flash using Rosetta. The crash logs were *amazzzzing*. We didn't support running Safari on Rosetta at that point, and never supported Flash on Rosetta, so that was easy. But I saw those crashes every once in a while. If it came in through a customer support line, then we'd have them work on transitioning the person to the correct browser version for their architecture.

The reason I don't trust Google Chrome goes back to a stunt the team pulled:

https://daringfireball.net/2012/02/cookies_and_privacy?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000618

Which, you're like, but wait, that article's about Safari!?!

Yes, it is, but…if you looked at the WebKit commit logs from the relevant time period, you'd understand. (At that point, a significant fraction of the WebKit committers were Google employees.)

Deirdre