Then Firefox too became bloated. And it slowed down. I started using Mozilla’s Camino (their Mac-focused browser) as a result. Then Chrome arrived, in a similar way to the way that Firefox had. It was refreshingly fast…
This quote made me laugh, because Firefox was forked from Mozilla because Mozilla was too bloated. It just seems like a perpetual cycle.
Accusing Chrome of becoming bloated seems harsh, technologies like SPDY and V8 have improved the browsing experience and isn't it a main priority of the Chrome team to never increase the start-up time?
This doesn't change the fact that more and more features get tacked onto a browser which have nothing to do with browsers.
Chrome didn't have much useless features a year ago, but now Google is trying to make it into a platform.
Which non-browser features have been tacked onto Chrome?
That's a genuine question, the only thing I can think of is the 'Apps' dashboard with a link to the Chrome Web Store, apart from that Chrome seems to consist of just the essential elements of a browser.
Chrome native client, Flash plugin (built in), PDF browser.
The PDF browser is the only one useful to me, and it's been broken in Linux for the last 3 versions of Chrome...
Some of the newer WebKit features are getting bloated as well, and are built-in even if you don't need them - e.g. the new Javascript de-obsfucation feature in the developer tools.
Don't know about you but I prefer my plugins to be auto-updated to the latest, safest versions. Last I checked the non-bundled Flash still had to be manually updated from time to time by the user. The built in Flash/PDF is updated with Chrome. You might not think this is useful, but just wait till you click on a link and get pwned. Even if you don't, because you're on Linux, what about your parents?
The word 'bloated' can be overused, but let's ignore the choice of word the GP used. The fact is, Chrome downloads have been getting bigger and bigger (there was an article here on HN a while back with some numbers), which isn't surprising because a lot more is being included. For example,
* Flash
* PDF viewer
* Developer tools suite
* Chrome-specific technologies like NaCl
* Chrome Store support
* Proposed web standards like Web Audio API and WebSQL (which are significantly more complex and large in comparison to alternative proposed standards to them) and SPDY
Now, the significant increase in size might be justified in some people's opinion, it's debatable of course.
This quote made me laugh, because Firefox was forked from Mozilla because Mozilla was too bloated. It just seems like a perpetual cycle.