A while ago, Ben Goodger (our fearless tech lead) wrote up a set of core
principles around Chromium. If you have not read and pondered these, please
do:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/core-principles
In particular, as we've had more contributors both inside and outside Google
over the past year, I feel there have been an increasing number of debates
about things like adding more options and prompts, or making the UI more
complex in other ways. One of our design goals is never to present users
information and choices they don't understand or care about, and to make the
browser automatically do the right thing, so that it's "a natural extension
of your will" instead of "a piece of software" (in the words of the
document). While this presents us with hard choices, and we can't always
accommodate every user (including some of us developers!), it's important
that we share a unified vision of what the product should be. Ben once
mused that he'd love for us to be able to _remove_ options and prefs in each
subsequent version.
My own summary is this: trying to please everyone results in a product that
doesn't perfectly please anyone; we should be willing to be bold, be
arrogant, and create a product that is unsuitable for a few users, if that
means it is exceptional for most. There are many good choices in the
browser space today, and it's perfectly fine if an individual finds that
Firefox, Safari, or any other browser is a better fit for him--as long as we
understand and accept the tradeoff that triggers that decision.
I hope you're passionate about making something great, and that whatever
you're working on is focused around these core principles.
PK
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