> Honest question: is there a specific person who is smugly grinning about this at google.
I sort-of understand where you're coming from, but isn't this needlessly hostile? Unlike in the case of "spying innovation" you brought up, Chrome's "Scroll to Text" seems to be intended with the user's benefit in mind (and only indirectly Google's — via greater user satisfaction, but that's exactly the product design model we want).
It would have obviously been far preferable if this had gone through the "proper channels" (discussion at the W3C, standardisation etc. first), but I don't think that there's any evidence to believe that anybody at Google thinks that they're the first to come up with this.
I sort-of understand where you're coming from, but isn't this needlessly hostile? Unlike in the case of "spying innovation" you brought up, Chrome's "Scroll to Text" seems to be intended with the user's benefit in mind (and only indirectly Google's — via greater user satisfaction, but that's exactly the product design model we want).
It would have obviously been far preferable if this had gone through the "proper channels" (discussion at the W3C, standardisation etc. first), but I don't think that there's any evidence to believe that anybody at Google thinks that they're the first to come up with this.