Comment by JimDabell

This is not true yet, but it’s getting close.

The pattern is this:

- Google publishes a specification.

- They raise request for feedback from the Mozilla and WebKit teams.

- Mozilla and WebKit find security and privacy problems.

- Google deploys their implementation anyway.

- This functionality gets listed on sites like whatpwacando.today

- Web developers complain about Safari being behind and accuse Apple of holding back the web.

- Nobody gives a shit about Firefox.

So we have two key problems, but neither of them are “Google controls the standards bodies”. The problem is that they don’t need to.

Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”. This happened at the height of Internet Explorer dominance too. A huge number of web developers would happily write Internet Explorer-only sites and this monoculture damaged the web immensely. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

The second problem is that nobody cares about Firefox any more. The standards process doesn’t really work when there are only two main players. At the moment, you can honestly say “Look, the standards process is that any standard needs two interoperable implementations. If Google can’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement something, it can’t be a standard.” This makes the unsuitability of those proposals a lot plainer to see.

But now that Firefox market share has vanished, that argument is turning into “Google and Apple disagree about whether to add functionality to the web”. This hides the unsuitability of those proposals. This too has happened before – this is how the web worked when Internet Explorer was battling Netscape Navigator for dominance in the 90s, where browsers were adding all kinds of stupid things unilaterally. Again, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

The web standards process desperately needs either Firefox to regain standing or for a new independent rendering engine (maybe Ladybird?) to arise. And web developers need to stop treating everything that Google craps out as if it’s a done deal. Google don’t and shouldn’t control the definition of the web. We’ve seen that before, and a monoculture like that paralyses the industry.