I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.
They're doing this in the open through the W3C WICG process [1]. They're not doing this as they see fit.
> for their own purposes.
Open standards are available for anyone to use and benefit from. That they may have had a use case in mind when defining the spec does not invalidate it; rather, it reinforces it and shows its value.
WHATWG's and W3C's track record as wannabe standardization bodies is incredibly poor considering that it has seen Opera and MS drop out of browser development alltogether, and that web standards are so fsckng complicated it's infeasible to develop a browser from scratch again, ever. I mean, that's exactly the situation that a standard is meant to prevent.
It's time for a real standardization org to step in, and for society to sit at the table when it comes to decide on the primary means for digital communication.
Sure they are. It's already part of Chromium.
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/browser/portal/...
It's been there since at least last August.
Start at https://www.chromestatus.com/features/schedule you can drill down from there, for each feature, you can see links to W3C, WICG, TC'39, or whatever repositories, complete with discussion, and status from other browser vendors.
Yes, Chrome has shipped proprietary API features "on by default" before without buy-in from everyone else (e.g. NaCL), but so has Mozilla. The question is, are these the exception, or the rule?
And in my view, most of the Web's evolution in the past few years has been way more open and participatory than the 90s/00s Netscape/IE era.
I really don't see a significant difference. They can pretty much propose whatever they see fit through WICG and implement it in Chrome as they see fit.
By the way, this isn't a standard by any reasonable definition of the word.
One way of looking at it is that the standardization process is "propose and implement whatever you want, but it doesn't become a standard until another browser implements it and consensus is achieved".
This is a direct response to the problems of the W3Cs old way of defining large, pie in the sky, standards without any implementation, and then only much later realizing that they were bad.
Google are now where microsoft were when they launched IE6, adding features as they see pleased to support their own products and revenue.
Back then the web population was savvy and not so reliant on microsoft that they could jump to firebird/firefox/opera when things got really bad.
The modern web users don't have that option because google are far more dominant now than microsoft ever was.
Back then people would joke about their grandma being "stuck" on IE6, but that's the level of technical aptutide of the whole web now. Just ordinary people wanting to get on with their own business.
Back in '02 chances are you'd be re-install XP all the time and during one of those installs a technician could install firefox (or later chrome) and you'd be set up. That doesn't happen now, OSes "just work" and people aren't changing their browser.
At peak (in ~2003-2005) IE had over 90% of global browser market share. Chrome on desktop has between 60 and 70, and afaik less on mobile, and less in the US. So, no.
> That doesn't happen now, OSes "just work" and people aren't changing their browser.
Given that chrome doesn't come on any popular desktop OS by default, this seems unlikely. If people weren't changing their browser, Safari, FF, or Edge would be the most popular due to coming by default on OSX, most linux distros, and Windows by default. (how popular is CrOS?)
> No, given chrome's market share other browsers are forced to implement it or people will consider those browsers broken.
There's a pretty decent history of this not happening.
I also don't really think your idea of how the web was used is a true reflection of reality. I was an elementary school kid back in 2002 and was using netscape and IE 4? 5? at the time, in school. I certainly had no clue how to jump to firefox or opera, nor did I know how to re-install the OS. Nor did my teachers.
I don't think the average web user back then was as savvy as you're thinking. Perhaps the average web user you hung around was, but that's just your social circles.
No, it has about 60% on both mobile and desktop, not counting the derivatives (like Edge and Opera). Considering that both of those markets grew significantly since IE6 days, that makes Chrome more dominant than IE ever was.
And you seem to assume that an average consumer installs stuff on his own after the OS installation, which is not the case with less tech-savvy people I know. They usually give it to someone a bit more tech-savvy to do post-install tasks, and those always include an installation of a different browser. Every single second-hand computer available in my country's market comes with a cracked version of Windows, MS Office and a different browser. Tech-savvy ones just reinstall the OS, non-tech-savvy ones continue using the defaults — the defaults set up by someone else.
No. Dominance is a function of market share, not market size, that's silly. Otherwise I could argue that Firefox is also more dominant than IE ever was, since it's got more users than peak IE. Same with Safari. But then 3 browsers would simultaneously be more dominant than the one that controlled 95% of the market at its peak. Neat.
>At peak (in ~2003-2005) IE had over 90% of global browser market share. Chrome on desktop has between 60 and 70, and afaik less on mobile, and less in the US. So, no.
The parent post was comparing Google and Microsoft, not just Chrome and IE.
They launched the draft on the 2nd and implemented the tag on the 10th. I'd hardly call that going through the open process. That's a move to save face.
<portal> doesn't feel like something that will ever be supported in Safari.
Dart ran natively in Chrome once. Why doesn't it now? Because webdevs didn't care enough to write native Dart on the front-end.