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Comment by neilalexander | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?

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If mobile app store revenues can be used as a metric for revenues on the web generally, iOS users are a valuable demographic to target, even if they are the minority. If your website doesn't work in Safari, you're going to lose revenue.

<portal> doesn't feel like something that will ever be supported in Safari.

We are, by using and recommending browsers not owned by advertising conglomerates.

I'm a very happy Safari user but evangelism is only going to get you so far. There need to be better alternatives.

People used to say that about IE6, before Firefox and Chrome came along.

IE6 lost that battle because it stagnated - it wasn't just not keeping up with new standards, it wasn't innovating in general. We don't know if it turned out the way it did, if Microsoft kept proactively extending HTML in new IE versions. But given that this is largely what was happening in the IE/NN mortal combat era that preceded IE dominance, I'd expect "this browser best works in ..." to make a comeback. And, indeed, it's increasingly common to see websites explicitly say that they want Chrome. Especially new Google projects...

It's not up to Google, it's up to web developers. If they find <portal> useful they'll implement it which forces FF/Safari to create their own implementations.

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.

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