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Comment by jpochtar | Hacker News Reader

This is a good take. Standards were a weapon to fight Microsoft's closed source IE— emphasis on closed source. Why? Competing browsers needed to be IE-compatible to matter, and without standards spec-ing out what IE's doing, it's hard for other vendors to know if they were 100% compliant.

Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source, and competitors can freely borrow their engine, I'd say we don't really need the W3C anymore.

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> Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source

Chrome isn't open source, it's open core.

But Chromium is open source and that's what people refer to when they say browser monoculture---not that Chrome is dominant (there will always be a significant minority of Safari, Opera Mini, UC Browser, etc.) but that Chromium-based engines are extremely dominant.

I used to feel the same way but I think there should be competing implementation of standards to make faster progress.

GCC vs Clang is what comes to mind. The competition from clang improved the overall quality and performance of c / c++ compilers in general

Compilers are algorithms to convert mathematical expressions to something that can run on a physical computer. Porting optimizations is easier than porting something from Blink to Quantum.

W3C failed to create an open platform. Browser vendors use W3C as a rubberstamp for their implementations. There's many W3C Notes and Editor Drafts with only one vendor. Just look at the latest Google firehose of new features.

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