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Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

They have been a rubber stamp for Google for years now anyway so there is no functional difference.

What ever Google wants, the W3C approves as "standard"

Agreed, though I'm not sure the W3C has much choice. When WHATWG wrested control of HTML from W3C it drove home that browser implementers determine the standard. Given chromium's ~75% market share[1] and Apple's ~18% market share it increasingly seems like the purpose of the W3C is performative, to lend more credibility to what has become a proprietary standard driven by Google and Apple.

[1] tallying across chromium-based browsers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2022...

It's not true, to w3c's surprising credit.

What Google does, is publish a "draft" which is as far from a standard as their authors are from the Moon. This gives Chrome the leeway to call it an "emerging standard" and just ship it. It doesn't care if there are objections, or that other browser vendors will not implement it. It's now a "standard" in Google's dictionary.

For something to become a W3C standard even in the present world, you need a consensus and at least two independent implementations. None of that exists for stuff Google pushes out (hardware APIs, web transport, constructible stylesheets [1], the list goes on...).

The correct name for those is Chrome-only non-standards.

[1] These one isn't even a draft. It is.... "a collection of interesting ideas" in a working group https://wicg.github.io/construct-stylesheets/ Shipped by default in Chrome, of course

Chromium only, not chrome only

Those non-standards are aggressively pushed by Chrome, and shipped by default by Chrome first.

Calling it Chromium makes it sound like they somehow originate in the "open-source" version. They don't. We have to call them what they are.

TIL, I though chromium always was ahead of chrome, so all changes end up in chromium first, therefore also other chromium based browsers get the patch/nonstandard behavior.

Chromium might get those features purely due to Chrome's release cadence. So the code may be enabled the code base without flags before it ships in Chrome (Chrome releases are monthly).

Most of Chromium-based browsers will probably lag on those features because they either don't want them, or have their own release cadence, or are running an older version etc.

And it's only Chrome that pretends that their non-standard features are standard, and employs a large network of propaganda from web.dev[1] to dev rels[2] to advertise them as standards.

[1] Example WebTransport https://web.dev/webtransport/, multiple non-standard hardware APIs https://web.dev/devices-introduction/

[2] I sadly lost the link to tweet from either Justing Fagnani or Alex Russel where they called the decision to ship Constructible Stylesheets "bravery to move the platform forward". Context: trivial deadlock issues in the spec, both Mozilla and Safari were dead set against it until issues could be fixed, Google-led lit-html wanted the functionality, so Chrome just shipped it.

That's pretty transparently untrue. Plenty of examples of Mozilla and/or Apple refusing to give the go-ahead.

Whether or not this has been true historically, all three companies are under massively increased pressure in the current environment, and may not be sufficient checks on each other the way they have been in the past.

Genuinely: what do you believe the W3C has published as a standard (and not as a draft, not as a community group report) without support from multiple vendors?

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