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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> It's pretty generally accepted that the correct way to do web standardization is for proponents of some new thing to implement that thing and deploy it and then once it has been shown to actually work bring a spec to the the standards folks for standardization.

- Behind dev flags

- And then wait for consensus

- And then there have to be at least two independent implementations

And only then does this become a standard.

Chrome doesn't care. They create a semblance of the spec, create a semblance of a discussion, and then enable it APIs in Chrome. And then pretend it's a standard.

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How is a company that runs a public website supposed to A/B-test marginal attach rates for a feature hidden behind a dev flag?

A feature behind a flag in a browser isn't for the public web sites. It's for devs (web devs and browser devs) to figure out if the feature works, if an API is ergonomic, the various edge cases etc.

This links to the chromium repo where it is behind a dev flag.

They do origin trials (behind flags) for all new features. They still release a bunch of them later without any consensus etc.

Sure, but not all (or even most) chrome features are web standards, so it makes sense that those are deployed without consensus, because there isn't anyone to get consensus with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36884155

And this particular feature? They want to pretend it's s standard. You don't create a spec proposal for a feature you don't just develop internslly

Yes and the standard development process starts by designing a spec proposal and testing it! That's the first step. If the proposal ends up not being implemented, the implementation may be removed, but you still need the implementation to write the spec, that's more or less how WHATWG works.

All of the following are true statements:

    - Not all chrome flags are related to spec proposals
    - Not all spec proposals are related to chrome flags
    - Not all chrome-led proposals are finalized
    - At least one browser must implement and test the proposal before the proposal can really be considered, and multiple other browsers must implement it before it can be accepted.

You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial.

> You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial.

And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this.

As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3]

Do not assume any good intent on Google's part when it comes to Google's business interests. Their intent is always malicious until proven otherwise. And there have been fewer and fewer cases when they have been proven otherwise.

[1] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5680923054964736

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622

[3] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics

I don't follow, is the issue that Google is lying about trying to standardize something (what you claimed before, and which clearly isn't true), or that they're implementing things that aren't standardized[1] and which you dislike (true, but, like, fine. You can use other browsers)?

If chrome implements WEI and it isn't standardized, you're not going to be knocked off the internet if you use firefox. That's extremely silly.

[1]: Keep in mind that things that aren't standardized include third party cookie behavior, so the behavior that FF and Safari have, that you support, isn't standardized either. If you're fully against browsers implementing nonstandard apis or features, you can't be in support of third party cookie sandboxing at all.

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