Hacker News Reader

The complexity is enormous but isn’t google employees are active on various standards committees? Google benefit from the complexity because it ensures there will be less competing browsers.

View on HN

I think Google basically _is_ the standards committees, at this point. Not in the sense of having majority control just by themselves, but in the sense of (1) the cartel being argued over here (browsers funded by Google) having that or close to it, and (2) Chrome being the main source of new features getting implemented, so that the job of the standards committees is mostly to play catch-up with Chrome.

A lot of the complexity stems from backwards compatibility.

Also I seriously doubt there is any conspiracy here!

(opinions are my own)

It is not necessary a conspiracy. It's just google had (and still has) no incentives to keep web ecosistem simple and accessible to browser developers, while making it harder perfectly aligns with google's interests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com