I don't mean this to doubt you, it is a sincere question. Do you have any examples of that happening? It sounds very believable, but it would be great to have actual sources for future reference.
- All of hardware standards. WebHID's timeline is especially egregious https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...
- Most of standards advertised on web.dev as "new exciting opportunities you can try now". E.g. WebTransport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/webt.... The status of that spec is "scribbled on a napkin", but somehow already released in Chrome.
- Other "standards" and "specs" here and there like web share target https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/
Can I Use had to create a special UNOFF tag for all the web APIs that Chrome (mostly Chrome) ships. If you go to MDN and look at all APIs marked as "experimental", you'll find that most of them are already shipped in Chrome: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.
Who knows.
Not us, we’ll never know.
And to those rushing out to point out the excuse part about OpenGL on Mac not having support for compute, WebGL already back then wasn't backed up by OpenGL on all platforms, see Windows (DirectX), PlayStation (LibGNM).
Also eventually Safari also moved their WebGL implementation from OpenGL to Metal, and Chrome did as well, replace their WebGL to run on top of Metal on Mac.
So not really that much of a problem regarding the state of OpenGL on Mac as "required" implemenatation layer for WebGL.
If you're looking at fugu in particular (especially in the latter stages) we had external developers or businesses wanting the features.
Note: there are some apis that a Google customer wanted to use first.