Super impressive that an independent, non-corpo project has gotten this far this quickly.
Just building a good html/css renderer and a JS engine is crazy, but now you are hooked into the ecosystem and at the mercy of whatever comes next. Chrome can push back against proposals but little browsers either use chromium or are basically in a riptide trying to make sure they keep up.
If Google is strong arming or pushing ahead their own agenda, the standards body should have plenty enough votes to veto.
And for teeth, compliance should be a requirement for Google to even be allowed to have its own browser. If they break it, no more browser for Google.
Google isn't your friend.
If you're a consumer, they're limiting choice.
If you're a startup or midcap, they're in your way.
I expect startups to out-innovate once the giants get a regulatory buzz cut.
And there's no way, in general, to differentiate you (who I'm assuming to be a good-intentioned actual-expert) from someone who is either (a) not an expert or (b) not good-intentioned (i.e. a lobbyist) - so this offer is effectively useless, and the more general point of "there are experts that can help" is invalid.
I've been thinking about this problem a lot, because it is one that needs to be solved. But it's more complicated than just saying that "experts from the community can offer to help draft regulations" because the problem of how lawmakers can trust those offering help is very difficult.
...and that's assuming that the lawmakers are operating in good faith and accurately representing their constitutents' interests, which there is scientific research[1] that indicates is not true.
[1] https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/testin...
Chrome has the best compliance with standards of any of the big three (see wpt.fyi) - which is not surprising, because they also have the most engineering time dedicated to their browser, and the most people working on standards.
These bodies require buy in from multiple vendors, but generally not unanimity. That said, browsers can and do ship things which haven't been standardized (e.g. WebUSB, which is still only a draft because only Chrome wants to ship it). In a lot of cases this pretty much has to happen pre-standardization, because it is difficult to come up with a good standard from the ivory tower with no contact with actual use. Chrome is unusually good about working in public to develop specifications for such features even when other browsers aren't currently interested in shipping them.
I don't know what problem you think this proposal would solve.
That is, if there's a promotion, or a company bet, or a need to establish/secure market dominance for one property or another, Chrome dumps a scribble on a napkin, barely engages in any conversation, and ships to production within a few weeks after dumping said scribbles.
Once it's out there, it couldn't care less what other browsers vendors will say. Dominant market share and an army of developers who never bothered to learn about standards processes will make sure that this is now a standard.
The problem isn't Chrome pushing back proposals. The problem is Chrome pushing ahead with its own proposals regardless of anyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371575
Otherwise you get Internet Explorer, in reverse: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
Chrome literally doesn't even bother pretending that many of their proposals are more than some scribbles in spec-adjacent format. E.g. a spec for WebHID that other browsers could implement was just dumped into the repo after Chrome shipped it.
Constructable Stylesheets had both a badly named API and a trivially triggered race condition. Shipped in Chrome in the middle of discussion because Google-developed lit "needed" it.
And so on and so forth.
The problem with all of these new specifications is that Google can’t convince anybody to do this, no matter how much money they throw at them. That’s not an Apple veto stopping these things from becoming standards, that’s Google pushing shitty specs.
We've kinda come full circle. Web standards were made to prevent what happened when Internet Explorer ruled the world but now a corporation has near-monopoly browser share and is driving the web standards themselves
At this point a modern browser is basically an operating system.
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/
Seemed to have fairly frequent commits but they abruptly spotted 3 months ago.
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/-/commits/main?ref_ty...
And in that sense, is it better than Gecko with firefox, which is non-profit?
Ladybird is still far from usable or fast enough to even start comparing it to Gecko.
Shopify, CloudFlare, and others.
Well, it could be that AI actually speeds up development, who knows.