Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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That is literally how a standard supposed to work: arrive at consensus and have two independent implementations before it can be claimed to be a standard. Or at the very least arrive at an API shape and hammer out obvious problems before shipping.

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.

But is every feature in a browser supposed to be standardized? Like, it's against the rules somehow to develop features without asking permission from Apple and Mozilla?

It's not against the rules, but it is hostile to the web. Forking the web because a company is big enough to do so may sound just dandy to you, but to the rest of us who have spent decades working on interoperability it's a big middle finger.

Allowing Apple to have a veto on which features are allowed to be added to a browser is even more hostile to the web.

Apple doesn’t have a veto. If two independent implementations are required for something to become a web standard, all Google have to do is convince anybody outside of Google to implement their specs, such as Mozilla – who Google pay billions of dollars to.

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.

Your conclusion would be true were your premise true.

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