![]() It can be dominated by insiders, and sometimes their incentives are less than pure. It’s messy, slow, painful, and the outcomes aren’t always the best ones. I’m not going to paint the Web standards process as some Elysium of technology-for-good. However, they can’t (quite) go cowboy/cowgirl and do it on their own right now – they’ve all agreed to work together on the definition of what ‘the Web’ is in a Standards Developing Organization (SDO), most often the W3C. Right now, to make something part of ‘the Web’, you need to convince a browser engine to implement it. Putting aside the many arguments one might raise about diversity, risk management, innovation, and so on, I want to focus on one aspect of this potential change – governance. Chromium already has a high market share of browser engines why not just formalise it? Microsoft has already ditched their engine for Chromium we’re all worried about Mozilla’s health and long-term (or even medium-term) viability, and Apple is only one competition judgement away from having to open up iOS to other engines.Īfter all, the code is what determines what browsers are capable of and therefore it defines the shape of the Web. Why not just converge on a single actual codebase? That way, interop on things like HTML parsing is perfect, but people can still choose the browser with the features (e.g., privacy protections) that they want. On the face of it, there is some sense to it – after all, most W3C and WHATWG specifications have been written algorithmically (rather than declaratively) for a while now. ![]() Update: See responses from Chromium-associated folks below. So my ears perked up when I recently heard from a well-placed contact that “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium-only Web.” While the Chrome team (and friends) have long railed against what they perceive as other browsers’ plodding implementation of cutting-edge extensions to the Web, it’s a pretty big leap to advocate for a Web with only one browser engine. Many argue that browser engine diversity is the backbone of the open Web – assuring not only interoperability and user choice but also a bulwark protecting the Web from centralization. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source. Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. What willwould a Chromium-only Web look like?
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