It's a standard platform, but the platform itself is not standardized, which is the point I think GP was making. The problem isn't that people don't think the web is a standard platform, but that it's hard to quantify what it means to support the web as a platform because of conflicting implementations. Standardization is ostensibly supposed to help with that, but it obviously doesn't perfectly reflect what browsers will actually support. Ultimately it the question comes down to whether people can actually use the browser with the websites they want to connect to, but that's not something that can be quantified easily due to it depending on what features websites are using and which features a browser has implemented, and network effects can make it hard to pin down what's expected at any given time, which is where all of these "imperfect" metrics like calculating some score based on the standards is coming from.

> At this point the web is a de facto standard platform.

Yes, the web is a standard platform, Blink is not. Google can’t just spit out any old privacy-violating, insecure garbage specification and call it a web standard just because it’s what they want to build. Google don’t unilaterally decide what the web is.

> there are plenty of features that they have endorsed that browser vendors didn't bother with.

Something can’t become a web standard unless there are two independent implementations. It’s part of the standardisation process. It also disqualifies things like Web NFC and WebUSB from being web standards because Google couldn’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement them.

I think you misunderstood (or don't know what "de facto" means).

> Google don’t unilaterally decide what the web is.

They absolutely do.

They don’t. We are close to that point, yes, which is why it’s so important to clearly delineate what is a web standard reached through consensus from what is Google trying to push their stuff through regardless.

If something doesn’t work in Safari or Firefox then web developers normally still hold back, so they aren’t de facto standards. We aren’t quite at the point we were when IE dominated the web. But there is a growing number of developers who blame other rendering engines for not blindly going along with whatever Google says, and that needs to be stopped in its tracks not accepted.

> then web developers normally still hold back

It takes just a few weeks on hn to see it's not true and there are a few devs who will point to the usage stats and not care about Firefox. For safari, many people just don't have access to it, so they'll never test in the first place.

Hacker News is not representative of the typical case. There are very few professional web developers who ignore Safari – a huge number of people surf on mobile and a huge proportion of mobile users are Safari, so any developer ignoring them isn’t doing a very good job. All web developers have access to Safari – if they don’t use macOS then they use a tool like BrowserStack to test in Safari. This is a standard part of a web developer’s toolchain.