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.

QUIC. HTTP/3. WebP. And more in this comment thread.

Yep, QUIC is what I was thinking about when I wrote my additional comment, but there are many examples, as others have pointed out.

push notifications, webgpu and webusb are examples of chrome being a reference implementation and using things for their services while simultaneously pushing the standard.

Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.

WebGPU is the only one of those I’ve really followed, but hasn’t that had a huge amount of input and changes due to other voices in the working group? That seems to contradict the simplistic picture painted above of Google just dictating standards to the industry.

Would webgpu exist at all if Chrome hadn’t just pushed through with an implementation?

Who knows.

Not us, we’ll never know.

To add insult to injury, we probably would have gotten WebGL 2.0 Compute, which was initially done by Intel, if Chrome had not refused to ship it on Chrome, arguing that WebGPU was right around the corner, and it would take too much space, this was about 5 years ago.

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.

Not true about webgpu, but true about some APIs in Google's project-fugu

We had very few products that use the fugu apis., and I don't believe we were the first to ship them either in a production website.

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.

But the other browsers objected yet Chrome still shipped them

Anytime you see someone on HN lamenting that Safari is the new IE because it doesn't implement something, 99.9% of the time it's Chrome-only non-standards.

- 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

It happens every single time. This isn't some well kept industry secret

Any serious antitrust process would break it in a separate company.

Would that change anything? If you have a separate company who owns a 90% market share browser, they can keep ignoring standards just fine

If Google websites break on Safari, users will stop using Google before they stop using an iPhone. They will blame Google as well. Safari has refused to implement standards multiple times.

If people want specifics:

https://xcancel.com/rich_harris/status/1220412711768666114