It is nuts, when you think about how much a browser does, it is a crazy feat.

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.

The government(s) need to force Google to obey web standards that are set by an industry consortium. One that also has small player participation as a requirement.

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.

The government and most voters don't even know what a file is. They can't even vote in favor of their own basic needs like health care. Do you really think this band of incompetents should be empowered to strangle innovation?

There are plenty of experts in our industry willing to help the government pen regulations. I'd gladly volunteer.

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.

> There are plenty of experts in our industry willing to help the government pen regulations. I'd gladly volunteer.

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...

We have to let Google do whatever they want, lest we strangle innovation. The people we trust to literally run the country, to build, operate, and maintain nuclear weapons and submarines - they can't be trusted with things like files.

Google mostly does obey web standards that are set by an industry consortium (WHATWG, W3C, or in the case of JavaScript EMCA).

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.

> 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.

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.

> Chrome can push back against proposals

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

OTOH, are all of the browsers supposed to move in lock step? Is chrome supposed to wait for everyone else's approval before launching any kind of feature?

Right. There are a number of features Chrome has that others don't that make it viable for a kiosk. Right now it's the only one.

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.

And one of the browsers is maintained by an OS vendor that benefits from the lock-in that comes from native apps and rent seeking from their app store. I'm sure they would love to control the pace of browser innovation by just deciding not to implement certain features.

I wouldn't say stuff like Manifest V2 is "new features". A lot of what Chrome is pushing is just to support its commercial interests.

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

Manifest v2 was having the same privacy guarantees as Safari and it broke a lot of people’s brains. Even if we assume it’s a secret way to neuter ad blockers even though they are fine, it does not imply we have IE or anything close. I’m kinda happy people take positions like these because they keep companies honesty but it’s completely irrational.

I think the word "standard" carries a certain meaning.

>It is nuts, when you think about how much a browser does, it is a crazy feat

At this point a modern browser is basically an operating system.

Definitely... IF they keep this up, they will be a real contender by the end of 2027. I keep saying I'd like to see a similar push for Servo though... since it's probably the next most feature-rich engine option. It really needs a corresponding browser project to go along side it though, since FF/Mozilla isn't that interested.

It looks like Amazon has people looking at Servo integration in GTK: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2025/10/01/servo-gtk/

I believe this would be Verso: https://github.com/versotile-org/verso

That repo is a mirror of the GitLab version.

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...

But how to pass tests securely, is completely different problem. This is conformance testing. But impressive regardless.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean by how to pass tests securely? It doesn't read like you mean security tests but otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.

Conformance testing means that you meet certain specifications. It tells nothing about how you handle data which is different from the specs or random data; or in other words, the root of most security problems.

> Super impressive that an independent, non-corpo project has gotten this far this quickly.

Well, it could be that AI actually speeds up development, who knows.

Data so far says that it doesn't https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

Are they really non-corpo? I remember seeing some corpos bankrolling it?

And in that sense, is it better than Gecko with firefox, which is non-profit?

I don't remember that; maybe you can look it up?

Ladybird is still far from usable or fast enough to even start comparing it to Gecko.

It says here: https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

Shopify, CloudFlare, and others.

Okay. Seems more diversified than Mozilla at least, with its huge dependency on Google's search bar.

cloudflare is sponsoring. says it all.

What does that say?

It says that there's funding, which goes much further than hobbyists could.

I know what you meant by "non corpo", but the Ladybird organization is literally a corporation: https://ladybird.org/assets/documents/public-records/2024-03...

A nonprofit corporation