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.