Browsers

Also if alternate browsers mindshare dips too far they could argue it was too much effort to support such a small part of the market.

"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?"

This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further.

And this is only one case.

Why? Because the W3C is a factory the never stops churning out specs.

It's quite telling that even Microsoft was not able to keep-up with the complexity and decided to piggy-back on the biggest investor.

If we want less mono-culture, the first thing to do is to bring the complexity down to something manageable.

Well, Microsoft opting for Chromium will be a big win for Google. As Google has a strong hold on Android mobile user base, for many non-technical users what comes by default is the first browser (may be best browser). Google taps that privilege/monopoly/advantage to their use. Those who comfortably use Chrome in mobile device will obviously opt for Chrome in desktop as well. Because it simplifies their mental model of browser comfort. Microsoft might have done the same thing for decades, but it has been trying to come out of that image for the past of couple of years. IMHO Microsoft is no more an evil. I won't blame Google if it plays fair with respect to its Chrome browser in Android. In many Android phones we can't uninstall Chrome. If we use Chrome actively in Android, it pushes lot of notifications (they will say serving the user with relevant content, but to me its a ad/handle which intend to make me see pages where ads are again controlled by Google). Even in Desktop when i open Google's any of the services using browser other than Chrome, at least in the third world where i live, it suggests me to "Switch to Chrome". Nobody is forcing anyone. But it is very essential to tell the world that there is something better available.

The recent better one from Firefox: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...

>Maybe it is a bad idea in general to allow a remote page write pixels to your screen: images, videos, text and now applications

Computers have been doing this since the 60s, at least, in some form or another. I don't think you want to live in a world where the very idea of networks is considered harmful. Where all of the software you consume has to be loaded from physical media and the internet and any network connected device just doesn't exist. You couldn't even have cellphones.

We don't need a "whitelist" browser - you simply choosing not to visit sites you don't want to visit is already a sufficient whitelist. Having "specifications" that websites and authors would have to enforce based on content would make the web less free.

Websites are software. Software authors have the right and the freedom to write whatever they like, any way they choose, up to and including the UI. The Guardian being able to make their own decisions about how to implement the web versions of a "newspaper" - including design choices which might differentiate them from USA Today, is part and parcel the same sort of freedom that any author of any work, software, literary, music, what have you, enjoys. That HTML, CSS and JS don't step over the line from describing content to making editorial decisions about content is a feature, not a bug.