zlacker

>>dochtm+(OP)
We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era.

Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google.

In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years.

Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.

>>paol+B6
We've also seen how it looks like with Google, with a lot of features that later did become standardized - or obsolete - being implemented in either Chrome, or in their Gears addon (http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html), which led to application caches, IndexedDB, File API, geolocation, web workers, notifications, etc.

Oh and early on they had URL prefetching, but that led to badly written web interfaces from executing operations that shouldn't happen.