Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with.
We are at an impasse. The standards cannot be deprecated because they are used all over the web, and because they are used all over the web a new browser maker has little choice except forking chromium or firefox. Even microsoft couldn’t afford to keep adding all the standards to their browser engine. Normally the solution for a messy overgrown implementation is a grand reboot. But we can’t do a grand reboot of the web because we cannot get rid of the legacy. The only viable strategy I see to have real browser engine diversity without giving up on compatibility is moving as much of the standards implementation as possible into JS modules, so new browser makers can start with a small engine that loads the publicly hosted standards modules.
>Building a browser for the modern standards-based web is effectively impossible, because it costs too much, takes too long, and requires a standing army to keep up with.
I wonder which company grew their browser marketshare through ruthless advertising on their already-a-monopoly search engine, then began to compete with the other browsers by purposefully breaking their websites on other browsers (all by accident of course, hundreds of times), then began to implement their websites with alpha versions of their proposed web standards that only their browser properly implemented, leaving other browsers with a dreadful polyfill that had horrible performance on purpose, only to then basically force their proposals through the web standards body that they had made because they couldn't control the W3C, leaving everyone having to follow such great APIs as WebUSB or other badly-implemented-but-only-by-them flavor of the day API, all the way to forcing dreadful protocols like QUIC and HTTP/3, justified by their need to save up three bytes per request and making the user's experience better while they serve 2MB of tracking javascript and ads through DNS-cloaked servers.
I think the name was like... Gogle ? Golgool ? Can't remember.
That is the standardization process. The W3C won't ratify a standard that does not have draft implementations in the wild.
Making it the default and making the fallback only reasonably accessible by installing an extension that will rewrite your links (that all send back to the alpha-using version), causing every browser that isn't Chrome to slow down to a crawl while you happily display a "Hey, did you know the web is faster with Chrome?" isn't working through the standardization process, it is weaponizing it to sabotage other browsers.