On the web, momentum is the standard. I’ve been a web developer since the 90’s and I’ve seen technologies and standards come and go. One constant amongst them i

On the web, momentum is the standard. I’ve been a web developer since the 90’s and I’ve seen technologies and standards come and go. One constant amongst them is the ones with the most momentum become the standard (whether de facto or de jure). Flash was a standard, say what you want about it but browsing the web without a flash plugin, for a time, would have been a diminished experience. Even if it wasn’t an IETF W3C standard DHTML from Microsoft was really incredible at the time. It should have been a standard. There was no momentum behind it so it died. RSS was a standard, now how many of us still use RSS readers? JavaScript, need I say more? PNG was a standard but took forever for browsers to implement because JPG’s were “fine”. You want something to be a standard? Build awesome things quickly and get people to adopt them. You want something to not be a standard? Build something better, but do so quickly. The Chrome team has great momentum, so sometimes when they sneeze the web catches a cold.