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Nothing about that is inherently bad. It leads to bad behaviour, but in and of itself it's not bad. Also, saying that only a big corporation can provide a brows

• userbinator 6y ago
  There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). The complexity of a browser and the complexity of a media player are extremely different. To make a huge generalisation, the latter is far more maths-heavy and less interactive. I have played around with writing decoders for a few codecs, and to a first approximation, they are very similar, so it's not hard to see how something like VLC was created. Media formats are also relatively stable, it's not like a new one comes out every few months. On the other hand, the modern browser has many different components that a very wide breadth of knowledge is necessary, and on top of that, companies like Google are paying a great many people to do what appears to simply be churning the "standards" and continuously increasing their complexity, making it harder for others to even keep up. They invented the absurd oxymoron "living standard". Their common euphemism for that is "pushing the web forward". The great diversity of media players vs. the effective monopoly of browser(s) already shows this huge difference.