It's a three player world now, and Google wants a better web, Apple doesn't want a better web, and Mozilla is somewhere in-between, but increasingly playing the

It's a three player world now, and Google wants a better web, Apple doesn't want a better web, and Mozilla is somewhere in-between, but increasingly playing the "privacy above all else" card too. In June 2020, Apple declared a bunch of APIs they will not implement (https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16-web-apis-in-safari-due-to-privacy-concerns/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16...), in a big press blitz trying to make it look like they were some noble hero. Web MIDI (incredible fun), Web USB (very useful for Arduino using folk for example, who have excellent web-based tools), Magnetometer/Ambient Light/Battery/Proximity sensors, WebHID, Device Memory, and that's just the half. A week latter Mozilla put out a similar PR using the exact same Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to try to make themselves look good, to declare themselves virtuous non-implementors. Sure, I agree, not every site should have access to these sensors/capabilities. There are privacy risks of turning them on. But they're also excellent capabilities, that really help users do interesting things. Making users use less-secure less-sandboxed native apps is a downgrade. There should be some security regimes where these web techs can be permitted. For a while Mozilla wasn't even reviewing a sizable chunk of web standards (tracked via the excellent https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/), just declaring them unsafe & leaving the convo. They've at least started going back to old Request for Positions & reviewing a good number of them, even if they don't intend to implement. And there's a good number of standards they have about-faced on, have accepted as real asks. In general, I'm encouraged in seeing a much more interested & engaged & progressive Mozilla emerge quite recently, within the past year or so. I don't know what to do about web standards. Google takes a lot of flak, but who is there to work with? Edge, a Chromium fork, has some pro-web attitude, and indeed drives some new features for Chromium & participates. But there's largely no one but Google+Edge to deal with left in the web standards implementer world. The other browser vendors are broadly against a lot of features, for reasons of malicious-self-interest. Meanwhile Chrome continues to have one of the most open, progressive, interactive, review-seeking, concensus-desiring, most mature & responsible feature-lifecycle processes the world has ever seen. There is nothing else on the planet that gets shipped with such a high bar, such a socially pro-active, such a well planned & democratic process for how the feature gets developed. It's the gold standard of standards. https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#launch-process https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#launch-pr...