[fanpuns]

This isn't really my area of expertise so if this already exists feel free to educate me.

Would it be possible to have a generic browser that isnt controlled by any vendor, but perhaps contributed to by all of them, which could be used as a dev standard? It doesn't even have to be available to users, just devs. Vendors could still develop their browsers any way they want, but when output diverges from this kit, they would at least know it. As a dev you could use this as your test kit and know that if it works here, it works everywhere.

I could see problems with this being backwards compatible, but at the point where the major vendors sign on, all future releases would compatible (and eventually all releases as older versions are retired).

I suppose that perhaps though this is already accomplished by Chrome, but it seems less than ideal for many reasons.

[Scarblac]

I think that would in effect become just another browser developers need to test with.

Vendor browsers will miss features compared to it, and have extra features, and do some things a bit different. Developers wouldn't consider it "the dev standard" since it wouldn't be used by many people, and what matters is that your users can use what you meant them to use.

[foobarchu]

The big problem with this idea is that different browsers use different rendering engines. Not everyone uses webkit. If the test suite is built on webkit, then you can't say it'll work under Firefox or Edge, because a critical component is different.

[TheAdamAndChe]

> Would it be possible to have a generic browser that isnt controlled by any vendor, but perhaps contributed to by all of them, which could be used as a dev standard?

It's possible, but there's no financial incentive for them to do so, so it's incredibly unlikely. Open source browsers already exist, but because a company wouldn't earn money from contributing, they won't do it.

It's also unlikely that businesses will start building websites for different browsers. Chrome is currently the industry standard, and to maximize viewers while minimizing development cost, developing for Chrome will capture most of the market share.

[smichel17]

I'm not sure how this differs meanibgfully from web standards as published by the w3c.

[isleyaardvark]

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/