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by the_third_wave 870 days ago
Well, no, that is not how it works. Blink undoubtedly has an oversize influence on 'web standards' (which are more and more defined as 'whatever Blink does') but that would not be that much of a problem if web developers built and tested their sites against more than just Chrome and Edge (Blink) and Safari (Webkit). History is repeating itself since the same thing happened when Microsoft's Internet Explo[rd]er was the dominant browser and developers only tested against that, putting a 'Best viewed using Internet Explorer' badge on their sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

2 comments

i am aware, i work as webdev and my current project is only Blink compatible. my employer does not want me to waste any time ensuring i support other browsers that are not going to be used.

web should be able to be viewed in any browser and get the same document.

I'm not particularly experienced with web browsers, but whenever I hear people who know what they're talking about, I always leave convinced that this is exactly the problem.

If there are sites that work on Chrome but not Firefox, it just seems to me that either:

- Chrome or Firefox must be breaking web standards

- Web standards must be unspecified for that use case

I have no idea the fix though, the web is so massively complex now, that I don't even know what specifying standards for every use case would involve.

Most web standards are codifying existing functionality, not the other way around.

Chrome/Blink has exclusive APIs, that often are not on track to be a standard.

This makes Safari (Webkit) and Firefox (Gecko) look bad, because they end up having to implement the same APIs, and then, maybe, it's standardized. Browser extension APIs come to mind.

I wish the situation was more neat and tidy, but it's not.