[tolmasky]

The response was more in regards to the grand-OP's desire for a lower level extensible runtime and lamentation about plugins, more than a comparison to standards now that I think about it. In other words, which web is more open:

1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.).

or

2. One in which perhaps all the browsers were closed source, but adding new features to any such browser really was just a matter of referencing a script on a web page?

The questions is more or less only useful as a thought experiment by this point of course, and in particular I don't feel that the "standards" process was ever particularly open to begin with, so I don't think things have, or will, necessarily get much worse.

[kenjackson]

I like how you've stated it, and made my original premise less confrontational and more of a question about what you value as "open".