A lot of people forget that the only browser used by most everyone was IE and that was stagnant and smelly as they come. Firefox nudged the web forward when it was introduced, and made quite a splash on its own by capturing about a fourth to a third of usage from IE, but a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.
And that was a good thing. However, I regrettably find Google now pushing and pulling the rest of us harder than we want or need. Now that they are in the lead, they give the impression they are the writer of the scrolls. (In fact, a Google employee is the editor of HTML.)
Now, one cannot complain too much. Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful, but too many developers are turning first to them for what to do and how to do things rather than seeing the whole forest.
> Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful
Only time will tell.
Personally I'm not that grateful to Google. Like you said, it all started out as a good thing - rather innocent. And of course it turned to "profit at all cost" soon after that.
IMHO most people not quite understand the trade-offs involving technology choice. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple (in no particular order) take advantage of that in the interest of their stakeholders. Violating their user's freedom and privacy along the way.
Conflating freedom and privacy to lump them all in together is a bit unfair I feel.
Apple for example is a privacy leader. Easier to secure their walled garden perhaps and they have their own pros and cons but they shouldn’t be in a set with google, Facebook and to a lesser extent, MS.
The power of a company like Google can be great when harnessed appropriately. When Chrome was the new kid on the block, they had every incentive to be compatible, faster, better, more flexible, etc. Now that they are the leader, their incentives are very different. I'm very concerned about the rapid move away from straightforward text-based protocols to opaque binary protocols. Yes the performance is better, but the protocol itself is far less flexible, harder to troubleshoot, and harder to build on. The whole reason HTTP took off was because it was simple, human-readable, and easy to implement, and built on TCP which was well understood and simple. It was a liberating change from the rigid, corporate, non-standard binary protocols coming from the Microsofts and IBMs and Oracles of the world. There are plenty of ways HTTP/1.1 could have been improved for better performance without sacrificing its fundamental openness. But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols. Performance on poorly designed sites that load tens of megabytes of crap from hundreds of URLs on each page load is the hook Google is using to push us back into what I consider a dark age of network communication. But it doesn't have to be this way.
> But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols.
This whole BINARY vs. PLAINTEXT paradox where the binary tends to be more efficient where the plaintext more open and intermediate ground between humans and machines, for me can be solved in a optimal way where the final output is always binary, but where you can assist humans with plaintext latter.
Just look how many beautiful and expressive computer languages we have now where the output is a pure obscure binary.
So i think if you follow this path you can have the best of both worlds. And because of that i tend to disagree with your point of view, where the default must be plaintext.. The layered approach is probably much more sophisticated and less amateurish when you care about waste of CPU cycles and RAM memory, without the need to have only a obscure and opaque representation.
Is it really ? I was under the impression that a large influence and a precursor to wasm was NaCL from Chrome along with ASM.js from Mozilla. Also Microsoft seems to be very involved in WASM.
If they're not all involved, it won't work, but firefox really lead asm.js, which was the actual precursor to webassembly. NaCL was more like a competitor that tried to do something similar but never got the kind of mainstream adoption needed for cross-browser support.
> a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.
It wasn't Google that dethroned Microsoft, it was Apple. The combination of Microsoft neglecting Mac, and the resurgence of Apple were the primary drivers away from IE. Chrome had almost nothing at all to do with it, they just out maneuver Apple and Mozilla to steal the crown form the fallen king.
In the late 90s IE was king and many websites demanded it. Netscape lost the browser wars and opensourced Communicator under Mozilla in 1998. Mozilla was in no position to compete with Microsoft so it instead pushed for standards compliance.
Internet Explorer 4 on Mac and PC were based on the same code but when IE5 launched in 1998, it wasn't available on Mac. When it did eventually land, IE5 for Mac was based on a different code base and rendering engine. This caused a problem for Apple because their platform was no longer on feature parity with the PC when it came to the Internet. IE in general was slow but IE5 on the Mac was worse.
Apple announced Safari at Macworld in early 2003 with a big emphasis on performance, during the demo Steve Jobs spent 30 seconds closing and reopening the browser to drive home the fact that it loaded fast. Apple went to great lengths to make Safari standards compliant and fast but they went one step further and worked with the most popular websites around to make sure they too were standards compliant too.
Around the same time Apple brought Safari out of Beta at the 2003 WWDC, Mozilla released Phoenix (Firefox) with an emphasis on standards compliance and performance. This set the stage because Apple and Mozilla were now aligned in a common goal, to make the web fast and standards compliant, and neither of them registered on Microsoft's radar.
It was Apple's push for the adoption of standards compliance by major websites that allowed Firefox to capture 25% of the PC market and by the time Microsoft responded with IE7 in 2006, it was already too late. Microsoft had lost, the world had decided that IE was garbage and there was nothing they could do to save the sinking ship.
Apple saw this power void IE left and so in addition to launching full Safari on the iPhone in 2007, they also launched Safari for Windows in a bid to become the dominate browser on all the major platforms. Unfortunately Google saw that same vacancy but Google was the default search engine in Safari and in Firefox. Apple and Mozilla were contractually obligated to promote Google Search so in 2008 when Chrome was launched, there was nothing they could do to stop Google promoting Chrome on google.com.
When Chrome arrived in 2008 it touted compatibility with Safari and adherence to standards compliance but the killer feature was stability. At the time all browsers crashed, it was accepted as an eventuality. It was so bad that Session Restore had been touted as a major feature. Chrome launched with multi-process isolation so that when something crashed, it didn't bring down the whole browser. Google's other innovations were rapid development cycles and background updates. This meant their browser always had the latest features and their users were always up to date. It took Mozilla years to catch up, Apple still has not.
And that was a good thing. However, I regrettably find Google now pushing and pulling the rest of us harder than we want or need. Now that they are in the lead, they give the impression they are the writer of the scrolls. (In fact, a Google employee is the editor of HTML.)
Now, one cannot complain too much. Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful, but too many developers are turning first to them for what to do and how to do things rather than seeing the whole forest.