If that's the intention you can update your original comment to say the "open" standard, because your definition of standard is not universal. And then I would have instantly agreed because I've experienced this firsthand.
Besides from that technicality though, do you really think that publicly available standards would have changed the situation? I don't think so---Chrome (and to be clear, most other browsers) has supported tons of closed standards anyway.
The standards are open. The problem is that browsers don't implement them 100% the same and they add in their own features. Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue. Different browsers can compete based on ancillary features like Linux distros do.
Your post seems to suggest that open web standards have only recently been developed. You do realize that even 10 years ago there were open, cross-browser standards? Granted, they were more primitive, but it was still perfectly possible to write web apps in them.
I think its best we look at these two ideas seperately:
1. What Google decides to put into their browser.
2. What is the accepted standard
The first does not, and should not be an 'open process' because creative work doesn't do well when made my committees of people with disparate ideologies and motives.
The second is currently adjudicated by the various standard bodies, and is an open process.
You're arguing that Google might become a 'defacto standard' and implying that it would be harmful for the web in general. However, historically the only harm that has come from a defacto standard is if it is either (a) overlaps with an official standard without using the same process or (b) fallen behind an official standard. This is the case with Internet Explorer over the past few years.
On the other hand, the things that IE did innovate on have been copied and become part of official standards (in some way or the other) to the benefit of us all (e.g. XMLHttpRequest Object).
You're missing my point. Assuming that all browsers correctly implement the specification is naive. I don't have an issues with standards themselves existing.
First, it is simply not true that the standardized parts of the web have been fully open. There have been scores of proprietary features, including those with no source availability or even documentation, that have become web standards because browser vendors built or reverse engineered them and web developers used them.
Standardization is a good thing, but you're being a bit selective claiming web standards have always been open and source available. It doesn't always happen that way. It didn't happen that way for image codecs, for example.
Second, plug-ins most certainly are and have been a Web standard.
NPAPI was implemented in multiple browsers from multiple different vendors and has been used by dozens of major software companies and thousands of lesser companies, commercial and open source, for browser integrated features.
That you don't consider de facto standards to be standards doesn't mean they aren't.
If every browser vendor fully and correctly implemented a standard on their first try, you'd have an excellent point.
As it is right now, even people that develop towards standards still have to choose between deviating from those standards to support a wider audience or sticking to the standards and turning away users.
That's not really how it worked pre-2010 when IE had the monopoly.
And for all of Chrome (and Google's) faults, it does seem to be reasonably standards- compliant and even open to experimentation. If they want to spend some of their piles of cash developing new features that other browsers can then adopt and then standardise, I don't see the problem.
If developers choose to use Chrome-only features and their pages break on other browsers, that's on them
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.
Maybe the standards process is broken, in which case that's something that needs fixing. I can't see why the four browser makers can't create their own browser standards.
I think their point is that open standards are good for user experience. Can you imagine if each browser implemented their own hypertext format instead of html? Or Stylesheet language beside css? Or they used their own application protocol instead of http? Or if email wasn't federated; Can you imagine not being able to send emails between networks, so nodamage@gmail.com couldn't email smadge@myuniversity.edu? No matter how good the user experience of these nonstandard protocols and formats were, the user would suffer.
> Yes, the spec is technically open, but there still haven't been any players that work as "well" as Adobe's.
It's a valid point, but a lack of good competition doesn't make the standard any less open; published is published. Consider 2002-2004, when Internet Explorer had nearly 95% market share [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers]. HTML was an open standard, but no viable competitor existed until Firefox was released.
Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
I thought the point of open standards was that you didn't develop for just one browser. Google loves to trumpet its openness a lot, so forgive me for being confused by their motives.
Besides from that technicality though, do you really think that publicly available standards would have changed the situation? I don't think so---Chrome (and to be clear, most other browsers) has supported tons of closed standards anyway.
reply