W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis
The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that's even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.
Context & Ripple Effects
The warning lands three years after Apple won a higher-profile seat in HTML standardization, a period when the browser vendors most shaping the web spec were also the ones shipping its dominant mobile implementations. The co-chair's argument inverts the usual IE-era framing: instead of one laggard desktop browser holding the web back, two companies now control the mobile browsers where most new web usage happens — and each has an app store business that competes with the open web.
The story traveled widely for a standards-body complaint, picked up the same day by The Verge, Electronista, Tim Anderson's ITWriting, and the co-chair's own blog — a sign the developer community was already primed to read mobile WebKit fragmentation as a governance problem, not just a technical one.
First-order effects
- Web developers building HTML5 apps for iOS and Android face a de facto dual-vendor standard set by Apple's Safari and Google's Android browser, with the W3C's leverage limited to moral pressure on two companies whose priorities lie with native platforms.
Second-order effects
- Independent browser makers such as Mozilla and Opera, absent from the mobile duopoly, lose the distribution position that made them credible standards enforcers on the desktop, weakening any counterweight to Apple- and Google-defined behavior.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the neutral browser cedes its role as the web's primary platform to operating systems controlled by Apple and Google, and standards bodies' relevance comes to depend on the goodwill of the very gatekeepers they are meant to check.
The trend: Mobile platform owners are replacing the browser-as-neutral-platform with OS-controlled distribution, shifting web standards power from committees to the two companies that ship the dominant mobile engines.