Web developers and Google's own apps are increasingly diverging from open web ethos by optimizing for Google-developed standards that first ship in Chrome
Chrome-only sites are a problem — Chrome is now the most popular browser across all devices, thanks to Android's popularity … Tweets: @chartier , @tomstuart , @mattrosoff , @dhh , @vivaldibrowser , and @ow Tweets: David Chartier / @chartier : Yep. And it's ridiculous, especially for a company that claims it wants to “organize the world's information and make it universally* accessible and useful.” * Whereby ‘universal’ we mean everyone probably downloaded Chrome already https://www.theverge.com/... Tom Stuart / @tomstuart : “That often means Google is the first to ship with these standards, because the company has been advocating for them. Mix that together with a lot of developers using Chrome for web development and the issues are obvious.” https://www.theverge.com/... Matt Rosoff / @mattrosoff : Not surprising, still depressing. Big dominant company acting like big dominant company. Standards schmandards. http://www.theverge.com/... @dhh : Consider it your duty as a fan of the open web to use another browser than Chrome, at least part of the time. It's disgraceful of Google to release Chrome-only sites. Don't reward them. http://www.theverge.com/... Vivaldi / @vivaldibrowser : “Chrome now has the type of dominance that Internet Explorer once did, and we're starting to see Google's own apps diverge from supporting web standards much in the same way Microsoft did a decade and a half ago” / via @verge: http://www.theverge.com/... @ow : I don't agree with this viewpoint, but it is an issue. Problem isn't so much that Chrome is bad in any way, but more that their cadence is insanely fast and no competing browsers can keep up - web devs would rather use the newer stuff http://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge's report lands at the moment Chrome has become the most popular browser across all devices on the back of Android, and developers plus Google's own apps are shipping features built to Google-developed standards that debut in Chrome first. Critics like David Chartier and Tom Stuart read that as a direct contradiction of Google's stated mission of universal access — 'universal' now effectively meaning 'everyone already downloaded Chrome.'
The piece is the opening move in an arc the corpus keeps extending: by mid-2019 analysts were warning about Google's effective power over the web via Chrome and Chromium, and by 2020 the framing had hardened into Google replicating a WeChat- and Facebook-style walled garden on the web, powered by Chrome, Android, and AdWords together.
First-order effects
- Users of non-Chromium browsers — Vivaldi among those quoted in the reaction — encounter sites and Google apps that break or degrade outside Chrome, making engine choice a functional decision rather than a preference.
- Web developers face pressure to target Chrome-first APIs, since Google ships its own standards before other engines implement them.
Second-order effects
- Rival browser makers are pushed toward adopting Chromium itself rather than fighting for parity in their own engines, accelerating the consolidation Bloomberg flagged around Chrome and its open-source sibling.
- Apple's counter-position cuts both ways: Safari's slow feature adoption and refusal to engage contentious API proposals give developers yet another reason to standardize on what Chrome supports, as later coverage of Safari's lag harming the web documents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the web converges on a de facto single-engine platform where 'standards' are whatever one vendor ships first — the same dynamic that made Internet Explorer dominant, but with Google holding the position across desktop and mobile via Android.
- The endpoint sketched in the corpus is structural: a walled-garden web controlled through browser, OS, and ad-stack chokepoints, with independent engines like Mozilla's marginalized and even Apple's WebKit model attacked from the other flank as an iOS monopoly that drains the web of future potential.
The trend: Browser competition is collapsing into engine monoculture, with whoever controls the dominant engine — Chrome today, WebKit on iOS — setting de facto web standards instead of multi-vendor bodies.