Chris Krycho has written an excellent post about how us fickle web developers might sometimes confuse features that land in one browser as being “the future of the web.” However, Chris argues that there’s more than one browser’s vision of the web that we should care about:
No single company gets to dominate the others in terms of setting the agenda for the web. Not Firefox, with its development and advocacy of WebAssembly, dear to my heart though that is. Not Microsoft and the IE/Edge team, with its proposal of the CSS grid spec in 2011, sad though I am that it languished for as long as it did. Not Apple, with its pitch for concurrent JavaScript. And not—however good its developer relations team is—Chrome, with any of the many ideas it’s constantly trying out, including PWAs.
It’s also worth recognizing how these decisions aren’t, in almost any case, unalloyed pushes for “the future of the web.” They reflect business priorities, just like any other technical prioritization.
I particularly like Chris’ last point about business priorities because I think it’s quite easy to forget that browser manufacturers aren’t making the web a better place out of sheer kindness; they’re companies with investors and incentives that might not always align with other companies’ objectives.
