RErektide·May 12, 2023
PPK (whom you cite) is an extreme conservative for the web, as are many many forces about.
I don't think it's possible to have this conversation. People have a deep belief about what they want from the web, and a ton of people want it small & tiny & less than it is.
People are desperate to believe Google has some huge weird agenda. The agenda seems pretty obvious: build a great hypermedium. Build the best protocol for information the world has. Because Google already is everywhere, already has the best search engine, already has a great first party relationship with users, as they start every journey into the web. Google' agenda isn't to block out or hurt other people, it's to be better & do better than all the native apps, to make the connected online experience simply better.
And they're winning. They're doing it: they're making the con
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nected hypermedia world the best option for computing, by having great capabilities, by making it easy for webdevs to do amazing things quickly, by having a good low-level capabilities that endless frameworks can arrange as they see fit, pursuant to the ideals of the Extensible Web Manifesto. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto
They're not being mean or unfair at all. Chrome has the most fair, reasonable, upstream-first, pro-social way of developing software the world has ever seen. https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/ is higher responsibility, more responsive & shared-early, with more safeguards than almost everyone else on the planet, and they do it in public. Their works are specified, they seek review early, they get architecture & security group reviews. It's unprecedented in extreme how far Google goes to make sure web development is open.
But people just cannot possibly imagine there's not some secret cause. Everything is met with hostility, weird personal attacks, & debasement. You basically never hear anyone who is critical but also reasonable or sympathetic or understanding: this is the tell. Almost all the negative feedback against Google & Chrome is to the wall outrage, is 100% on one side, lacking in nuance or balance. There's no recognition of good, no appreciation of the attempt at process. This is a cruel & savage thing the internet has ganged up to do, to be so lopsidedly angry and mean, with so little willingness to recognize optimism, growth, hope, trying, and effort, which have already been such an amazing boon to us.