Also intriguing as a solution, which is potentially much stabler across revisions (page numbers are unstable), is the text-anchor-fragment feature Chrome introduced a while back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments
It's actually hit ~88% of the market https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments but unfortunately, Firefox remains a holdout* and that's my browser, so I don't use it (although maybe I should just install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-... and try it out - my existing method of making new anchors for annotation purposes is cumbersome).
* Firefox officially is positive on it but no sign of any movement on it: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#scroll-to-tex... https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu
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I love firefox except for a fairly recent feature adopted by chrome, which is the ability to update usb device firmware through a web browser via the Web Serial API. I do a lot…
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- webkit/standards-positions · linked in 22 of the same discussions
- explainers-by-googlers/web-environment-integrity · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- libjxl/jxl-rs · linked in 4 of the same discussions
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| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 30 | 3 | 27 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 1 | 14 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 39 | 6 | 33 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 30 | 3 | 27 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 0 | 29 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 26 | 1 | 25 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Mozilla's Positions on Emerging Web Specifications
See the dashboard for Mozilla's current positions.
What is this Repository?
This repo is where Mozilla decides and documents what it thinks about
emerging technical specifications for the Web. Typically they're draft documents in the
IETF, W3C (including the WICG),
WHATWG, and Ecma TC39, but they could come from
elsewhere too.
Having a clear Mozilla position on these specifications helps us align our thinking and communicate
it clearly to these standards bodies, as well as other browsers.
Implementation status (or even intention) isn't tracked here; see dev-platform.
Possible Specification Positions
We will seek to apply one of three labels to new specifications:
positive - Mozilla regards this work as a potential improvement to the web.
neutral - Mozilla is not convinced of the merits of this work, but does not see any significant negative potential.
negative - Mozilla believes that pursuing this work in its current form would not be good for the web.
These positions will be based on our best assessment of the current state of the specification and
the potential for it to benefit our users and the web as a whole. We consider the intended purpose
and the design fundamentals of each specification. Incomplete documentation, minor issues, or lack of
interoperability testing are not reasons for a negative position, provided that intent is clear.
We might also use the following labels for specifications where we have not formed a position:
defer - Mozilla takes no position on this work.
under consideration - Mozilla has not taken a position on this work and is gathering more information.
What about Firefox?
A position here does not address whether Mozilla will commit resources to developing a
specification. In particular, taking a position does not commit Mozilla to implementing a
specification in Firefox.
Requesting a Position
See our contribution guidelines for information about how you can participate.
Building locally
See DEVELOP.md.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
39 sourcesThe only roadblock I’ve found has been the webserial API, which enables users to flash ESP32/8266 or other devices from webpages. It’s super handy for flashing WLED or ESPHome to devices because you don’t have to install any extra software. As far as I know, it has been marked as a “wontfix” in the Firefox bugtracker as they consider it a harmful feature [0]
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
In Firefox Sync actually worksMozilla are dragging their heels on @scope:
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/implement-css-scope-rul...
Someone who clearly didn't get it was wasting three years time "well actually"ing everything. The latest news is "it's worth prototyping". Meanwhile Chrome has released it(steam rolled?) and Safari has it in tech preview.
I question if FireFox has the resources to keep up with the pace of the modern web.
In CSS Is Fun AgainMozilla's Position on CSS Scope
1 points · Open discussionYeah, scoped css is key to reducing all sorts of complexity.
The BEM approach in all is craziness is basically an attempt at scoping. And then tailwind too is trying to solve many if the same problems, from the opposite direction. In both cases people end up using their component frameworks and JavaScript libraries to build new abstractions atop the hacks to try and scope css, and the pile grows.
Real scoped css with @scope has actually landed in latest Chrome and Safari, but Firefox are dragging their feet.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/at-scope
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472
In CSS Is Fun AgainMozilla to Support Trusted Types
7 points · Open discussionWeb Bluetooth is not a standard and is not on track to ever become a standard, e.g. "This specification was published by the Web Bluetooth Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track."
It is also not supported on any version of Firefox, for the same reasons. Here's Mozilla's "considered harmful" GitHub issue. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95
In QEMU-iOS, an emulator for legacy Apple devicesIt's not "purely hypothetical." It's reckless and irresponsible of you to spread misinformation like that based on wishful thinking.
WebUSB made it possible to work around Yubikey phishing protection [1]. WebMIDI allows websites to overwrite device firmware, which is a dangerous capability that could result in a sandbox escape [2]. Granting a website WebNFC permissions makes it possible to read TOTP tokens stored on Yubikeys at any point later on [3], which is worrying because ordinary users can't possibly deduce that from permission prompts. Battery Status API was heavily abused for fingerprinting by the time it was removed from Firefox [4]. I'm amazed that you dismissed that as a "hypothetical" concern, because if anything, it's the legitimate uses of the API that was hypothetical [5]. Uber used it to "inflate Uber prices for desperate
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users with low batteries." [5] [6].
But one don't even need theses examples to see how bad theses APIs are. Hardware are mostly designed to work with local applications. To expose them to websites is a fundamentally flawed idea. Google justifies them by adding permission prompts each time a problem emerges, but users can't possibly be expected to be fully aware of the consequences of allowing raw hardware access to websites with mere dialogs that they blindly click through.
And oh I wish there were only 3 bad APIs like you hinted. There are more than that. WebMIDI, WebNFC, WebSerial, WebHID, Generic Sensor API, File System Access, Low-level Sockets API, Network Information API, and the list goes on.
These aren't isolated examples. It's part of a broader pattern where Google ships an anti-feature, asks for "feedback" which means nothing because "devs already depend on it," and "standardizes" it despite opposition from the remaining browser vendors [7] [8].
I’ll judge browser security based on a broad set of examples rather than a cherry-picked one every time.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-yubikey-phishing-webusb/
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58
[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/238
[4]: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/battery-s...
[5]: https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/5U8NHoUY-...
[6]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/05/25/uber-low...
[7]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
[8]: https://twitter.com/rich_harris/status/1220412711768666114
Request for Position: WebUSB API
4 points · Open discussionBrotli has two major advantages. First it encodes to the same well known gzip format, so rolling it out didn't require new clients. Second, it didn't require dictionary support.
Where-as if you look at Mozilla's standards-positions for zstd, they defer because it requires a compression dictionary to encode & Moz didn't want to have to "standardize" one specific dictionary. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/105
In Chrome feature: Compression dictionary transport with Shared BrotliI don't mean to support or refuse the author's main points or analysis, but you might like to know that the Chrome team is currently working towards shipping the Topics API. I have strong opinions about it but I will try not to editorialize.
My high-level understanding is that they're going to run an ML model over your browsing history (locally on your device) to build a list of "topics" that you care about. Sites you browse can use the Topics API to pull a set of these interests from the browser to show you "relevant" ads. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this standard.
https://privacysandbox.com/proposals/topics/
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622
In Blocked by Cloudflare> On its HN submission (referencing the wrong URL) he defends against criticism [1]
And it's a very weak defence. There are great rebuttals to whatever he writes in there.
I mean, he rants that HTML failed, and then literally proposes "By providing low-level primitives instead, applications could ship with their own implementations of high-level concepts like layout, widgets, and gestures, enabling a much richer set of interactions and custom experiences with much less effort on the part of the developer."
Has he tried to implement any of those from scratch using only low-level primitives? How is it "much less effort on the developer"?
In general it just reads like a justification for Flutter:
"This API alone is not useful for application developers, since it provides no high-level primitives. However, as with other platforms, powerful f
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rameworks will be developed to target this set of APIs. A proof of concept already exists in Flutter"
Why not provide high-level powerful primitives out of the box? Oh, then Flutter wouldn't have a reason to exist.
---
As a side note: WebHID is a Chrome-only non-standard. They literally dumped a non-spec onto other browser vendors, shipped it to prod, and then "updated" the spec later: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
I figured I’d take a minute to try and find the proposal itself, so I could see what the proponents considered the virtues of this to be.
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
I stopped reading after the explainer’s intro section. The first example is making it easier for websites to sell adds (lmao) and the other 3 are extremely questionable whether if the proposed remedy even helps. And it’s presented as a benevolent alternative to browser fingerprinting, as if we must choose between these two awful choices. It’s an absolute joke of a proposal.
In The Right to Lie and Google’s “Web Environment Integrity”> You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial.
And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this.
As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3]
Do not assume any good inten
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t on Google's part when it comes to Google's business interests. Their intent is always malicious until proven otherwise. And there have been fewer and fewer cases when they have been proven otherwise.
[1] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5680923054964736
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622
[3] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics
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