But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.
There's such a strong strain of dark side energy aimed at Google. It just feels so unhinged to me though.
Blink-dev is an amazing mailing list of really good improvements being built intelligently, in well declared fashion, with lots of checks via standards bodies, fully open to discussion. There's very few places on the planet where such good work is so easy to see, and no where that it's so abundant. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev
What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think? What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google wants a competent capable successful healthy web. They want there to be an open, standards & protocols system out there, a connected rich hypermedia internet, because everything else humanity has done with computing is proprietary and trying to rely on someone else's platform is existentially hazardous.
Agreed, that stings. Its extremely visible & painful. I want to believe there was some intent, to make extensions that weren't such an extreme hazard, so that the Google Web Store could be better. But it's obviously just a massive regression in user agency, and miserable, and directly undoes so much of the good that was the web.
I still think this is, like, the one example. Its a bloody awful one though.
Sure there are a lot of people on blink-dev building good thoughtful features
But there are also plenty of people at Google etc who are convinced that advertising is the only way to fund the web and so build features to support that e.g. maintaining 3rd-party cookies, FLEDGE / Flock / Topics (and the rest of the deceptively names Privacy Sandbox)
Advertising is a massive invasion into our personal lives and via ad networks actors (sometimes hostile) can get access to data they have no rights to
> What features has Google killed, do you think?
The problem is more like google can implement whatever feature they want and force it into web standard
> How often has this been a problem, do you think?
very often
> What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google is holding out in a sense that no other people can implement a feature-complete browser. Google is killing the "open standard" web by make the standard impossible.
But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.