If you've ever wondered if there's anything to the critique that some browsers "ship whatever they want" or "don't follow standandards", here's the long-form explanation of why those arguments fail on their own terms:

Infrequently Noted

Web Standards and the Fall of the House of Iamus - Infrequently Noted

Working Groups do not invent the future, nor do they hand down revealed truths by divining entrails like prophets of the House of Iamus. In practic...

Strongly agree with a good 3/4 of this by @Cory Doctorow:

Pluralistic: The worst possible antitrust outcome (03 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The best outcome would have been for Chrome and Android to have been spun out into non-profits, endowed with the cash Google has been paying Apple to avoid any more competition across apps/search/web. It has not helped matters that neither DOJ, nor most civil society orgs (save @Open Web Advocacy), could see through private-equity-adjacent logic to understand the public interest in these software projects. Own goals all around.

Thanks to 20+ years of cooperation via standards, most web devs are insulated from the reality that competition (or the threat of it) makes standards possible. It's a shock to recognise that Apple has broken the system so thoroughly that SDOs themselves are at risk:

Infrequently Noted

Apple's Assault on Standards - Infrequently Noted

By subverting the voluntary nature of open standards, Apple has defanged them as tools that users might use against the totalising power of native ...

One assumption made web standards possible: competitors are free to ship differing ideas when they disagree. Until iOS, this was the norm. Apple's ban on competing browser engines changed that, and Cupertino is poisoning the roots of the tree that gave the web life:

Infrequently Noted

Apple's Assault on Standards - Infrequently Noted

By subverting the voluntary nature of open standards, Apple has defanged them as tools that users might use against the totalising power of native ...

Cory Doctorow (@Cory Doctorow) quipped: *"An 'app' is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it."*,[1] but the native rot goes deeper. Remember when FB rebuffed Apple's offer it couldn't refuse?[2] Knock me over with a feather, the "privacy wars" were all for show:

Infrequently Noted

Apple vs. Facebook is Kayfabe - Infrequently Noted

Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is Facebook's chauffeur; holding Zuck's coat while Facebook wantonly surveils iPh...

[1]:

Pluralistic: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies (12 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

[2]: https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-facebook-almost-worked-together_id141910

I want you, a tech-literate person, to internalize one deep fact: Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is (and always was) Facebook's chauffeur; holding its coat while it surveilled everyone. How to be sure? IABs:

Open Web Advocacy

In-App Browsers: The worst erosion of user choice you haven

Apple facilitates mass surveillance through native apps from Facebook, both directly from in-app activity, but much more insidiously, through "in-app browsers" that FB tacks onto every link you tap. And these things are *rank*.

Several times over the course of my career, specific companies have gummed up the works in web standards, leaving it to everyone else to figure that out they weren't on board with the web continuing to progress. It's bad, and we should learn to spot it:

Infrequently Noted

How Do Committees Fail To Invent? - Infrequently Noted

Conway's Law is generally discussed in the context of organisations trying to solve a problem. But what if there are defectors? And what if they co...

An extremely cool ping/pong of ideas teasing out what good browsers can do with almost no code in these posts:

1KB JS Numbers Station – Terence Eden’s Blog

dbushell.com

Play it, Sam. Play “Speech Synthesis”

The one where I make the web browser read it for me

I spent hours and hours trawling through the sites of some of the world's best web developers, and despite the horrors I regularly experience in my daily work in Big JavaScript Territory, what I saw left me hopeful:

Infrequently Noted

Links? Links! - Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

Just published a new section on my site to capture references to a lot of the essential web performance and fundamentals-oriented webdev resources I find myself continually directing folks to. Also, lots and lots of links to blogs I love:

Infrequently Noted

Links, Resources, and Humans of Note - Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.