The dream of the modern web is the concept of a single standard/platform that is used for all user facing software. This is a flawed idea and this article demonstrates one of the biggest reasons for that. By definition, features only become part of open web standards if all the main players agree to them. All the players have financial and political incentives to block various things. Corporations can block something that you want to use even though you have no relationship with that corporation. In a capitalist system you have very little leverage against a corporation that you have no financial relationship with. What are you going to do: stop buying the [Apple/Google/Microsoft] products that you already don't use? What's left is people writing angry impotent blog posts against companies that don't care about them in the least.
The list of proposed standards that have been blocked/delayed by one of more of the big browsers is huge. Blocking proposed standards isn't uncommon, if anything it's the norm. mathml, websql, pointer events, h264 video, nacl, flexbox, webgl, jpeg2000, webm, mp3, ogg vorbis, theora, webp etc etc.
Because of its origins as a way of displaying untrusted documents the web has no 'escape hatch'. It's a very tight sandbox. Flash and Java used to fulfil that role but they are on the way out. The web has a very basic trust model - all pages are untrusted and there is no other level of trust available. So if what you want to do hasn't been blessed by all the browser vendors then you are screwed. Does one of the main browser vendors compete with your product? It's quite likely that they do. Yet you want to give them full control over how your code can run all on all users machines?
If you don't like the idea of a corporation being able to veto a web standard then you need to seriously ask yourself if you actually like the idea of open web standards at all. Political vetoing is integral to the idea of open standards created through consensus and it isn't going to go away no matter how much people fantasise about it.
The list of proposed standards that have been blocked/delayed by one of more of the big browsers is huge. Blocking proposed standards isn't uncommon, if anything it's the norm. mathml, websql, pointer events, h264 video, nacl, flexbox, webgl, jpeg2000, webm, mp3, ogg vorbis, theora, webp etc etc.
Because of its origins as a way of displaying untrusted documents the web has no 'escape hatch'. It's a very tight sandbox. Flash and Java used to fulfil that role but they are on the way out. The web has a very basic trust model - all pages are untrusted and there is no other level of trust available. So if what you want to do hasn't been blessed by all the browser vendors then you are screwed. Does one of the main browser vendors compete with your product? It's quite likely that they do. Yet you want to give them full control over how your code can run all on all users machines?
If you don't like the idea of a corporation being able to veto a web standard then you need to seriously ask yourself if you actually like the idea of open web standards at all. Political vetoing is integral to the idea of open standards created through consensus and it isn't going to go away no matter how much people fantasise about it.