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I think he's right. SPDY and WebP both started as Chrome-only features, and the world has essentially been forced to adopt them.

So far I think that's been a good think on balance because they are good technologies. But it is worrying how much power Google has in this space.




SPDY was donated to the IETF for adoption into the HTTP/2 standard. Other browser vendors only implemented it at that time.

WebP is a file format and doesn't fall into the normal standardization process. Browsers implement support for new file formats at their own behest.


Yes. After SPDY had already been implemented and shipped in Chrome.


Of course, that's how it works. Chrome is hardly alone in field testing their new feature proposals.

You'll note that they're also willing to kill features which are not adopted, like PPAPI.


> You'll note that they're also willing to kill features which are not adopted, like PPAPI.

After adding whitelists for Google properties like Hangouts, of course.


It's not like interoperability suffered because of that. HTTP fallback was always there.


Nevertheless it's some kind of fait accompli, especially in a market with only three main actors.

Where one actor can also start using the new "standard" overnight and break lots of services for people which are not using their browsers... You know what I mean. It's some kind of enforcing to have a monopoly.




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