I mean this is the problem with the entire situation. I immediately read the article looking for any evidence that they would abandon the direction of the idea rather than do what Google does sometimes and roll out a POC on some other less controversial part of their infrastructure and then come back to it when the timing is more right (like after a large cybersecurity event happens, mark these words). They did exactly that. They rolled it back to the Android team and promised to perfect a smaller effort in a less controversial sandbox but rest assured they are publicly saying only that they are retiring the effort for the web for now.
I really wish Google would go back to being the champion of the Open Internet I once knew them for and step away from the MBA’ification of everything they keep trying. Seems like the moment they dropped “don’t be evil” they started going there. It’s exhausting.
Instead of celebrating a victory, every one of the Open Internet crowd gets to celebrate a smaller project execution and nothing but a pause in the web platform version of it. Yay.
> They rolled it back to the Android team and promised to perfect a smaller effort in a less controversial sandbox
Conveniently this also seems to mean (assuming I understand the announcement correctly) they get to roll it out for the webview and finalize everything without going through the web standards process and without dealing with any community feedback because it's not technically a web standard anymore.
They get to build a working implementation in Chromium (oh, sorry, not Chromium. Android Webview, an entirely different browser that just happens to be based on V8 and the same rendering engine, but is definitely not Chromium) and they get to make sure everything is working and even get websites using it for webapps. And then if they come forward again to standardize it they can say, "look, developers are already using the API so we're not going to change anything, and it's not controversial, and we're just slightly expanding it so that browsers are all compatible with each other, so it's fine if we just launch this in Chrome and ask the standards committee to sign off, right?"
This is part of what's concerning about 'open' platforms like the Web; large and influential parties inevitably end up steering things to serve someone's bottom line somewhere.
I'm beginning to think we need hard forks of the Web, because we already have two "spheres" of the Web: the JS-heavy sites-are-apps Web, and the documents-and-links Web. The former can be argued to be a superset of the latter, but with continued anti-user efforts coming from that crowd and their diametrically opposite endgoals compared to an open platform... what real choice do the major parties have but to part ways...?
