The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business.

Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.

This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.

>The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business.

Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.

>Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.

>This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.

This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong. If worst came to worst and Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it and remove the offending parts. A Google Chromium and a Non-google Chromium fork is still way better than what we have now today with four distinct engines in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE.

> Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.

If we believe Google it is in a very performance sensitive part of the APIs, I would say that makes it a prime target for future optimizations just to hard wire the performant behavior directly into the engine.

> This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong.

Of course we can always count on a profit driven company to do the right thing and there was never a project Dragonfly at Google, just as there was never a Tiananmen Square massacre. Trust in Alphabets morality absolutely, trust that when they are doing something obviously wrong that they are doing it for the right reasons.

> Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it

Maintaining a fork is going to be quite difficult when upstream wants you dead, already ships black box modules for some features and represents the de facto standard for 99% of the world.

I don't think so. Google is abusing their power with Chrome to force their standards on others. I hope they lose their grip on the browser market like MS did, and standards become open.

The standards are open. The problem is that browsers don't implement them 100% the same and they add in their own features. Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue. Different browsers can compete based on ancillary features like Linux distros do.

> Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue.

When Microsoft was in a monopoly position, they ignored the standards and pushed ActiveX plugins. Chrome this year wanted to push other browsers to adopt obsolete U2F specifications because they used them in Google products. If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.

>If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.

That's a good thing. What's the point of maintaining four separate software projects who's ideal purpose is to literally do the exact same thing. It's much better to settle on one open source project. If we think Google is the boogeyman then settling on a Chromium fork is still light years better than what we have now.

I think this is incredibly shortsighted. From a programming perspective, large codebases are a bit like complex organisms and experience a sort of evolution. Forcing yourself into a single local minimum in the form of a single browser implementation guarantees that it will be much harder to avoid having the same constant set of strengths and flaws.

The common ground is the standard not the browser implementation. The web has been working well and is still working well with multiple implementations.

Forom a technical standpoint it's of course unideal, but from a governance standpoint there's a lot to be gained. The browser is a critical piece of infrastructure and handing a monopoly to one company is essentially sleeping at the wheel. As long as there's significant economic value in providing the platform, competition is in the public interest.