It’s an improvement over the situation as it was, but Google still has a great deal more muscle than anybody else in steering the development of Blink and the web in general.
Really, at this point I think Chrome/Blink should be spun out as a separate entity. It could be set up as a model similar to that of ARM, or perhaps a non-profit of some kind. Either way, Blink needs to be separated from overwhelming corporate influence.
> I think Chrome/Blink should be spun out as a separate entity
Dear god, no, please.
The Chrome team is a treasure of immense value to the world. They are the only major software team in the world where my bug reports have been triaged and fixed. Again and again and again, and usually very quickly too. Ocassionally I would find some hellish obscure corner case of a bug, ignore it, and it would still get fixed even without my reporting it: the team is just unbelievably effective! I wished Google were not selling advertising, but the downsides for Chrome have been fairly limited. The fact that they have given the source code to Chromium away for free is just plain astonishing. I am blown away by how good Google has been as a custodian of something that is used by so many in the world: it has been a fair gift to us all with surprisingly few caveats.
If you don’t like Google’s guardianship then use a derivative browser, even Microsoft Edge!
Split off Chromium and it would likely turn to shit. How many times have I seen browser vendors go down the path of evil? How many times have I seen important software get sold, and the product focus shift to something execrable?
On browsers: the Safari team is a black hole for bug reports, with a browser full of broken or non-compliant functionality… IndexedDB is just one of many similar symptoms. Firefox has the right social goals, but it hasn’t been delivering guru level engineering, but instead Firefox is continually chasing useless queer features (similar to many other now dead products in the world). The Microsoft Edge team did fix one bug report for me once, but I just happened to report it while they were developing the feature, and I had test cases showing the feature working in Firefox and Chrome. I still have trauma from Microsoft IE6+ (although it was a competitive edge for my business that I could usually make it work, albeit at the cost of years of my life devoted to creating IE workarounds).
Edge adopted chromium because microsoft could not compete with their monopoly power to enforce web standards as “however it is implemented in chrome”. If chrome ships a feature, there 80-90% market share means that every other chromium browser has to ship it or they’re “broken” and people switch to chrome.
if the other chromium wrappers have a seat at the table, that isn’t the table that makes the decisions.
Apple's iOS browser monopoly is literally the only thing preventing Google from having a near total monopoly on web standards.