construct-stylesheets VS caniuse

> With adoptedStyleSheets they're objecting to making backwards incompatible changes

Which would not be bacwards incompatible if they hadn't shipped something that wasn't agreed on in the first place.

Again, slowly: they literally shipped that to production despite loud and explicit objecitons from both Firefox and Safari they shipped it to production. When asked to hide it back behind the flag, "but backwards incompatible change, the framework we're developing is already depending on it"

And since you're quoting rniwa, here's the relevant quote https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu...:

--- start quote ---

I feel like I’ve put so much time & energy into making this feature something sane & useful, and all you did was basically to dismiss many of my feedbacks and go with whatever you like and just ship it. And now you’re saying you can’t make changes because you shipped it?

I’m sorry but that’s just not how standards work.

--- end quote ---

> With WebMIDI they're saying they want to do an announcement before making the change.

Indeed. Once again: because they shipped an API that neither Safari nor Mozilla supported. Now that this issue has surfaced (no thanks to Chrome), they can't just roll it back or fix it because people already rely ono this behaviour, which the implicitly acknowledge.

It's not true, to w3c's surprising credit.

What Google does, is publish a "draft" which is as far from a standard as their authors are from the Moon. This gives Chrome the leeway to call it an "emerging standard" and just ship it. It doesn't care if there are objections, or that other browser vendors will not implement it. It's now a "standard" in Google's dictionary.

For something to become a W3C standard even in the present world, you need a consensus and at least two independent implementations. None of that exists for stuff Google pushes out (hardware APIs, web transport, constructible stylesheets [1], the list goes on...).

The correct name for those is Chrome-only non-standards.

[1] These one isn't even a draft. It is.... "a collection of interesting ideas" in a working group https://wicg.github.io/construct-stylesheets/ Shipped by default in Chrome, of course

I literally provided just some of the examples. Those are easily verifiable.

Web Transport is shipped by default. What was the input from other browser?

Here's the timeline for HID: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...

Constructible Stylesheets: the spec contained a trivially reproducible race condition, the API was badly specified. Google shipped against any objections and refused to bring it back under the flag. Full discussion here: https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. Shipped in Chrome https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... (may be hidden on mobile) despite multiple unresolved issues. Two years later Chrome did add a better API that people originally requested, other issues potentially remain.

> If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one.

Easy.

The most obvious/glaring one is WebHID. Enjoy the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459

It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers maoning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome.

The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets.

The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead

In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

> The negatives are often theoretical

They are not theoretical. Too bad webapicontroversy.com has been shut down (it looked like this [1]), but you can scroll down to "defer" and "considered harmful" in Mozilla's positions here: [2]

There are more, of course, but they are not visible unless you're willing to follow thousands of issues across hundreds of GitHub repositories. One that springs to mind is, of course Constructible Stylesheets. Mozilla and Safari: the spec describes an algorithm that leads to deadlock in trivial code, we wont implement it until this is fixed. [3] Chrome: ship it, because lit-html (developed by Google) wants it and is already using it. And then procedes to gaslight people and misrepresent their positions (cant' find the relevant link, but at this point I can't find the will to dive into the cesspool).

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/32768/108985355-3f...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu...

The article uses custom css @properties which are awesome and have 88% browser support [1].

One thing to watch out for is differences in how browsers handle setting the fallback initial-value. Chrome will use initial-value if CSS variable is undefined OR set to an invalid value. Firefox will only use initial-value if the variable is undefined. For most projects, this won't be an issue, but for a recent project, I ended up needing to use javascript to set default values in Firefox to iron out the inconsistency between browser implementations.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=%40property

Safari is the only browser that doesn't support extending HTML element

https://caniuse.com/?search=Custom%20Elements

You forgot to mention (Web)Workers. This is explicit creation, management, and communication with additional threads within JavaScript. What's more, they've been around in JavaScript longer than the V8 engine has even existed!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

https://caniuse.com/?search=webworkers

Do you happen to know where can I check out the cutoff version for each browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm doesn't have it (or other things like WasmGC for that matter)

(https://caniuse.com/) A handy tool for checking the browser compatibility of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features. Can I Use provides up-to-date support tables for various web technologies across different browsers.

Caniuse

Can I Use (https://caniuse.com/)

> Is it though?

In my experience it's the buggiest browser out of the big three, and is often missing basic features like e.g.:

https://caniuse.com/?search=opus

Supported in Firefox for *12 years* now, in Chrome for 10, still no support in Safari.

They only "support" Opus audio in their special snowflake '.caf' container, which is super buggy and the last time I checked no open source program could even generate Opus '.caf' files that could be played by Safari on all Apple platforms. I ended up writing a custom converter which takes a standard '.opus' file and remuxes it on-the-fly (I only store '.opus' files on my server) into Safari-compatible '.caf' files, taking special care to massage it so that it avoids all of their demuxer/decoder bugs. You shouldn't have to do this to have cross-browser high quality audio!