A) Maybe not you, maybe not me or anyone else here, but 99.99% of the rest of the world? And when the rest leave, is Mozilla really going to be able to justify maintaining a browser for those that remain? B) There might not be a website that would do it, but what about if practically all websites with any corporate backing did it?

You get to Google pretty quickly by following links. If you look at the top of the linked issue, it links to a few things owned by Rupert Ben Wiser. If you follow the explainer link, you get this list of authors:

Authors: Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

And in the repo, he says it’s being prototyped in Chromium.

That’s all written by him though, so I guess he could just be lying and making up names. So I tried looking up his name, to see if he’s listed anywhere as a Google employee, but the best I could find is he’s listed as a Google employee since 2022 on Facebook and LinkedIn. And he doesn’t have much on his Github. (I kinda feel a little stalkery now… Don’t harass anyone please). So either this is an elaborate, very late, April fool’s or he’s probably the fall guy for whatever exec actually thought this up.

I may not be 100% right, as I haven’t looked at it in detail, but I think it’s even a bit more than that. Since the way that’s proven is by the browser vendor signing the request (I assume with an HTTP header or something), you could also verify it’s from a specific vendor. So even if Mozilla says, yes, we’ll display your ads, a website could still lock down to Chrome. It would probably also significantly hamper new browsers, and browsers with a security/anti-ad focus, as they won’t be recognised by major websites that use the new protocol until they have market share, which they won’t get if they don’t have access to major websites.

Nah, nah, it was the International Phonetic Alphabet. Can’t have something like that on the 'murican internet.

Do you understand the functioning of both interpreters, down to the CPU instructions? How the database you’re using performs those updates, or quickly finds your items? The precise function of the virtual DOM? TLS handshake protocol? If so, good on you, but you don’t need to know more than the surface level of any of these for a CRUD app. But these and other systems you use hold the raw power, and wielding them poorly could lead to bugs, or security or performance issues.

On the other side, whatever you do may seem mundane to you, but lighting a fire would seem mundane to a sorcerer the umpteenth time they’ve done so. A simple CRUD app could seem dramatic if you have no idea where you’d even start building one, which is the state the majority of people are in.

None of that is chromium. Vivaldi could have built that on top of Firefox, but didn’t. As to why Firefox is better, the very fact that it’s an alternative that is keeping up technically is a benefit. It’s less a ‘V-shaped engine’ monopoly and moreso a ‘V8 engine made by a specific company’ monopoly. They have far too much control over the direction of web standards. Much of what they are doing is actually good, but it should then be spread based on merit, rather than because they directly control almost the entire market.