Nonetheless, its still mildly concerning that smaller players in the browser space are finding it difficult to keep pace with all the new APIs being introduced to the web these days. Even Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine in favor of a Chromium fork.
It's a tricky situation with no obvious solutions. The Pale Moon dev's plea to slow down isn't going to work; devs want these new features and they're not going to stop using them just because a smaller browser developer with no significant market share can't keep up.
There is, perhaps, the beginnings of a solution with the Extensible Web Manifesto[1], which aims to shift the focus of browsers from implementation of many high-level features to instead focus on smaller, simpler low-level features which high-level features can then be built on top of. (Though ironically, web components are a part of this movement.) CSS Houdini[2] is one such feature which seems like it might be relevant in this specific situation (though whether it's helpful I have no idea; in the short term I suspect it might just translate to a lot more work).
Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them and it was ultimately the downfall of IE.
> Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine
This will be the downfall of chrome. Google will ultimately be fined under anti-trust, chrome funding will dry up and browsers will stop supporting these absurd features. Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.
> Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them
The idea that users didn’t want Flash is laughable. It was enormously popular and enabled all kinds of multimedia presentation that the web couldn’t come close to rivalling.
> Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.
Web components are JavaScript. And it’s a standard agreed upon by all the major browser manufacturers. They aren’t going away, no matter what happens to Google.
Had it not been for iPhone, and we would all still happily using Flash, instead of waiting 10 year to still catch up with what was possible in 2011 regarding 3D on the browser.
Small players were never viable in the space. If they were people would care about, for example, Opera. Instead, probably 12-ish people care about Opera.
It's a tricky situation with no obvious solutions. The Pale Moon dev's plea to slow down isn't going to work; devs want these new features and they're not going to stop using them just because a smaller browser developer with no significant market share can't keep up.
There is, perhaps, the beginnings of a solution with the Extensible Web Manifesto[1], which aims to shift the focus of browsers from implementation of many high-level features to instead focus on smaller, simpler low-level features which high-level features can then be built on top of. (Though ironically, web components are a part of this movement.) CSS Houdini[2] is one such feature which seems like it might be relevant in this specific situation (though whether it's helpful I have no idea; in the short term I suspect it might just translate to a lot more work).
[1]: https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto
[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Houdini