I was explicit about the problem, which is not new features that come to some browsers first, advertised in a browser-agnostic way. That is ok, provided the features are on a standards track. What I cited is fragmentation due to capital-C Chrome as a requirement.

Google is doing deals and marketing web apps and add-ons as "Chrome". This is showing up all over the place, most recently in my experience on the Starbucks free wireless service agreement page.

Major content publishers Mozilla has talked to are surprised that we can host their Chrome-targeted web apps and HTML5-based extensions. They think such things are exclusive to Chrome. If they use Dart and need native performance, then that'll be true. There is a slippery slope, especially when more and more of the differentiation is not on a standards track (Dart, NaCl, WebSQL).

Nevertheless most of the current differentiation is bogus and any modern browser will do. There's certainly some "WebKit required" fragmentation. We saw this with Amazon's kindle web app, which is specifically built to WebSQL and not IndexedDB. But I do not believe any big player is pushing "WebKit required" as an agenda or marketing program. In contrast, Google is clearly pushing "Chrome" as a requirement or works-best-in brand.

The Chrome experiments, most recently

http://www.allisnotlo.st/index_en.html

are obvious, maybe too obvious. Defenders can always play up the "experiment" hedge. That helps but only so much, especially when many of these experiments could work in other browsers with trivial changes.

I'm told that people have run chrome.angrybirds.com in Firefox. So it should be html5.angrybirds.com but -- no surprise from a marketing angle -- the domain name starts with C not H.