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Comment by leorocky | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is getting more awesome with each update, but admittedly I'm kind of liking Chrome's implement first, standardize later approach to new features, which is why you can get a directoryReader in Chrome and drag and drop support for uploading entire directories. I wish Firefox had that, but it's not a standard so they're not implementing it.

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Both Chrome and Firefox have the same approach of implementing first, standardizing later. For example, Firefox has had large swaths of ES6 implemented since 2006 or so.

Rather, it's not so much that they refuse to implement features until they're standardized, it's that each browser maker refuses to implement the features dreamed up by the other browser makers until they're standardized.

> Both Chrome and Firefox have the same approach of implementing first, standardizing later

>Rather, it's not so much that they refuse to implement features until they're standardized, it's that each browser maker refuses to implement the features dreamed up by the other browser makers until they're standardized.

I guess that's what happened with this. A Mozilla engineer explicitly argued against implementing something because it's not a standard in this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782233

Mozilla is doing the same. Take a look at the WebAPI overview for some examples:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI

True, but just as a note, that page also includes APIs available in Chrome and not Firefox, including directoryReader:

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

Another example is the, now deprecated¹, Audio Data API which had by far the most visible involvement I've seen yet from the community.

You also have the rather new Social API² which is still in development and what about the whole ASM.js spec³?

1: http://blog.mjg.im/2013/11/07/audio-data-api-disabled/

2: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/So...

3: http://asmjs.org/

Personally I prefer the "wait 'til standardized" approach better. Web standards have been dragged through the mud enough thanks to IE and its disregard for standards. We don't need Chrome running wild doing the same.

IE caused problems by not implementing standards (or not doing it correctly) On the contrary, Chrome is causing problems with implementing pretty much everything the devs come up in their offices or only partly implementing standards.

Or, at least, that is how I experience things.

I prefer Chrome/Firefox's way of implementing proof of concepts before standardization; it's more pragmatic, less ivory-towery. It's the difference between agile development (what people used to call XP) and waterfall.

Rather than being developed in a closed room by a committee, features emerge in a sort of darwinian sense, in that usable features survive (they're played with, commented on, blogged about, critiqued), and bad ones tend to end up being ignored. And it works because good developers won't touch features that would break a site's cross-browser compatibility, but might sneak in stuff that can gracefully fall back. Thus the whole world becomes an "agile" test bed for a potential standard until everything slowly coalesces into a stable status quo.

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