The Web has succeeded at interoperability and scale in a way that no other technology has before or since. Still, the Web remains far from “state of the art” , and it is being increasingly threatened by walled gardens. The Web platform often lags competitors in delivering new system and device capabilities to developers. Worse, it often hobbles new capabilities behind either high- or low-level APIs, forcing painful choices (and workarounds) on developers. Despite browser versions being released much faster, new capabilities still take a long time to materialize, and often do so in forms that are at best frustrating and at worst nearly useless to large swathes of the developer community for solving real-world needs. The best recent improvements to the platform have been the result of collaborative discussions between developers and browser vendors. Sometimes these lead to big new features. More often than not, they lead to small changes that make existing systems suitable for a wider range of uses.
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