Yeah the Bandwagon effect, especially when it comes to this, nobody knows what will really happen, but still comment as if it was the worst thing. Like happened with Manifestv3, where still today you have people saying āno adblocker will work with Manifestv3ā.
I mean, if you go to Chrome Status, and you check around, you will see how many weird things Chromium team has already implemented in the Browser, stuff that can be easily abused by any developer.
Like
Feature: Open popups as fullscreen windows (still on trial)
Adds the ability to open a popup directly to full-screen. Adds an additional windowFeatures parameter to the window.open() JavaScript API which allows the caller to open a popup directly to full-screen on the display that would contain the popup (based on screenX/screenY). This eliminates the need for the developer to manually transition a popup into full-screen which could require a new user activation signal.
Motivation
Sites cannot open full-screen windows without multiple user gestures. This particularly restrains web applications that launch full-screen content on another display (via the window management API) by requiring multiple user interactions which degrades user experience.
What can go wrong with it? especially for the non tech people who will be browsing around in their Chrome browser and will probably click something malicious because it just decided to open full screen, and developers didnāt have to do anything because the window.open() API made it easier for them to implement that.
The Popover API
An API that can be used to build transient user interface (UI) elements that are displayed on top of all other web app UI. These include user-interactive elements like action menus, form element suggestions, content pickers, and teaching UI. This API uses a new popover content attribute to enable any element to be displayed in the top layer. This is similar to the dialog element, but has several important differences, including light-dismiss behavior, popover interaction management, animation and event support, and the lack of a āmodalā mode.
Motivation
When building a web application, there are many cases in which an author needs to create transient user interface (UI) elements that are displayed on top of all other web app UI. These include user-interactive elements like action menus, form element suggestions, content pickers, teaching UI, and the listbox portion of a select control. These paradigms will be collectively referred to as popovers. For many such use cases, it is incumbent upon the author to handle the popoverās styling, positioning and z-index stacking, focus management, keyboard interactions, and accessibility semantics. Because no platform-native solutions exist to comfortably handle all these use cases, individual authors and framework developers must continuously re-write the same classes of controls. This results in duplicative work for the web development community, and inconsistent experiences for users of these web applications. The web platform can be extended such that authors can get popover interactions and styling āfor freeā, but have enough flexibility to support their individual use cases.
So what could go wrong with it as well, when developers can show popovers with any content easier now, that could have anything good or malicious, and just as any other technology, it can be used for good and bad things.
There is also Feature: Topics API
which if you read the Github page, it is yet another way they want to continue and implement FLoC, but they want to add some more stuff and say it is more private and better but it is the same Interest-based advertising
and Google being an advertising company, it is obvious why they would add that.
It was shipped in 115 and never heard anyone speaking about it.
So, in resume, what I mean is simple, many things Chromium team adds are weird or can be abused by developers against the users, so WEI and Manifestv3, and FLoC were/are not the only things being added that can affect the users.
In the end, if WEI gets implemented, then nobody canāt do much about it anyway, not even Brave, apart from disabling and enabling when it is needed because Washington post or new your times need it, there is not much it can be done.
Just like today we deal with DRM and Playready and Widevine and Windows users can watch Netflix 4k through the web and others only 1080p, and then paywalls and anti-adblock technologies and trackers and pagers like Instagram or Tiktok, which stops the video if you arenāt actively watching it and put it on the background, and malicious ads, malicious popups, and website using different domains to deliver bad scripts so you block them one day, and the next day they will not be blocked, and ad networks in apps and apps pushing ads every minute etc etc etc, everything being implemented by developers in their apps or websites, so they are not exactly friends either.