This situation might change if Google is forced to divest itself from Chrome. This is currently in the US courts, but it might take awhile.

due to above said nepotism...

standards require some politicking and money I suppose

Standards do require that. Someone has to show up at the right meetings and conferences, and it's often necessary to contribute code too.

"Build it and they will come" doesn't work for products, and it doesn't work for standards either.

... and I want to add that there's no need to assume nepotism.

If you get code merged into something like Chrome, and it's big and goes unused for a few years, at some point some security-minded person will come along and argue that your code is an unused attack surface and should be removed again.

> ... and I want to add that there's no need to assume nepotism.

Sure, and while this is true:

> If you get code merged into something like Chrome, and it's big and goes unused for a few years [it's likely to get removed.]

it's also true that Google could have pushed JPEG XL instead of pushing WebP, which would have massively increased the usage stats of the JPEG XL code and saved it from removal. But (for whatever reason) Google decided to set things up to push folks to use WebP at every turn, and here we are.

Standardization is the most important feature a technology can have. Look at JS.

> Look at JS.

Given how much duct tape it took at times to get various browsers to behave I would say JS is proof of the opposite. It succeeded in an environment where standards where a mere suggestion.

Don't they all run JS ES5 itself the same way? It's more that each has different feature sets (HTML5 stuff, webrtc, wasm, etc), which are callable from JS but would've been a problem regardless of the language.

Standardization is a big feature of JS, but it's also a surprisingly good language for its use cases. There was even good reason to port it over to the backend (NodeJS).

There are only two browsers, Safari and Firefox.

only Nightly