I saw a reference to the following in a CSS-Tricks post today. “Crowd-funding prioritization of new feature implementations for web browsers.”
What browser features are important to you? Are they important enough for you to pledge some money to get it implemented?
So to get features, standardization, compatibility, etc. moved forward, developers need to pay via crowd funding? Seems about right its 2020, pretty soon we will need a monthly subscription to use bookmarks or tabs.
We did this with Flash. Though with Flash, at the time, it was more about other vendors than consumers - people (err, companies) like Samsung, Nvidia, etc. What feature do you really want? Are you willing to help fund the implementation of that feature? Not sure to the extent that it was taken advantage of.
Funding browser features isn’t totally uncommon, and I saw plenty of that when working on the browser team at Microsoft. Igalia is one of the bigger players in this space.
Getting features implemented across the browsers isn’t easy! There is a lot of heavy lifting that needs to happen before even a single line of code is written, so partnering with (or wholesale delegating to) a company like Igalia was one of the more effective ways to drive implementation and standardization of browser features.
