On the surface, it is kind of wild, but I want to suggest that it's in some ways beneficial for work like this to be supported directly by the companies that benefit from them (including core dev work and engine improvements).
There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular.
There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.
Agreed - Igalia encourages companies to work upstream, it's part of the idea that we stand for.
A patch like the layer based SVG engine is imposssible to maintain by a single company - e.g. Vorwerk, downstream, for an extended period of time. You want to be able to follow upstream (e.g. for security updates), and that's hard when you change a piece of the core engine with your own stuff.
There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular.
There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.