Alex Russell: Hobson's Browser: How Browser Choice Died In Our Hands
Channel: London Web Standards
Date: 30/11/2021

The mobile ecosystem has quietly upended the market for browsers and, in doing so, made browser choice matter less on our most personal computers. The mechanisms of this sea change are not well understood, nor are the ways that mobile's dominant players benefit from the false appearance of choice. This talk outlines the new structures that challenge our traditional views of what it means to choose a browser and why, if the web is to continue to matter, we must work to change the rotten foundations of this new status quo.

About Alex Russell

Alex Russell (@slightlylate) is Partner Program Manager on the Microsoft Edge team and Blink API OWNER. Before joining Edge in 2021, he worked on Chrome's Web Platform team for a dozen years where he helped design many new features. He served as overall Tech Lead for Chromium's Project Fugu, lead Chrome's Standards work, and acted as a platform strategist for the web. He also served as a member of ECMA TC39 for more than a decade and was elected to three terms on the W3C's Technical Architecture Group.

His technical projects have included Fugu, Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, and Web Components, along with ES6 features like Classes and Promises. Previously he helped build Google Chrome Frame and led the Dojo Toolkit project. Alex plays for Team Web.