At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
Oh no I agree with you, I don’t think a single company could change it, but the truth of the matter is that Google is winning. I think the best bet is legislation, and I think Mozilla could be useful in that regard. Google is in a similar position now that Microsoft was in the 90s/00s, only difference being that I don’t think Google will sleep on their laurels as the web is a lot more established now, and the web is Google’s entire business.
What better way to get data than to own not just the way people discover websites and information, but also the way people access it? Google is dangerous.