This is a disturbing article:
Others, however, may be culled—even if they're on track to become Web standards. For example, Google developed code to provide preliminary support for CSS Custom Properties (formerly known as CSS Variables). It was integrated into WebKit but only enabled in Chromium. That code now has nobody to maintain it, so Apple wants to remove it.
That is not good. It feels very much like a return to the old days of "best viewed in browser X!" on the web. If this continues, we are looking at the very real possibility that developers will have to split their work between one browser that is not standard compliant and one that is. Chrome on the desktop and in the Android world is too big to ignore; Webkit, because of iOS, is likewise too big to ignore. is Developers will now have to waste their time making sure things work in both rather than creating new and better apps.
One thing this does highlight how Apple has turned into 1990s Microsoft. (I will now pause for the Apple fanboys to recover from their rage induced sputtering ...). Like Microsoft of old, Apple does not care about the experience of a user outside of their walled garden. They are interested in ensuring that users stay locked into their ecosystem. If that lock-in causes friction for the users when they venture outside the garden, well, all the better for convincing them not to stray.
This is a reasonable business proposition, from the standpoint Microsoft in the 1990s and Apple today: the more time people spend within a given ecosystem, the more money the owner of that ecosystem is likely to make. Google, if it every rises to the same level of dominance, will likely do the same. It is simply good business sense and it highlights the weakness of standards and the instability of open ecosystems. All of the incentives are to lock in and control. Openness only has a chance in those rare circumstances where there are enough large players who want to prevent their competitors from achieving lock in.
Anti-trust law, then, is the best hope for an open web.