Interesting perspective from the Frames/Blinks OG: > "Some takeaways from my 2020 Blink/Frame: --- Browsers may support pre-installed of these plugins, but rendering links in this manner can be easily manipulated—Chrome and Safari are not willing to do it. Firefox dislikes Web3. Brave insists on developing its own wallet and won’t do big partnership. Opera I have some meeting of Boss Zhou around 20/21, he’s not giving it much importance. Achieving Frame/Blink/Web3 Miniapp without installing plugins is impossible—we met several high level title folks from Google in 2021, SVP/C-level. The discussion was whether Chrome would allow some leeway for Web3 plugins (including delaying Manifest V3 and creating a path for Tampermonkey like miniApp). The answer was no; Chrome would only consider these if Google developed its own wallet (similar to how it handles auto filling password and Google Pay credit card management). Subsequently, Google invested hundred millions in DCG's secondary shares; the financial statements included $mask cuz we were at 2-3B hype days. Unfortunately, this Google deal turned into a big tuition, severely impacting Google's confidence in this area. Now, all their efforts are focused on AI. Our invested company discussed acquisitions with Apple. Surprisingly, Apple is working on something (web3+browser+wallet) deeply but may never release it. The standard committee for this area is under ECMA/TC39. Metamask, Coinbase, and us are involved, along with Mozilla, Google, Tencent, and Microsoft (web2 etc). The real push for Web3 standardization at the JavaScript level comes from Metamask (Snap), Coinbase, and us; however, progress is extremely slow. Hopefully Solana will join force." (source: https://x.com/suji_yan/status/1805654289286938906?t=ah7LWmw_00wZf2Qx0x2LuA&s=19)
Whatever they do, I feel like developing privatized extensions is probably gonna be it but also such a let down. I wish browsers would finally feel the pressure to evolve. But it seems the equilibrium still hasn‘t been broken. IMO if the browser had better capabilities where it could, for example, encrypt and sign data reliably and without having to store keys in various extensions, this would be so good and give a lot of good power to dapps.