A nice recent example is "smooshgate", wherein it was determined that breaking websites with an older version of Mootools installed was not an acceptable way to move the web forward, so we got `Array.prototype.flat` instead of `Array.prototype.flatten`: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17141024

> I don't recall a part of the web where browser developers were viewed as not having agency

Being a servant isn't "not having agency", it's "who do I exercise my agency on behalf of". Tools don't have agency, servants do.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890

> The Internet is for End Users

> This document explains why the IAB believes that, when there is a conflict between the interests of end users of the Internet and other parties, IETF decisions should favor end users. It also explores how the IETF can more effectively achieve this.

It's literal W3C policy: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

--- start quote ---

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself, which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once.

--- end quote ---

However, the needs of browser implementers have long been the one and only priority.

Oh. It's also Google's own policy for deprecation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

--- start quote ---

First and foremost we have a responsibility to users of Chromium-based browsers to ensure they can expect the web at large to continue to work correctly.

The primary signal we use is the fraction of page views impacted in Chrome, usually computed via Blink’s UseCounter UMA metrics. As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!

--- end quote ---

I’ve never heard of servant oriented, but I understand the point. Browsers process and render whatever the server returns. Whether they’re advertisements that download malware or a long rambling page on whatever I’m interested in now, browsers really don’t have much control over what they run.

It’s utter nonsense. Development of the web has always been advanced by the browser side, as it necessarily must. It’s meaningless for a server/web app to ship a feature that no browser supports.

I cannot imagine a time when browsers were "servant-oriented".

Every browser I can think of was/is subservient to some big-big-company's big-big-strategy.