Comment by jandrese
5 years ago
How would you migrate to a different SQL implementation? It would have to be 100% SQLite compatible in the early days because that's what all websites would expect. It makes migration nigh impossible.
That said, as long as the SQL implementation they choose is free and open source I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. I mean we are also stuck with Javascript in the browser and that hasn't been a total disaster. The whole point of standardization is to choose one particular solution and have everybody use it.
I think your second argument also applies to the first no? Any technology that is implemented in a major browser, be it JS, Webkit, SQLite has incentives to port it to other platforms. Web developers don't expect 100% compatibility, they are so used to things behaving differently and broken across browsers that it's actually surprising if something just works from time to time.
If anybody was expecting 100% compatibility all the time, we wouldn't get any new standards, and would all use chromium.