Lobbyists wondering why not slip this into appropriations bill and make MS put this in desktop.
If things weren't so complex, a small group of hackers would "shut up and hack" and fix their grievances and give the community something new to play with. Instead, we've gotten to the point where most people realize that they are too small in face of all the complexity. Then what choices do you have left? Give up, or get bitter and angry because those who have the resources to maintain a browser or Linux distro aren't doing what you want (and eventually you give up anyway because shouting into the void doesn't fix anything). One can go against the grain but they will be left in the dust; I saw lots of bitter Palemoon users who were ignored as the web moved on and sites started breaking on their increasingly outdated Firefox fork. I can't blame those users.
It's this same complexity that enables e.g. Google to just block your browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
Open standards mean nothing if only one company on earth has the resources to implement them (and they deliberately push out others). Open standards mean nothing if they require you to implement user-hostile, freedom-disrespecting features that enable behavior like above.
Blocking everything except Chrome would immediately raise way too many eyebrows, but allowing the few big (non-) competitors while making life hard for any potential rising stars has value if you want to maintain the status quo (near monopoly on browser market).
In any case, I don't really even care about Google's motivations here. I have a problem with the fact that they can do this at all. Open technology should not enable overriding user control and arbitrarily blocking clients based on prejudice.
