Most of Apple’s software is proprietary. Some of it, though, is based on open-source projects. WebKit, which powers Safari, is an open-source project. Which means that Apple is not the only source of contributions to the code that powers Apple’s web browser. Indeed, the entire web development community can contribute WebKit code that can be integrated into the core of WebKit. Many (most?) other browser engines are similarly open-sourced.

Which led to the open-source consultancy Igalia creating an experiment called Open Prioritization, which let members of the community to crowdfund features they’d like to see added to prominent browser engines like WebKit, Chrome, and Firefox. (Igalia already did this work for paying clients, by the way—deep-pocketed companies that want a particular feature added to all the browser engines can, and do, pay developers to get it done. What was different here was the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of the priority list.)

As Eric Meyer explains, implementing the :focus-visible pseudoclass won the vote, the community supplied funds and Igalia matched, the work was done, and Apple’s WebKit team accepted the contribution. It just appeared in Apple’s latest Safari Technology Preview release.

Unfortunately, this led to some people in the web-development community to complain that Apple, the richest company in the world, was relying on crowdfunding in order to implement features in its web browser.…