Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

This is a good take. Standards were a weapon to fight Microsoft's closed source IE— emphasis on closed source. Why? Competing browsers needed to be IE-compatible to matter, and without standards spec-ing out what IE's doing, it's hard for other vendors to know if they were 100% compliant.

Now that the major browser everyone's coding against is open source, and competitors can freely borrow their engine, I'd say we don't really need the W3C anymore.

This is probably silly, but I've been wondering if IE 11 tracks me the least while providing clickable internet text. It just needs uBlock Origin and a Linux port... maybe?

Ultimately, Google will still decide what goes into Chromium. As it stands, Google decides what patches get merged, and Google decides how core features are implemented. And they can be implemented in ways that are very hard to toggle and very specific to Google's business model.

We need to get a version of Chromium that's not owned by Google -- but, I don't see any motivation for Google to give up control of Chromium or move Chrome over to use a different, community controlled fork.

So if you want a version of Chromium that really is community controlled, you'll need to have a community fork of Chromium that we all agree to work on and use as a browser base. Otherwise, we'll just be giving free labor to Google, and they'll still filter contributions so that primarily their interests are served.

Unfortunately, now that we've forked Chromium for all of our browsers, one of two things is going to happen:

- either the fork will need to be tightly constrained by Chromium, in which case Google will still effectively control it, or

- the fork will diverge from Chromium, in which case we'll be back to the exact same position we are now. You'll have multiple competing browser engines, one of which is used by the most dominant browser on the market.

The TLDR is if you're worried about Google controlling the browser engine, it still seems to me that the only solution is to get a non-google controlled browser engine used by a browser with market share comparative to Chrome.

The relative lack of user adoption for Vivaldi, Opera and Brave suggest to me that standardizing on Chromium won't significantly help with that. Edge is now moving over to Chromium -- if it sees a massive influx of new users, maybe it'll be worth taking that strategy more seriously.

In the meantime, since it appears we are going to need a browser engine to compete with Chromium anyway, what's the harm in having one company (Mozilla) try to compete by building their own browser engine the way they want? Sure, Firefox isn't doing great right now, but is it doing any worse than Brave?

Good thoughts, except for Firefox 'not doing great right now'. I've switched over for almost a year now, both for regular and development use, haven't looked back.

Chromium stopped using webkit. They forked Blink.