Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.
A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters, and if anyone has a monopoly that is "bad" because competition helps innovation.
Each rendering engine winds up, for good and bad, with a small group of people deciding what features do and do not get put in. If they simply decide that feature Y doesn't get put in, and that rendering engine has a monopoly then feature Y is a non-entity as far as the web is concerned.
For example, if Google controlled the web's primary rendering engine do you think Do Not Track would be in it? NO! It took all of their major competition to add it before they did, starting with IE.
Active X would like to disagree with you. We're currently dealing with a massive (revenue/company) product that only runs under IE < 10 because it still uses Active X.
I don't think a common rendering engine is at all a bad thing. Maybe two to keep them honest. But blink + webkit + trident (?) + Gecko (?) seem like wasted engineering talent.
The incompetence was in mandating a certain implementation instead of writing a technology-neutral law requiring a certain security level.
> For example, if Google controlled the web's primary rendering engine do you think Do Not Track would be in it?
Isn't Do Not Track a pretty good example for a browser feature that is independent of the rendering engine?
I don't necessarily agree with your assertion that a browser's rendering engine is the only part that matters. Internet explorer ships with windows by default. Mozilla (firefox) has policies that focus on privacy. Chrome focuses on speed, and, well, serving Google.
These are all things that differentiate the products in the market and aren't necessarily rendering engine related. Yes - if one entity maintained absolute control of the rendering engine, then the needs of each vendor would not be served - but then it wouldn't be open source, either.