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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but most of the good things that have happened with the browser are directly because there was competition. If one wins and the others disappear it's simply going to be too tempting for the winner to abuse it's position because nobody will have another choice.

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To add to that, Google already abuses its position with Chrome (see the stuff surrounding AdNauseum in the past couple days). One company having as much power over the shape of the web as Google already has is scary enough, the notion of them "winning" the browser wars is even worse.

Actually, most of the good things that have happened with the browser have a reference implementation in IE6. Their current "modern" standards were all written after that point.

The stagnant few years after Netscape screwed up Navigator 6 was actually a little mini golden age for web developers. Essentially one target, with a ton of features that are only now being recreated in modern browsers.

It's just a shame that Microsoft was so hated by everybody. Things like their sane Box Model endured 15 years of people referring to it as a "bug" until finally it got introduced as a CSS option and people were overjoyed to finally be able to specify the width of a DIV and have it end up being that size after borders and padding.

You did not do much web development then, did you? It was not "reference implementation", most of the nice things were not implemented at all and many that were there were buggy. And even if the box model makes more sense it was still a bug because it did not behave as the spec say. Or rather did not behave under some conditions. Lucky are the people who forgot or never new the joys of standards/quirks/whatever-in-between modes.

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