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All aboard the Chrome train.

Firefox my dude. Has plugin support (uBlock) on mobile.

Quite, Any browser that doesn't use chromium is the correct choice. Monopolies are bad, and it's hilarious that people are celebrating one of the demise of one most destructive monopolies of the computing age with "just use $new_monpololistic_product, it will be different this time"

A lot of the same people decrying the Chrome monopoly never the less push for more and more bloat in the web standard, thus helping to enforce that monopoly by ensuring that hardly anyone has the resources to make a reasonable competitor.

Time to deprecate the web and start from scratch.

Doing so today would only result in a worse and more proprietary product, I suspect.

More proprietary than "basically Google just tells everyone how it's going to be"? Maybe. It'd be hard to make it worse though. What people seem to really want out of the web is a VM platform and a document layout engine, so why not design a new VM that is intended first and foremost to be an efficient application platform, and then make one of those applications an open source document layout engine? You don't have to be married to HTTP and all its woes either. You could even port a current "legacy" browser to it. And if that document layout engine is found to be lacking, we can make a new one without breaking everything because its just another application on the VM.

Hell, you could compile the VM with an HTML5/JS target and get forward compatibility too.

A worse standard is unlikely to win people over. Even a better standard is unlikely to win.

Take HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, remove 90% of the cruft. Now, include what people want like a much better table element that by default can handle Adaptive screen sizes etc etc.

Chromium and Firefox are open source so you can probably get support in them by writing the code yourself. But, good luck gaining traction.

You'll have a really very bad time deciding what is cruft on those.

No, but "click to play" for javascript would be a good start.

At least Webkit/Blink are open source and have multiple implementations. With that in mind, how do we distinguish between a "monoculture" and a "standard"?

I feel the same instinctive feeling that we're just going back to the IE days, but is it possible that having all browsers align on a single rendering engine could prove to be helpful rather than harmful?

Indeed. We should be able to split our browser choices freely between a duopoly!

About 5 years ago we had 4 browsers with significant share - IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. Even 10 years ago Firefox had a decent impact over over 25% and IE was being brought down into the "managable" area of 50%ish.

I'm screaming on the inside. And using chrome because my phone doesn't have enough storage for another browser / I can't remove it.

Which is baffling: I find myself in a situation that Microsoft was fined for

uMatrix is the best at blocking all sorts of content. One can selectively enable and save preferences per website, and that is helpful since uMatrix tends to break websites using CDNs.

s/mobile/Android/

Unfortunately there are no extensions on iOS (I'm guessing due to Apple's policies).

The world already is:

Global market share held by leading desktop internet browsers

Chrome Safari

May '18 66.93% 5.48%

Apr '18 66.17% 5.48%

Mar '18 66.93% 5.37%

Feb '18 67.49% 5.42%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i...

Yeah, let’s go from ‘designed for Internet Explorer’ to ‘designed for Chrome’!

That'd be an upgrade over edge. Remember, Safari and edge are coupled with the OS. Safari team and Edge team can't even push updates without blessing from the OS teams. Chrome, even on Android, does not have this problem. Ideally we'd have more people using Mozilla Firefox but in the world we live in, I'd prefer people use Google Chrome over Safari or Edge (even when edge switches to chrome).

It's really sad the WebKit has won. We're now back to single vendor.

With Firefox being the only independent rendering engine and that's been on a downwards trajectory.

A downwards user share trajectory, but an upwards technical one as of late. But yeah, it's pretty worrying that a webkit monoculture is developing. At least webkit is open source, so google won't really have a true monopoly (at least apple and microsoft will have competing (if still webkit based) implementations).

A downwards user-share trajectory, and a downwards reputation trajectory. I don't think that all the hate Mozilla's getting is deserved, but a lot of people didn't like that one easter egg, or the mess with Pocket.

I've been using Firefox continually since the first version. I don't recall any easter egg. Is it still in the browser?

There was a Mr. Robot easter egg that lots of people were angry about.[0] I didn't notice it either, though.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-investigates-mr-robot-fire...

That's crazy, people trust them to ship the entire browser, but adding an extension makes them untrustworthy.

What will those people say if they ever decide to break the browser into a core and user visible plugins?

The Webkit/Blink engine is far from being single vendor, they are vibrant open source projects with many companies that contribute to the development efforts, pretty much all browsers except for Firefox will be based on it soon.

Web developers would rather have a single good engine, assuming that it's good enough and continuously developed.

IE failed back when they all but ceased development for a number of years and since it was closed source nobody could take it over.

How has Webkit won? It's basically only used in Safari these days, right?

Blink is a WebKit fork and is used by everyone, from Chrome to Opera, and soon, Edge. Apple and Google have gone their separate ways, and will make decisions separately, so WebKit isn't really contributing to the Blink monopoly.

It's effectively the same as Blink which is used by Chrome, soon to be edge and any other popular browser.

Google certainly thinks so when they check the Firefox user agent on Android and give them a some cut down mobile version.

I just wish we could get all of our customers on board the "browser with non-security updates" train.

Let's not.

Google literally censors plugins they don't like from being loaded into Chrome. No.

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