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We were in WAY worse shape back then. IE6 was closed source, under-resourced (after they gained market dominance), and MS had every incentive to suppress the progress of web technologies once they ran the table.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t all be rooting for the other players today and keeping a close eye on Google, just saying there is no way for Google to do nearly as much to hold back the web as MS did back then, even if they wanted to.

I'm actually looking forward to WebAssembly but I'm just imagining wasm applications tying into ChromeOS and we have ActiveX all over again.

It'll be like the early 2000's if switching to another browser was most likely just IE6 reskinned.

Microsoft Edge, which is built on Chromium, would fit this parallel nicely.

And brave, and vivaldi

And Opera.

There's only one competing browser engine left, Firefox's, with like 5% market share. Except if you have an Apple device, every other option is skinned Chrome.

No it isn't. It's skinned Safari which is WebKit. Chromium forked from WebKit years ago and they have diverged. And Apple certainly doesn't include all of the phone-home stuff that's in Chromium. It's not even remotely the same.