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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

As expected, we're approaching a web browser monoculture. When you have an open platform where only one company controls it, it fails to be open any more. I'm sincerely worried about an ad company controlling the largest source of information on Earth.

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I'm not too worried to be honest. IE almost completely dominating the market didn't prevent it from being completely overtaken by newer, better tech. And this time with Chrome being open source it would be even easier for a competitor to emerge if chromium becomes the new IE. if it doesn't and it stays better than the competition, what's the problem? The better product dominating the market makes sense. You don't even have to ever touch a google service to use chromium

It's not a browser monoculture, it's a browser-engine monoculture. I for one welcome our new overlords.

I think it's great to have diversity in a browsers; one browser might focus on being light weight, while another might have a new spin on the UI.

But I do NOT want diversity in how different browsers render a table.

Problem is, there are limits to how different browsers using the same engine can be, especially when it comes to matters like efficiency. At some point you’re going to have to start modifying the engine and eventually, fork it due to divergence becoming unmanageable — this is why Blink was spun out of WebKit.

You must have missed the 90s. When a single vendor mandated every new technology in the browser space. ActiveX and other pleasantries came out of those times.

I remember the 90's. It was the era of "Best viewed in X version Y".

Today I was setting up a spreadsheet in google sheets using Firefox. When I would hit backspace while editing formulas, it'd occasionally but frequently reinsert the deleted character half a second later

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