But for me personally MS has proven not being able to handle a browser monopoly with IE which became stale when they reached that goal. I don't want to support them getting there again.
The only real alternative is Firefox.
I would support virtually any company competing with Microsoft in the OS space, not because I'm afraid of a Windows monoculture but because I'm afraid of the effect and power monopolies can have. Let's say Microsoft open source Windows' kernel (now that would be interesting!), and a new company comes with their own custom OS built on top of it, I would definitely support them, even though the technology is the same.
Would it be better if there would be a different, new system, based on new technology? Perhaps, from a technology point of view at least, but that's a completely different topic.
Say google wants to "accidentally" sabotage GMail for Firefox users, as they've done in the past. They make a slight change, and it will just silently percolate to all Chromium clones, who will never have enough manpower or money to scrutinize all updates and understand what they are for (that is the whole point of reusing someone else's code).
So no, it's not a different problem. If your tech depends on someone else's tech, you are still commercially and strategically helping the parent company. I know this sounds annoying and preachy, I wish I could state it in more appealing terms, but it's the unvarnished truth.
> Let's say Microsoft open source Windows' kernel
The point of building an "alternative" on top of this codebase would be to have compatibility with other Windows software. Hard forks rarely ever succeed even in opensource, let alone when the parent group of developers is still going strong; so "altOS" would have to stay close to the Windows standards. MS could still steer the market by tweaking APIs, and your "alternative" build would have no choice but to follow suit. And of course, desktop developers would still target Windows and take the fact that it also runs on "altOS" as a bonus. So, effectively, you'd still be aiding the MS monopoly stay in place.
This is what all those Chromium derivatives (Vivaldi, Brave, Ungoogled, etc) effectively do: they maintain Chrome's entrenchment and let Google stay in control of web standards.
It is much more than just a Chrome clone.
Whatever kernel is running under the browser is meaningless to userspace.
Hence why many just get whatever Electron apps one throws at them.
> The appearance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air
Not really. The appearance of Safari was a game changer, and only because Apple was basically forced to give WebKit/KHTML back to the community thanks to the LGPL. Webkit triggered the wave of embedding that made its engine a de-facto standard in development circlets, so that it was the obvious choice by the time Google had to pick one for strategic reasons.
There is an alternative timeline where KDE just used BSD, Apple just took their code and kept it closed, and Chrome never happened.
On a side note, it is somewhat insane to me, that the new edge limits syncing of work account info to enterprise only customers, and non office 365 users.
If they would allow sync functions for all tiers, it would be really hard to advocate chrome over edge.
other than their complete asshole force update method, which is a different topic, but insanely frustrating.
The do it in tiers they choose, so random people across the company are getting it at different time. Even if it is undo, and rolled back, they will redo the upgrade the next time updates are done. Because of this, there is a growing amount of bad blood against the new edge.
And let us not forget the stupid fucking name, having a conversation and researching shit, "new edge", "old edge", "chrome edge." Have the stones to rebrand when you make a significant product change.