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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

Something that would have helped break the Chrome monopoly is if Microsoft had chosen non-Chrome for Edge. I would have liked Firefox, because that would have added technology weight so there was one giant behind each major engine.

Using Blink/Chromium is effectively Microsoft supporting Chrome's technology monopoly.

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It’d be nice if they rewrote Safari on Chromium. I think we’d all be better to pool our collective resources to work on a single browser vs. a whole bunch of competing standards and implementations

History is funny. KHTML (a KDE project) was repurposed to WebKit by Apple and integrated with Safari. Which in turn was taken by Google that built Chrome on it. They later diverged more and now other browser are being built on repurposed Chrome. It would be funny if Safari was really replaced by Chromium as that would mean the offspring has eaten the parent.

It actually extends further -- QTWebEngine is now a stripped-down version of Chromium.

I mostly agree. Having a healthy browser landscape is important for user privacy and accessible/equitable access to the internet, but I'm not seeing the evidence as to why that same argument extends to multiple independent engine implementations.

The computing world would be better off if governance of Blink/V8/etc were handed over to a neutral third party. Similar to Linux. Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Brave, etc can all still exist and differentiate on the implementation, just like how Amazon Linux differentiates with Ubuntu.

Competition is good, actually.

You really don't want a monoculture of a single browser engine pushing badly designed and often poorly implemented "standards".

w3c (and whatwg?) have a rule of "two independent implementations before a thing can become a standard" for a reason.

Prior to now-ish, we didn't have a bunch of companies working on a single browser, we had a bunch of companies making a bunch of browsers. With a core open source browser that everyone steals from and adds their own flare to, I'm way more open to that. That is the best of all possible worlds, IMHO.

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