Is it better than Chrome + uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger/Ghostery?
I'm not sure how critical this is in practice; but the way this evolved may be a symptom of the fact that Blink's authors' motivations align less well with those of an ad-block user than Firefox's authors' motivations do.
The worry of course is that once there truly are no competing rendering engines, that google will no longer feel the pressure to put user's interests before those of sites of even itself. And because blink and webkit don't really compete (still nice to have two, but on virtually no devices are both engines serious alternatives), that day is pretty close; it's likely already having an impact.
The DRM industry's answer to the previous waves of DRM and DRM-breaking was Denuvo.
The copyright cartel's answer to copying via digital bypassing and the analogue hole was to make it all but mandatory to cryptographically secure every single element in the chain between their own servers and the pixels on our displays, and refuse to serve HD content if your hardware and software won't implement that. Not to mention, DMCA.
Just because Firefox was the liberation from IE6, doesn't mean it will be proportionally as easy to liberate ourselves from Chromium if it does become the only browser engine.
Even in the Denuvo case, there is still pirate activity on games that employ it (albeit no 0 days).
These aren't the weak little monopolies of times past, stuff like standard oil - these new setups are much more clever, and much more pervasive, and much more powerful.
Oh hey, as it turns out tech companies are making obscene profits (so much for economic efficiency!), and we've given them little legal monopolies by implementing copyrights, patents and contract law in just the right way to make competition almost impossible. Startups competing with them need great luck, huge pockets, a brilliantly found niche - and even then they'll probably just get bought or simply fail.
I mean I get that browsers are just one small element of the whole puzzle. But on the other hand, it's also one of the few where avoiding lock-in might still be fairly easy. I don't blame anybody for using chrome - use it myself on occasion - but I'll avoid it as long as it's at least easy to do so.
Browser complexity is an issue in a more direct, plainly technical way too. Even from a purely technical perspective it's just nice to see alternatives, and the world is a big place; the extra investment spread over the now huge online economy is surely worth simply the extra reliability that such reproducibility brings to design of the web fundamentals and discovering new, useful platform features.
If you only have one implementation, it's very easy to accidentally have oversights in the spec that in effect render the true spec "whatever the browser does"; and while I applaud the pragmatism in that approach, I don't applaud the design-by-coincidence that then results in some pretty bad api's being permanent gotcha's in new webdev. Some of the API's that resulted from MS + apples more... "innovative" moments are pretty terrible, and here to stay.
Basically: having a bit of competition is just a good idea for all kinds of reasons, especially when the downsides are... well what exactly? Why would you want a blink monoculture?
When Firefox overtook IE6, Microsoft had been colossally mismanaging IE for years, which meant that IE had become a rusted husk of what it was in its glory days. This made for incredibly strong incentive for web developers to support an alternative, because having to develop for an utterly broken browser for an indefinite period of time was intensely unappealing. On the end user side of the equation, Firefox’s incredible speed, UX improvements, and robust support for extensions did a lot to win people over.
Fast forward to today. Google is infinitely more savvy with web developer relations than late-IE-era MS could’ve ever been — they keep devs “fed” well enough with a steady stream of new shiny features that it’s unlikely that they’d ever revolt. For users, the difference in speed and UX between Firefox is negligible or even works in Chrome’s favor (which is tilting further in Chrome’s direction with every site that’s developed and tested only against Chrome).
Additionally, the barrier to entry for new web engines is so high now that anybody trying to build a browser that is to Chrome what Firefox was to IE is almost certainly doomed to fail unless backed by a company with deep pockets and no expectation of return on investment for many years.
If Google is treating devs and users well, there is no reason to switch. It's when they falter on one, migrations can and will occur (given past history as experience).
Additionally, even in the situation that Google is a “good steward”, their total dominance means that there is no room for meaningfully different visions of the web to compete, which is very bad.
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Bootstrapping competitors is hard. Driving your competitors under and then cranking up the heat when the field is clear is a classic strategy.
As a strategy, it would be reckless in the extreme.