Why is browser consolidation such a big problem? If the current market leader starts to fall behind, then whoever does it better will gain adoption. Isn't this how Chrome grew a following?
Browsers consolidated down to basically one and then that one just sat and didn't advance anymore. And why should it? It's not like users could go elsewhere. For years the world was subjected to the absolute crap that ie6 ossified on and wouldn't fix.
We need viable competition to keep a fire lit under the leader to stay ahead.
Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)
IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.
When Chrome eventually came out I added it to my arsenal because it was new and there was an expectation that it would be as revolutionary as Firefox had been. And it was pretty good, much faster than ff was by that time. Never did give up ff entirely but Chrome ended up open more and more. Contrast to ie6 that I never opened again as soon as ff was available. I did check out ie7 when it came out but there was no reason to stay with it. Very much a catch up move.