We need a hard fork of Chromium today or it will happen in the future anyway.
Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.
for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue.
I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one.
> for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue.
Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed.
> I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?
Mozilla has already shown in the last decade they aren't interested in making a better browser.