Google's browser engine is open source. You can reuse Google's browser engine meaning that you can focus on the features that differentiate your browser instead of implementing the spec like you suggest.
We need independent groups of passionate people making sure that the web platform is focused on the best end user experience. We don't always have that today, but that vision is completely dead if the web functionality is decided entirely by an advertising platform.
A robust and reusable browser engine lowers the barrier of entry for anyone to innovate and differentiate. Browser compatibility is close to solved since everyone shares most of the implementation. Better user experience across the board at lower cost.
Specific examples are Brave, Opera, or more recently the Meta Browser shipping in the Meta Quest: very small team now leading the WebXR standard. it wouldn’t be possible without Chromium.
The browser engine is open source. You can make changes and proposals with your own fork. If you are making a browser for musicians you could try and advance the WebMIDI spec and add new functionality to it and then try to get it standardized. But as a browser developer you don't want to me spending your time implenting specs that other people have already implemented, but rather spending time working on things that improve your browser for your userbase.
What would be the point of open specifications if there was only a single implementation?
I never said there was? When you write the first implementation then there will only be a single implementation, but that's how counting works. 1 comes after 0. Anyone is free to write another implementation.
This model of starting with chromium really has nothing to do with building a web browser, it is just building a UI around Google's browser. There isn't much daylight between that and the often complained about limitation of Apple only allowing the use of WebKit on iOS.
It's faster to learn the part of the comebase you are interested in rather than building a whole browser engine.
>and are going to be dependant on staying in sync with chromium to get new features.
Being able to reuse the work Google is investing into th browser engine is a positive.
>There isn't much daylight between that and the often complained about limitation of Apple only allowing the use of WebKit on iOS.
The difference is you can make changes to the browser engine if you need.
Web standards are not driven by one browser or one company. That would still be true if everyone based their browsers off of Blink.
We wouldn't need standards at all if everyone used the same browser engine. Whoever owns the engine, likely Google, would make the engine however they choose and could change core fundamentals of how the web itself works.
Many devs were up in arms when a GitHub issue raised the idea of effectively DRMing the internet. Google can bake that right into chromium if they want to, and if they were the only browser engine they could easily get away with closed sourcing chromium and only shipping binaries so the feature can't be disabled or removed.
Web standards in that world would be an internal discussion at Google, likely driven entirely by their business needs. There's no browser competition there, the open web would be completely dead.
I am not suggesting that people only make UI changes. I am suggesting that there is value in reusing work that already exists.
>The browser experience is what actually renders the web page, not the menu system around it.
Chromiums renderer is going to be fine for most people looking to build a browser. People building a browser should focus onan building what makes their browser unique. Not every browser is setting off to create a new rendel engine.
>We wouldn't need standards at all if everyone used the same browser engine.
There still would be a need for cross industry collaboration on how to move the web forward. If Clang was the only C++ compiler there still is a benefit on having the standards process and working groups figuring out how to evolve the language.
>Whoever owns the engine, likely Google, would make the engine however they choose and could change core fundamentals of how the web itself works.
This is a problem with browser marketshare and not browser engine marketshare.
>and if they were the only browser engine they could easily get away with closed sourcing chromium and only shipping binaries so the feature can't be disabled or removed.
Other browsers can work together on developing on top of the last public release of chromium. This is still less work than all of these browser developers independently creating their own browser engines.