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If another browser engine is good enough they might _fork_ it in order to add these kind of predatory features. Kind of like they already did with WebKit, now that I think about it. :-P

Maybe you don’t see the irony in your comment, but that is exactly how you get opinionated engine. If there is only one party that controls the only engine, that is the definiton of ”opinionated”.

Management of browser engines are absolutely opinionated. It's chock full of opinions. Decisions to not deprecate, decisions on which features to add, decisions on which features to refuse to add, all align around the incentives of the people who control the browser engine. For the last fifteen+ years the internet has primarily been driven forward by the needs of Apple and Google. There's no reason we have to continue like this, though.

Third party cookies are a great example of how chrome is actively hamstringing the entire internet with its dominance and control by a for-profit multinational.

Here are some “opinions”

“The engine shouldn’t allow the user to block select parts of the content”

“Telemetry should always be on”

“The engine should restrict access to a list of websites and domains provided by the government”

“All encryption should have a backdoor”

Google is no less opinionated with Chrome than Netscape, Microsoft and Apple have been. Google's opinions for the most parts align with our own, but that doesn't make it any less opinionated. And a Servo-monopoly would be better but still not great. Firefox started to stagnate after it took over from IE and vastly improved once Chrome appeared. Competition keeps things healthy

For what I have in mind, initially, a non-requirement is perfectly mimicking whatever someone managed to jam into a standard, unless it's really necessary to use "necessary" sites.

(Anyone who does a lot of blocking of ads/trackers will already be familiar with sites not being pixel-perfect.)

I'm thinking that bending over to mimick someone's big-moat browser behavior standards in every detail can be a secondary priority, for later, after nerds are already using it successfully as a daily driver.

Nothing says nerds can't keep a Chromium installed as an emergency backup, for trying that one demo that uses the latest thing Google-Microsoft is going to railroad into the standard, or for watching Netflix while traveling. (And for Web development testing, of course.) But otherwise, we should be dogfooding, like we had to do with Linux.