I don't see much difference between a single party and a cartel of 3-4 parties. They are all mega corporations that don't share my interests and even when there are several parties any one effectively has veto power over any changes to standards.
The push for browser-as-OS is only going to make things worse. You don't get any browser choice at all when your hardware is running ChromeOS or FirefoxOS
Both browser based OS's are still in their early phases. What if the hardware could run both, just as easily as you could put whatever flavor distro of linux on your desktop?
There's too much closed source OS specific drivers to really allow you to run whatever OS you want on whatever hardware you want; and everyone is disincentivized unless money is involved. But what if drivers were open source? I'm not sure how to incentivize that (the community fixing shitty GL driver implementations, maybe), but I would bet you it would be a hell of a lot easier to get you favorite software running on your favorite hardware if they were.
Right now, closed source drivers are a thorn in the side of users having choice. With the rapid progression of the Mesa project in particular, when hardware manufacturers come around to releasing their drivers, then ChromeOS, Firefox OS, and Tizen will be poised and in a good position.
This isn't a valid replacement for just being able to run multiple browsers. Switching OS has a large cost. Your FirefoxOS local apps won't run on ChromeOS (and vice versa). You have to work out how to get your files from one to the other and so on. If you want to just try another browser out you have to go through a process that is very intimidating and complicated for most people. The average user is not going to do it (or if they are persuaded to do it many will get angry and complain that all their apps are gone).
Making the cost of switching browsers much higher is an attempt to lock people in to a single browser.
When your OS is no more than a browser, what is the difference?
It really doesn't matter if it's possible to work around these hurdles to changing OS, it's still a massive amount of effort to think about all these things rather than just being able to install a different browser alongside. Normal users will not be re-imaging their phones to different OSs just to try a different web browser. It just won't happen in any great numbers. After a hard fought battle over many years to get people over the relatively small hurdle of installing Firefox on open platforms, I would expect Mozilla of all people to appreciate how difficult it would be to get people to try out different browsers in a world.
Also, I know it's kind of taboo to talk about this around here, but it's worth also mentioning what web apps mean for user privacy and data security. You seem to be suggesting that people only use web apps where their data is never stored locally, only in the cloud. In data centres where governments can mine it (often without warrants or any kind of due process), where it can be mined to build profiles on users for advertising or insurance purposes. That kind of app also leaves user vulnerable to all their data disappearing when the web service they use runs out of money or gets bought out or just decides to ditch a feature.
Doing while preserving security would mean that such a runtime would run sandboxed (in the same way we render web pages with gecko in sandboxed processes). For that to work, the sandboxed process need to delegate some functionality to the "main" trusted process, like network access. This is happening through an ipc protocol (we reused the one from chromium) but the messages exchanged are very much gecko specific currently, so a lot of work would be needed to turn that into a more generic ipc embedding interface.
I'm pretty sure that the folks working on Servo would be very happy to plug in their engine there ;)
Perhaps you are starting to realise that running an open platform isn't as easy as you supposed, and a lot of Microsofts actions were not just "Microsoft is evil" either.
But nowadays, I see it as, multiple companies have a vested financial interest (including MS with their new leadership) to ensure that browsers are very powerful.
Even Apple, with iOS 8 has enabled 3rd party devs to have a full speed browser now with a JIT'd JS engine. They are simply not doing this from a position of weakness. There are no market forces. There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." Yet they still did it.
Your mobile platform won't succeed today unless it has a powerful browser built in, apps or not.
FWIW, I said it and did it.
I didn't like Safari, and I couldn't change the default browser to anything better. Even worse, most 3rd party apps used their own utter-crap in-app browsers instead.
So I switched to Android where I have freedom to set my preferred default browser, and 3rd party apps actually respect that.
I do agree with the rest of your comment — these days you can't have a platform without a great browser.
Same.