Comment by latexr
8 hours ago
> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink.
That’s what makes Google more dominant, and if you think that’s a good idea you should really put down your LLM and go read up on a bit of history. Do you want to live in a world where a single company controls your access to the web? Are you eager to navigate through ad pages with a little bit of web? To have even more of your data mined?
Browser diversity may be a bit annoying for developers, but it is good for users, and developers are users too. When there’s a lack of diversity, everyone but the dominant player is squeezed.
Google's dominance comes from market share not from owning upstream. If a different fork took 90% market share that fork would have the dominance and power.
And that market share is maintained by integration with Android and low-key sabotage of others browsers, especially Firefox. Similar to how Microsoft maintained its monopoly decades ago.
Whether a new browser uses a brand new engine or not that doesn't stop Chrome being integrated with Android.
> If a different fork took 90%
That can only happen if we don’t all focus resources on Blink, which is the point. By definition, we can only have other engines if diversity is a thing.
The problem isn’t specifically Google (though they are a problem), but any one individual company having all the power.
>That can only happen if we don’t all focus resources on Blink
Why? What's fundamentally stopping Edge market share from going to 90% that would go away if they switched back to their own browser engine?
>but any one individual company having all the power.
Open source means that anyone can make any change at any time. Google doesn't have all the power over what a fork does. A fork is still in full control.