Quite, Any browser that doesn't use chromium is the correct choice. Monopolies are bad, and it's hilarious that people are celebrating one of the demise of one most destructive monopolies of the computing age with "just use $new_monpololistic_product, it will be different this time"
A lot of the same people decrying the Chrome monopoly never the less push for more and more bloat in the web standard, thus helping to enforce that monopoly by ensuring that hardly anyone has the resources to make a reasonable competitor.
More proprietary than "basically Google just tells everyone how it's going to be"? Maybe. It'd be hard to make it worse though. What people seem to really want out of the web is a VM platform and a document layout engine, so why not design a new VM that is intended first and foremost to be an efficient application platform, and then make one of those applications an open source document layout engine? You don't have to be married to HTTP and all its woes either. You could even port a current "legacy" browser to it. And if that document layout engine is found to be lacking, we can make a new one without breaking everything because its just another application on the VM.
Hell, you could compile the VM with an HTML5/JS target and get forward compatibility too.
A worse standard is unlikely to win people over. Even a better standard is unlikely to win.
Take HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, remove 90% of the cruft. Now, include what people want like a much better table element that by default can handle Adaptive screen sizes etc etc.
Chromium and Firefox are open source so you can probably get support in them by writing the code yourself. But, good luck gaining traction.
At least Webkit/Blink are open source and have multiple implementations. With that in mind, how do we distinguish between a "monoculture" and a "standard"?
I feel the same instinctive feeling that we're just going back to the IE days, but is it possible that having all browsers align on a single rendering engine could prove to be helpful rather than harmful?
About 5 years ago we had 4 browsers with significant share - IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. Even 10 years ago Firefox had a decent impact over over 25% and IE was being brought down into the "managable" area of 50%ish.
uMatrix is the best at blocking all sorts of content. One can selectively enable and save preferences per website, and that is helpful since uMatrix tends to break websites using CDNs.