[ornxka]

Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the reason why there are only two viable browsers in the first place - because the endless and ever-growing list of specifications and standards web browsers must comply with has grown to the point where it is apparently impossible to build a browser without the budget of a nation state. For example, https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... has done some calculations, and has found that "the total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing." Good luck implementing that, if you're not Google!

A lot of things could be done to simplify the amount of labor it takes to build a web browser. If you look at the architecture of the web, there is no reason for things to be this complicated - the web doesn't need a complicated high-level language runtime when it could have bytecode a la WASM, for example. But that's exactly the problem, because the reason why things have become so complicated is not because that's just how complicated the problem space is that a web browser attempts to solve, but because the people in charge of the web actually have a vested interest in things being as complicated as possible. When you already have the budget of a nation state, there is not only no benefit to your job requiring less labor to perform, it actually harms you because now competitors need that many fewer resources to compete with you. That's the real problem - they don't want it to be simple and easy, they want it to be complicated and hard, and the present problem of lack of browser diversity is just a consequence of that.

This is the real reason why things have gotten this bad in the browser space, and it's never going to get any better without first addressing this fact and then by breaking basically the entire web by decimating the volume of standards documents web browsers have to follow. There is no other option. Nobody is going to sift through 114 million words of specification documents to build another web browser for the web that exists today.

The web can't be saved. Its replacement will have to start from scratch.

[freediver]

There are two components of a modern browser: browser rendering engine and a browser framework (everything around the rendering engine that creates the browser itself).

There are three main browser rendering engines, all of which are open-source: Gecko, Blink and Webkit.

Problem of standards is mainly "offsourced" to these rendering engines and these open source communities have been doing their job more or less successfully.

Browser frameworks are built around these rendering engines. Two most popular open source ones are Firefox (built around Gecko) and Chromium (brother of closed-source Chrome, built around Blink).

I think the problem that you are articulating comes from the fact that 99% of browsers on the market use one of these two frameworks, in reality mostly Chromium. For example Edge and Brave are based on Chromium. This leads to inheriting most of the features but also most of the flaws of the browser framework.

Notably there are no major open source frameworks built around Webkit, which is a shame, considering that at least for macOS, Webkit is by far the most superior rendering engine (both in battery life and sheer performance).