[szasamasa]

yes, there are sooo many OS out there

linux and windows, then 3x linux derivatives (android, mac, ios)

so we have the linux kernel and windows, we still exist (1% open source)

browsers have the open source chromium kernel plus safari and firefox and some small others

it seems to me browser choice is good enough

I dont mind if google and microsoft engineers all work on chromium together...

[drdaeman]

I'm sorry, but your comment has a lot of simple facts stated plain wrong, and then it entirely misses the point (which could be my fault for not making it clear what it was about).

macOS and iOS are based on Darwin, which is a BSD-derivative, IIRC there's nothing from Linux in there at all (although IIRC macOS used to ship some GNU programs). Chromium is not the engine, Blink and WebKit are. Android has almost no relation to GNU - sure, it has Linux kernel, but, it's entirely different system on top of it... but all of this is not important.

It doesn't matter if the browser choice is good enough or not. That's not the point at all - today's browsers are going to become irrelevant, just like '90s and 00's browsers don't matter anymore (Trident? Presto? CERN and NSCA stuff?). The fact there are only few engines remaining is the indicator, not the problem.

The core issue that the entry barrier is extremely high, and the foundations are still almost as bad as they were when Web2.0 was conceived. There's a giant baggage of legacy stuff that has pretty large impedance mismatch. The colossuses are growing so fast no one can realistically build a competing one anymore, yet all of them have feet of clay, as they were never meant/designed to grow into what they became through their twisted evolution.

By the way, I can totally understand if someone would disagree with this. Evolution takes weird paths, but somehow ends up achieving impressive results, and if we would stop caring about how things are working underneath (think of a recurrent laryngeal nerve analogy) and only focus on what they can do, maybe it's fine.

[szasamasa]

thanks for the details, you are probably right, then change linux to unix and chromium to blink in my comment, however, browser engines are all open source and they are the exact pitch perfect level to introduce competition

I am not so sure that chromium "kernel" or linux "kernel" ever become irrelevant... gecko or webkit maybe

even if only chromium engine stays, it is open source, if something goes wrong, you can fork or get back to gecko, webkit... we are all carbon based lifeforms, still there is great diversity I guess

why would we need to make so much effort to compete on browser engine level if it is so great that you cannot differentiate native to browser run programs?

I really do not understand what the point of your comments actually are... it is simply not true the browsers are not good for competition and I do not see what alternatives you suggest instead?