[iamkonstantin]

One can also say it’s a duopoly of two suboptimal browsers (factoring all Chromium based browsers together).

Even though other options exist “technically”, users on the two (3?) popular mobile and desktop OS experience a great deal of platform friction when opting to make their own choice (if at all possible like on iOS).

[dagmx]

Not that I disagree on the duopoly part, but truthfully there’s only one third browser engine in play and that’s Gecko/Firefox.

Which, imho isn’t any more optimal than WebKit or Blink.

Granted, perhaps if the duopoly didn’t exist, it could get more resources. After all they did once dethrone IE6, but I think that was as much Microsoft’s blunder as it was Mozilla’s success. I’m not sure Apple or Google are making the same blunders today.

[iamkonstantin]

It is possible that I'm missing a bigger picture where Mozilla is pushing the envelope with Firefox.

We've crystalized around a specific role for each browser (e.g. Chromium brings in whatever webstandards it needs to pretend to be an OS, Safari tries to keep up while also sneaking Apple ecosystem facilities, Firefox... keeping up?) and there is no real innovation. Of course, we have better ways to not-block-ads, scrape user telemetry, or ai-whatever-that's-good-for... but nothing substantial towards improvements for the people using browsers.

The browser space is stagnating.

[Zak]

What platform friction to users experience installing a different browser on Android? I'm aware few users actually choose to do it, but I don't recall any resistance from the OS to installing Firefox, making it the default, and keeping it that way.