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by DoctorOW 617 days ago
Before: Trident, Webkit, Gecko, Presto After: Blink/Webkit, Gecko/Quantum

We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.

2 comments

> The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control

Que?

If Google did some heinous stuff, tomorrow Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

> Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

Doubt.

I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)

>We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper.

That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.