[tsimionescu]

Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.

[timschmidt]

I suspect that the leading reason browsers require so much investment and development effort is the ongoing effort to engineer them into heavily surveilled application delivery platforms.

Most of the browsers in this list were developed by the open source community without major funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers

Though the same browsers tend not to support many of the newer standards.

I kind of miss SGML, myself, and wonder if a slower pace of browser development and associated code churn might actually be more benefit than harm.