[charcircuit]

The issue that you bringing up was more of an issue of Microsoft thinking they were finished with the web and the lack of automatic updates. It was not due to lack of diversity of engines, but of market share of a single product. This is very different from having the dominant browser engine invested in the success of the web with automatic updates to ensure that the web platform is able to advance and not stagnate.

[lucasban]

As a counterpoint, this does make it so that one group has disproportionate power over what features make it into that engine, or how they are implemented. What if their incentives change over time and are no longer aligned with what we might consider the success of the web?

[charcircuit]

Then it can be forked because it's open source.

[cosmic_cheese]

The problem with forking Blink/Chromium is that in order to be able to counter Google, the organization maintaining the fork is going to need dev manpower on the order of Google’s to be able to keep up with upstream patches, which is prohibitively expensive for all but a handful of orgs (not to mention, skilled talent capable of working on web engines doesn’t grow on trees). Without that any fork that differs substantially from mainline is eventually doomed as the divergence grows and overwhelms the team.

[charcircuit]

It does not take the same order of engineers for only integration. That is false as you can see by the existing integration teams for forks that exist. And I'm sure Mozilla is able to find talent capable of working on web engines.

[cosmic_cheese]

There are no Blink forks with appreciably large differences yet, though. In the aftermath of Google turning “evil” and working against the better interests of the web in multiple ways, you’re looking at a fork with divergences as large or larger than those that prompted Google to fork Blink from WebKit, making integration of patches from mainline Blink a full time non-trivial job.

Personally I’d rather see Mozilla working on Gecko or maybe consider switching to Servo or something instead.

[charcircuit]

The software is very modular. I don't see what could make it so hard to remove "evil" modules.

[cosmic_cheese]

Monopolies are bad regardless. It’s similar to dictators — even if you have a “good” one that works in the interest of the people, that can all come crashing down and turn to despotism in an instant.

In the case of the web, it’s also bad for any single company to have as much influence as Google has on web standards development. There’s simply too much conflict of interest at play. As a web engine developer they should have some amount of sway but if any party is to have disproportionate power it’d be better if it were an org like Mozilla that’s more likely to give issues like privacy and potential for abuse greater consideration.