Can you articulate why do you think a single engine is terrifying? KHTML is the precursor of WebKit that was used by Chrome and Safari for a while. It didn’t prevent Apple and Google to drive their products. Google eventually fork Blink out of WebKit. Other browser vendors follow a similar path (Brave, Opera, Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Supermedium...) Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed. I consider a single good reusable engine a level playing field for new browsers akin to the Linux Kernel for OSs. Engines are commoditized and differentiation comes from browser features.
It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing. While they might not go the route of Microsoft, putting their Active-X plugins in IE, using deprecated and non-standard APIs is pretty damn close.
Furthermore, all these forks result in bugfixes and new features making it back into Chromium. That allows Chromium to evolve faster than other browsers. That's not to say that Firefox hasn't been keeping up and pushing past Chrome on some important fronts (CSS Sub-Grid, for one), but I'm afraid a point will come where Firefox can't keep up with all the new web APIs that developers will want to use.
Another fork of Chromium doesn't lessen Google's influence over the market.
> It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing.
Thanks for asking. I was wondering if I could. I'll try:
> Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed
One of the foundational ideas behind the web is that you have a set of open standards that specify the web, and then people can go ahead and implement those standards and provide some unique set of features on top of those standards. For example: privacy.
I believe that Google and other big-tech actors are working to make the scope of these standards so vast and so fast-moving that it becomes impossible for a small or mid-range operation to implement and maintain a web browser. I mean, who was able to successfully fork and maintain a fork of KHTML/Webkit? Google! No small organization is capable of this. These are massive, complicated codebases that must keep up with evolving standards.
Therefore, even though you theoretically have "open standards," we're seeing a future with possibly a single implementation of those standards. And if you only have one implementation, then the whole foundation doesn't hold, i.e. you can't make a privacy-oriented browser because you can't make a browser in the first place. What if some day Google decides to stop contributing to Blink, to fork Blink and only update it closed source, against a set of fast-moving standards that they de-facto control? Or what if, at that point, with total domination, they stop following open standards entirely. I think that would be the end of the web.
Notice that a fork doesn’t have to maintain the whole code base, only your tweaks on top. Cases I know like Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Brave or Supermedium (I’m co-founder) have very small teams. They start with Chromium and have total freedom to modify privacy policies, ship remove any APIs or standards. At the same time they can take all Web compatibility for granted that I agree is not tenable by a small org.
