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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

Meh. I don't buy it.

First of all, individual boycotts will never, ever overcome a collective action problem, so a fundamentally futile solution is being proposed here.

Plus, this is only bad if Google act destructively evil and no one steps in to change it. If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins.

It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. This is the way of all web technologies. Should we go back to competing variants of (proto-)JavaScript to prevent web monoculture, too?

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> If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins.

There is zero chance of that happening. Like all public companies, Google acts in its own self-interest. Google controls Chromium, and there is absolutely no benefit to Google to hand control of Chromium over to an outside entity. 98% of all patches to Blink are reviewed by a Google employee.

If establishing a foundation were going to happen, then it would have happened when Apple and Google were still collaborating on WebKit.

I wouldn't say the chance is exactly zero - if Google's monopolistic behaviour surrounding Chrome (the "install our browser!" nags on their web properties come to mind) get too egregious, they may be forced to divest via antitrust law.

> It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out.

I think it should be that one competing _standard_ will win out. Ideally we can have infinite number of browser engines, as long as each one implements all widely used standards correctly. We already see this with most websites working fine whether in chromium or firefox. The only incompatibilities (in theory) should come from bugs or new standards/experiments which haven't been widely adopted or implemented yet.

The same for javascript - multiple implementations of a js engine is fine, as long as they all implement the ES* standard.

Also if everyone moves to a Chromium engine monoculture, what will happen to innovation? eg. Mozilla has made some major progress with it's work with Servo.

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