> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers
Ladybird seems to be thriving. Sure, they themselves only plan on releasing a beta version next year, but still.
And it's even on the Hacker News frontpage right now! https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
It is not even mentioned on https://caniuse.com/?search=web%20components
But I never encountered a single "works better with chrome" message. Am I missing something?
That's always the case at the beginning. And then it stalls. That's exactly the gripe with fast-moving web standards: the churn kills browser diversity by exhaustion.
"they themselves only plan on releasing a beta version next year"
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. It successfully replaced it. Only to start sharing most of the qualities that were the reason for Internet Explorer to fail in the market. And there was a web before Internet Explorer as well.
Chrome once started at 0% market share. Displacing the dominant browser has been done before. It can be done again.
Web pages that only worked with Internet Explorer did not age very well. Companies ended up spending a lot on needing to replace those. Making a webapp that only works with Chrome is at this point seriously misguided. If only for the simple reason that you can forget about IOS compatibility if you do (as long as Apple keeps a death grip on the app stores, there will be no chromium based HTML rendering on IOS).
Why? You skim over all the things that make the present and the future different from the past. The size of the audience is not the same, the size of companies and engineering teams is not the same, the hatred against Microsft was always sky-high... It is not the same battle , it is not even the same battlefield.