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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

If we had as many browsers as OSs - somewhat interoperable but genuinely independent - then I would feel much better about the web. Compare NT/Darwin/*+Linux/(Net|Free|Open|Dragonfly)BSD/illumos (to say nothing of the long tail; you can in fact use Haiku for a lot) against Gecko/Blink/WebKit.

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If you consider the BSDs and Illumos to be operating systems, you might as well consider Lynx/Ladybird/Servo/Netsurf/Trident as browsers.

For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems: Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations that sponsor them.

Agreed, and I would argue that it's even worse on the browser side. We have Chrome and Safari on iOS, the rest is essentially irrelevant. With regards to web standards, Edge is just another Chrome-reskin. When Apple sooner or later looses the WebKit monopoly on iOS, it will all be Chrome...

I have daily driven OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I have tried to use anything that isn't Gecko or Blink. I feel comfortable saying that the OS situation is much better than the browser situation. I'm interested in technical merit / feature completeness, not popularity. The situation is likely to improve with Ladybird and maybe Servo, granted.

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