Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft’s first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.
Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because “the browser is outdated” if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of “Edge is just Internet Explorer” eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.
I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google’s hand into compatibility, but I don’t know if even they are big enough to do that.
I imagine the reason that Cloudflare is doing this now is that Google just got off with no punishment from their antitrust loss.
Anybody who competes with Google now has to worry that they’ll do to them what they did to Microsoft. And, with Trump’s DOJ, the government will probably just ignore it if Sundar Pichai shows up with a shiny bauble for Trump. So, I’d imagine that Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon (AWS, Twitch), and Meta, among others, might all decide to fund an alternative browser.
Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft’s first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.
Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because “the browser is outdated” if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of “Edge is just Internet Explorer” eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.
I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google’s hand into compatibility, but I don’t know if even they are big enough to do that.
I imagine the reason that Cloudflare is doing this now is that Google just got off with no punishment from their antitrust loss.
Anybody who competes with Google now has to worry that they’ll do to them what they did to Microsoft. And, with Trump’s DOJ, the government will probably just ignore it if Sundar Pichai shows up with a shiny bauble for Trump. So, I’d imagine that Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon (AWS, Twitch), and Meta, among others, might all decide to fund an alternative browser.