But if that engine is open source, isn't that a good thing? There's a single standard but anyone can contribute patches for increased performance, new features, etc?
All commits to the Chrome codebase are gated through Google, an ad company whose driving motivation is in delivering value to shareholders, not to improving the web. Once the web becomes a Google monoculture, I won't be holding my breath to see any features land on the web that could threaten Google's bottom line.
> Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel?
All projects gate commits somehow. It's not about the gating, it's about who is allowed to make the big decisions and how much buy-in they need to seek from other stakeholders before they're allowed to proceed. It's also about incentives; if Linus were, say, a Verizon employee and if the Linux Foundation were a Verizon subsidiary, people would feel much differently about the governance of the kernel. Likewise if the kernel were permissively licensed rather than GPL'd.
> On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval?
The thrust of the point here is that forking the codebase is no good if you can't convince people to install the browser and for websites to support the browser. It's a social problem.
> is it not open "enough"?
It's not. Open source gives users the freedom to fork. When forking isn't enough to preserve user freedom, the next step is open governance, which involves delegating decision-making power to users (with many interesting structural varieties to choose from). Amusingly, I gave a speech on this topic at All Things Open just a month ago.
The absolute number is not that important, the trend is. That's clear even in Mozilla's own data: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity shows they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment.
https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
Except that we will probably have to support Edge for another 5 years for the people who refuse to upgrade, so in reality, it will be one extra unsupported browser that we have to write hacky workarounds for.
Honestly, I think it’s a monoculture already and the fact that multiple engines exist puts up an illusion of competition. Google controls where the Web goes today, and that there is an oligopoly is a false symbol. At least Chrome gets more dominance, we can no longer pretend Google doesn’t already own the Web.
