AFAIK, Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems. I remember the days Apple posted tarballs infrequently. I'm wondering if this move may open development up, and thus may become a codebase more widely 'owned' than Blink's.
I think "control" here is somewhat unreasonably pejorative.
They each do the vast majority of the dev work in their respective engines, so it's "control" only because if they want a feature they'll just implement it. Similarly neither implements things that aren't of interest to them - I can't speak for blink but webkit isn't going to oppose people contributing support for new features unless the implementation is not good (I assume this is a universal across all projects), or it's considered harmful (features that are inherently insecure - a la SVG raw socket access - or inherently harmful - e.g. new tech to aid tracking).
The problem with Blink is not necessarily that Google controls it, the problem is that Blink owns the lion's share of the browser market. This makes Google's control of Blink a problem, since it effectively means Google controls the lion's share of the browser market.
That's only half of it - the problem is that the duopoly maintain a stranglehold over their respective portions of their markets. Remember that Ios forces browsers to use their Safari engine, which is a step more egregious than MS' forced IE bundling. Both together make the problem far worse, and neither alone would make things better. Google and Apple are a huge problem for the web. So to answer the original question, no.
Microsoft's stranglehold over the browser market was a pretty huge problem, irrespective of their business model. The web is way too important to be so tightly controlled by one single company, no matter who they may be.
Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
Of course, Firefox and later Chrome came around, so in the end the Web kicked Microsoft's ass anyway.
> Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
I think it was a bit more general: "We want to keep a stranglehold on the Apis used to write general software". The ability to write software once for the web and have it work on web browsers on any platform was viewed as an existential threat.
However, the observation that they only developed IE as long as they were worried about that threat and then left it to rot afterwards is spot on.
Their strategy was aimed against their competitors interests, not their users interests. Microsoft in the bad old days still saw their users as paying customers and not just a source of data to be exploited.
It isn't Microsoft that has entered the extinguish phase for ad blocking browser add-ons. I also don't remember Microsoft doing anything as anti-user as trying to keep pop-up blockers from working back in the bad old days.
Pop-ups were universally reviled, but also explorer aggressively pushed lots of random half features to support their products - the only difference is that they didn't publish a "spec" as google uses to create a veneer of not being anti-user.
MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D
