Saying 'Chrome / Chromium [...] are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective' is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.
I mean, on balance, compared with the IE reigning years, Chromium is better than that, and its been mostly (again, from a developer perspective) a net positive in day to day developers lives that Chrome has not stagnated and new features ship.
That however, is not to say that its okay. There's other, broader issues than just developer experience to care about here, like what a Google dominated web means, because via Chrome, they can push a great deal around how the web actually works, which is a net loss to society. It can stifle other innovations. Things of that nature.
> is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.
Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web.
There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s.
[1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.
>> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it,
As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.)
But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_.
IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows.
In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels.
MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable.
The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at.
Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome.
[1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.
But... Firefox came out before Chrome. It's not like we had to use IE6 until Chrome came out. I started using Firefox as soon as it came out and have used it continuously ever since.
For an end user, Firefox was great. But the wide prevalence of IE meant that
* Sometimes sites worked only in IE or broke subtly in other browsers. The subtle breaking could be layout differences or functionality not available/working because the developers used IE specific technology/javascript
* Developers had to code for the lowest common denominator - IE. It really held back web applications
edit: (over Firefox, sorry I wasn't clear)