> but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.
Over IE and its dominance. IE 6 and onward was genuinely not great. IE 11 being maybe the least worst of them all, but still really bad.
Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc.
The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.
Microsoft was always of two minds about the Web, in a similar way to Apple's stance recently.
It's the universal runtime environment, so it stands the chance of commoditizing their platforms. There's no reason that you can't access the next killer web-app on a smart-fridge running HarmonyOS.
But they do recognize that they have to supply a servicable browser, because if they don't, people will pick up one from somewhere else.
So look where Edge (and Safari) focus their efforts-- begrudgingly matching the things they HAVE to match on Chrome, and adding on stuff like search and shopping tools or privacy gimmicks-- nothing that would make the web environment as a more free-standing platform that could displace native software.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.