Post #1434564

@mxk @EdCates @graves501 @theorangetheme What "gives me headaches" when a browser render engine gets a monopoly, we easily end up with the complete chaos we had with Internet Explorer roughly 20 years ago. Web sites had to account for IE3, IE4-5 and IE 6 version plus the "minority others". A web page would end up behaving completely different across all these aspects. The Opera browser was at that time one of the engines which was close to most compliant to the web standards. Microsoft extended IE without caring about standards and since it was the dominating browser at that time, they didn't care much about the standards. They had their own standards. But they also didn't care about compliance between their own versions even. Web developers at that time focused on getting the IE experience as best as they could and then came the minority browsers. This can easily happen again if Chromium ends up without real competition. Then Google can do whatever they want with Chrome, drop caring about standards since it "owns" the browser scope. And by doing that, websites starts to adopt to make sure web sites renders best on Chrome, resulting in people being locked in with Chrome. And somewhere along this path, Google can ditch the open source Chromium - just as they try to squeeze out the third-party Android apps these days. By not having a real competition in any market space, we users/consumers ends up as the losing part sooner than later.