yes it is, we've already seen this with the retiring of webmanifest v2. a kernel is less commercially interesting, and doesn't allow you to screw over your users for personal gain in the same way.
That wouldn't happen under community leadership ala Linux.
Linux pretty much never breaks userspace.
Instead what you are seeing is the exact problem of overriding commercial interests and no restraint on individual parties because they all have their own little fiefdom to rule over.
A single browser engine wouldn't be the problem, it would be a great boon in many ways. The problem has been and remains that there is too much commercial bullshit getting pushed down into the browser engine rather than being matters of porcelain exactly because there is so much resistance to a fully FLOSS core.
Apple and Google are both to blame here for different reasons. Apple wants browser engines to mostly suck, especially on iOS. Google wants browser engines to be good but not be capable of restricting telemetry or blocking adverts.
However neither of those concerns require having their own engine, proof being that they were both able to share Webkit for a period of time.
Mozilla isn't blameless in this. They push the whole standardisation angle in a desperate plea for relevance while wasting resources on non-browser projects. Their efforts to "protect standardisation" cost us things like WebSQL, created a massive rift during the HTML5 and XHTML years and resulted in relentless addition of complexity.
I'm not saying they haven't done good, if anything I think Mozilla generally speaking has done the most good but they too have contributed to the clusterfuck.
Ironically MS has done very little wrong since the IE10 days, they basically threw in the towel and just use Blink now which is good (minus Google doing shitty things with it).
If we could end up in a place where Blink is developed in a similar way to Linux that -would- be good. It's generally the most advanced engine would be easiest to adapt the Webkit improvements that Safari has made and is already used in many other browser porcelains.
I don't see a way there yet but my point isn't that a path exists but that an end point potentially exists.
Google Bad, etc is true but if that could be fixed a mono-engine situation would be drastically better overall. Waste less time, less incompatibility problems, better web for everyone. (which is why Apple would never be on board but whatever).
WebSQL, like a lot of the stuff Google pushes, wasn't a standard. It was an implementation. And one that raised a lot of questions, like will it track with SQLite or be frozen in time except for security fixes?
With only a single implementation there are risks, like everyone gets owned by the same bug or oversight. In nature mono crops can be devastated by a single virus or invasive species.
Exactly. Linux isn't a standard, it's an implementation and that comes with many benefits. Some downsides also like you noted but generally speaking more good than bad.
I prefer a world where we can have WebSQL over a world where it's killed because Mozilla says that we need to build a new implementation of SQLite just because standardisation.
Obviously lots of people feel differently but my opinion is that standards don't really matter that much when every browser chooses to implement each standard slightly differently.
well, the web needs to be backwards compatible, basically indefinitely, once something has been around long enough to proliferate. so it's generally troubling to just pull in some third party library and go "I call it WebSQL", because you can't make any guarantees about how it will change, whether project policies will change, or if it will be abandoned entirely. For something to be a part of web standards places constaints on that thing, permanently. And I would wager to say that SQLite never agreed to or promised to those constraints, they are their own project and have enough to worry about. So it got the axe.
