Someone can fork chromium if need be. There are at least a couple organizations with chromium-based browsers that have maintained their own engines in the past. Chromium is objectively very good so it’s not like it’s the time when we were left with IE5. The biggest problem now is Google trying to protect their ad business and the other Chromium browsers have been working around that. I don’t think we are nearly as bad off as we have at other times in the past.

A fork of Chromium is still a Chromium-based engine, and does nothing to combat the browser engine monoculture.

I'm personally hoping for Servo/Verso, as well as hoping that Firefox turns around.

I dunno. Forcing ads on everybody seems bad to me. YMMV.

Safari / WebKit.

It's unironically better than Chrome in nearly every way, except dev tools.

And being proprietary, and only running on one family of operating systems.

Safari is proprietary and runs on one platform, not WebKit. Orion and a couple other browsers run cross platform.

I was referring to Safari here. I'm aware that WebKit is cross-platform, but it has vanishingly small market share if you ignore Safari, and it doesn't provide sufficient competition to browsers based on Chromium/Blink to keep the web from being a monoculture.

Safari has 20% of the market in The US?

In the comment you're replying to:

> but it has vanishingly small market share if you ignore Safari

Safari doesn't help here because it's proprietary and only runs on one family of OSes. WebKit doesn't have any substantive market share without Safari.

The context of the thread is

> I will mourn the lack of a non-Chrome browser engine with enough market share to prevent Chrome from unilaterally changing the web.

Ignoring Safari makes no sense as they are the ones preventing this.