> This exact part of your comment is why big companies are fighting so hard to own and gatekeep web browsers.
Yes. And it goes even further, it's also why they're working hard to destroy the WWW, and have everybody silo-d into their app.
It's why on most social/media networks you can't really link to anything. Why they're dressing down the address bar so that people don't see (and learn about!) URLs any more. Or learn about their use, that they are one of the fundamental building blocks of what was the WWW.
Although there's more, they already burned some parts of the woods before attacking the WWW. Do you remember there was a time when almost all of the popular instant messaging protocols were supported in ONE (free, non-tracking, non-ad infested) app (and there was even a choice of such apps: Pidgin, Trillian, Miranda ..).
Some of them could even talk to each other. It's crazy to imagine, but ultimately even more crazy is that we don't have this any more!!
They won the instant messaging war, it was pretty silent in fact. Just wasn't as ingrained as the WWW used to be. They had to wean the users off slowly, which is exactly what they're doing right now.
The time is coming but not yet. If they could, they would completely do away with the browser and just have their own apps. All the browser represents to them is a liability; an opportunity to click away and leave their platform for another.
Well, Microsoft gave up and are using Google's browser. And Mozilla just downsized the Firefox team (and they're paid by Google to keep Firefox going, basically). And Safari is only ever a presence on Apple computers, which Apple already control completely. It's not really a huge competition...
Microsoft Edge is not "Google's browser". It uses the Chromium rendering engine but it's still developed and distributed by Microsoft, which means they own the telemetry, the features, the defaults, and the user experience (which are the parts that matter, no one cares about the renderer from a business POV).
Google has Chrome, we've covered that already.
Apple has Safari.
Firefox exists, and is only funded by Google - in my opinion - to fend off anti-trust at this point.
Just because Google has more or less won the browser wars doesn't mean all those other companies wouldn't _love_ to regain market share in the future.
And perhaps they will. Owning that window is hugely valuable and lucrative, so why wouldn't they?
I agree completely that Firefox is only maintained as an anti-trust foil by Google.
When Google worked out that Microsoft owning the browser might cost them in the long run, they started working on Chrome.
I don't see anyone doing anything similar at the moment. Microsoft's adoption of Chrome is a tacit admission that they lost the browser wars and are not interested in continuing that fight. Apple isn't trying to get Safari adopted en masse on any other OS, it just seems to want to have a browser that it controls on its platform, which I guess makes sense. But it's not a play for "controlling the browser" - they don't even stop you from installing other browsers on their platform.
This just isn't an area anyone is fighting for any more. Building a standards-complient fully-featured browser is a huge project, but not so huge that a large corporate couldn't afford it. Persuading people to use it is a larger problem, but again, nothing that hasn't been done before and can't be done again. But no-one at this scale is even trying.
There are a few attempts from the other direction, dedicated companies like Brave trying to make this happen, and I hope they succeed.
This exact part of your comment is why big companies are fighting so hard to own and gatekeep web browsers.