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.
could you expand on this? Which big companies are you referring to?