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.
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.