Chromium won, and I'm not sure we've admitted what that cost
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, Vivaldi — all the same engine underneath. Firefox (Gecko) and Safari (WebKit) are the only real holdouts, and Firefox keeps losing ground. So in practice "does it work on the web" now means "does it work in Chromium," and a feature isn't really part of the web until Google ships it.
The uncomfortable part is this isn't IE6. Chromium is genuinely good and genuinely open source, and everyone builds on it for sane reasons — a browser engine is one of the hardest things in software and nobody wants to maintain one from scratch. The monoculture got here through reasonable choices, which is why it's so hard to point at the moment it went wrong.
But open source isn't the same as neutrally governed. Manifest V3 is the tell: Google rewrote the extension API in a way that happens to kneecap the most effective ad blockers, and every Chromium browser inherited it whether their users wanted it or not. The smaller ones patch around the edges, but they're patching someone else's roadmap. When the company that ships the default browser also earns most of the world's ad revenue, "we decide what extensions can do" is a lot of quiet power.
I don't have a clean answer. "Just use Firefox" is real, but it asks people to prop up a competitor out of civic duty, and that never scales. So is a single good-enough engine just the natural end state for something this expensive to build — or is the browser too important a thing to leave to one company's judgment, however good that judgment is right now?
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