And we know this because it has happened before. Back in the mid-90s, there were two browsers competing for dominance: Netscape (first released in 1994) and Internet Explorer (first released in 1995). Netscape was originally the dominant browser but IE gradually took over as it was bundled with Windows as the default web browser (and could also be downloaded for Mac OS starting in 1996 and became the default web browser for Classic Mac OS and later Mac OS X starting in 1997) whereas Netscape was (originally) a paid product until 1998 and, by 2001, all versions of Internet Explorer had a combined usage share of 96% and what happened next?
Nothing.
And by 'nothing' I don't mean 'nothing happened now that there was one dominant web browser that had nearly 100% marketshare' I mean 'Microsoft pretty much decided "Well we basically control the entire web browser market now, we don't need to keep developing IE anymore" so they just left Internet Explorer 6 (the IE version released in 2001 that was default on Windows XP originally and itself achieved a peak user share of 90% in 2004) to rot and effectively stagnated the entire internet from both a design and technical standpoint since everyone had to design their websites to work with a browser that was full of security issues (which Microsoft would often take forever to patch and they'd only patch the most serious issues), its lack of support for certain standards other browsers supported, and its instability. I shit you not when I say this: you can crash Internet Explorer 6.0 by entering ms-its:%F0: into the address bar. That's all you have to do to crash it.
And I really need to make it clear how much Microsoft left Internet Explorer 6 to rot. Internet Explorer 1 was released with the Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95 in August 1995, Internet Explorer 2 was released in November 1995, Internet Explorer 3 in August 1996, Internet Explorer 4 in September 1997, Internet Explorer 5 in March 1999, and Internet Explorer 5.5 in 2000. Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001, alongside Windows XP and when did Microsoft release Internet Explorer 7? October 20-fucking-06.
Five years. They went five fucking years without doing any serious updates to their browser because why do they need to? What were people going to do, switch to another browser?
Well yeah, that's what they did. Firefox 1.0 was released in Q4 2004 (although public testing versions had been released since 2002, originally known as Phoenix from versions 0.1 to 0.5 and then Firebird from versions 0.6 to 0.7.1) and by Q4 2005, Firefox already had over 11% marketshare and it was growing more popular by the day. Microsoft now had competition once more (although they wouldn't dip below 50% usage share until 2010)
And the ironic part of all of this? Firefox is the spiritual successor to Netscape.
Not joking. During development, Netscape was known by the codename of 'Mozilla', which was a portmanteau of 'Mosaic' and 'Godzilla' and also stood for 'Mosaic Killer' (Mosaic referring to NCSA Mosaic, a one of the first widely available web browsers that helped popularize the World Wide Web and the Internet as a whole, that was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Incidentally, many of Netscape's founders had worked on NCSA Mosaic and Netscape itself was originally called Mosaic Netscape until they were presented with a legal challenge from the NCSA)
In 1997, Netscape began development on a new browser engine as the existing browser engine that they'd been using since Netscape Navigator 1.0 was slow, had limited support for dynamic HTML, and lacked many modern features that Internet Explorer (and other browsers) supported.
The following year, not only did Netscape announce that future versions of the Netscape Communicator software would be free but that its source code would be open source. The very same day, one of the initial emplyoyees of Netscape (and a long-time advocate for free software and the person credited for Netscape's decision to make the software's source code open source), Jamie Zawinski, registered Mozilla.org (Zawinski also came up with the name Mozilla), with the intent being that future versions of Netscape Communicator would be free software developed by Mozilla and Netscape would commercialize the software Mozilla developed using the Netscape name.
Unfortunately, the original plans - which would have had Mozilla and Netscape codeveloping Netscape Communicator 5 didn't work out as planned as it was meant to be developed using the original Netscape Navigator browser engine but they ultimately decided to scrap all this work and instead develop it using the new browser engine - which was originally announced as Raptor, then changed to NGLayout (Next Generation Layout - the change was due to trademark issues), and then Netscape rebranded it to Gecko (with Mozilla still calling it NGLayout as 'Gecko' was a Netscape trademark)
Seeing as the whole point of Mozilla was to develop free software that Netscape would then use as the basis for its own software, Mozilla began developing the Mozilla Application Suite using the Gecko layout. The Mozilla Application Suite (which was originally known as just 'Mozilla' and also the Mozilla Suite) featured Navigator (a web browser), Communicator (an email and newsgroup client), an HTML editor, and IRC client, and an electronic address book.
Mozilla was used as the basis for Netscape 6 (yes, they decided to go ahead and skip Netscape Communicator 5), which was released in November 2000 and based on Mozilla 0.6 (which itself was released about a month later in December) and later versions of Netscape 6, culminating in Netscape 6.2.3 - released May 2002 and based upon Mozilla 0.9.4.1 (which was a source-only release and not actually released as a product by Mozilla)
The same would apply to Netscape 7, which was first released in August 2002 and based upon Mozilla 1.0.1 (released September 2002) and continue through Netscape 7.2 (released August 2004 and based upon Mozilla 1.7, released in July 2004)
But some developers at Mozilla began to develop an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite, originally known as 'm/b' (mozilla/browser). These devleopers felt that the commercial requirements due to Netscape's sponsorship of the Mozilla project and feature creep were resulting in the Mozilla Suite suffering from software bloat.
This experimental branch was going to just be a web browser - it would not have the IRC client, the email client, the HTML editor, or any of the other features that they felt contributed to the feature creep and software bloat of the Mozilla Suite - and they intended for it to ultimately replace the Mozilla Suite.
In September 2002, the first public testing release of this web browser was released - version 0.1 - with the browser being known as 'Phoenix' (with the implications that this browser, much like the phoenix of mythology, had arisen from the ashes of its predecessor - in this case Netscape Navigator)
Later on, due to trademark disputes, the Phoenix name for the web browser was changed to Firebird starting with version 0.6 in May 2003. The Firebird name would also face issues as Firebird was the name of a database management system. In response, Mozilla began to refer to the project as 'Mozilla Firebird' and not solely 'Firebird' and that 'Mozilla Firebird' should be regarded as the project name and not the name that will be used when the project reached version 1.0.
Eventually, Mozilla (due to continuing pressure from the other Firebird's community) made the decision to rebrand the project once more from Mozilla Firebird to Mozilla Firefox, with them deciding to ensure that they would not have to change the name once more by registering 'Firefox' as a trademark. (And then it turned out that a software company in the UK held the European trademark for 'Firefox' but this time the UK company gave Mozilla a license to use the Firefox name in Europe so they didn't have to change the name again)
Firefox version 0.8 was released in February 2004 and eventually Firefox version 1.0 - the first version aimed at the general public - was released in November 2004.
So let's appreciate the irony that the browser that restarted the browser wars and started the the decline of Internet Explorer's market share was the spiritual successor of the browser Microsoft effectively killed in order to gain its near-total dominance of web browser usage.
And let's also not forget that, unlike with Microsoft's web browser dominance, where they were not savvy enough to actually leverage the fact that they had the dominant marketshare (hence why they just left IE6 to rot until Firefox came around and started to slowly eat into their marketshare), Google is savvy enough to to do this.
Look at Manifest V3 - which is replacing the current format for Chrome extensions (Manifest V2) in pre-stable versions of Chrome starting next month. Manifest V3 will have a completely arbitrary lmit on how many 'rules' content-filtering extensions such as adlblockers can use. Originally, Google was going to limit these extensions to just 5,000 'rules' but later, following outrage, upgraded it to a maximum of 30,000 rules.
30,000 rules sure sounds like a lot, right? Well I use uBlock Origin (which is, you know, the go-to adblocker) on Firefox and right now on Firefox, I have 136,487 filters in uBlock (and that's just the network filters - I have an additional 46,665 cosmetic filters - which hide content that the network filters cannot filter). And I have no custom filters, that's just the default filters uBlock has enabled. IDK if y'all know this but 183,152 filters is a lot damn more filters than the 30,000 limit Manifest V3 will limit adblockers to.
And to make matters worse, under Manifest V3, filter lists will only update (via ublock Origin Lite as the regular version of uBlock, which uses Manifest V2, will be phased out) when the extension itself is updated - you won't be able to add or customize any new filters. This ain't just for uBlock, this is for all content-filtering extensions.
And there's tons of other features that adblocking and other content-filtering extensions need to work to the fullest that Manifest V3 will not support and so therefore will be discontinued in Chrome once Manifest V3 becomes mandated next month.
'What's the big deal? Chrome is just one browser?'
Google Chrome (on desktop, since Chrome on mobile browsers does not support extensions) has a market share of 65.65% as of April. They are already the dominant browser, but let's look at the other major browsers and their market share:
- Microsoft Edge currently has 12.97%
- Safari has 8.44%
- Firefox has 6.73%
- Opera has 3.09%
But here's the thing, with the exceptions of Firefox (which uses the Gecko browser engine) and Safari (which uses WebKit), Microsoft Edge and Opera both use the Blink browser engine.
The Blink browser engine is the engine that is used by the Chromium project, which is the FOSS web browser that provides the vast majority of the codebase for Google Chrome as well as other Chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera. So really, while Chrome itself has 65.65% of the total market share of web browsers, if you include browsers based upon the Chromium project - the Blink browser engine has 81.71% market share.
Actually even that 81.71% isn't accurate either considering just how many browsers there are based on Chromium (admittedly many of these have negligible marketshare but even still).
Now, Blink (just like with Chromium) is FOSS, so developers can fork it and promise that they won't remove Manifest V2 support and therefore not kneecap adblockers and other content filtering extensions. But what if Google redesigns the core of Blink so that the API that Manifest V2-based extensions use for content filtering don't exist anymore? Then the developers of these forks will either have to rebuild these API entirely from scratch or start maintaining the network code themselves, with browsers that use these hypothetical forked engines becoming more and more divergent from Blink, which means the benefits of relying on Blink are now gone - unless the maintainers decide to fall in line with what Google wants.
So that is why there being one dominant browser engine is bad - because the developer(s) of the engine can then use their dominance to shape things how they want it to be. Hence why Google, who are effectively an ad company at this point, are severely kneecapping adblockers
Switch to Firefox btw.
Unless maybe it has a lot of features that are better than Apple? If so I'm interested in hearing about them. I might change my vote.
