Whilst this basically declares the Browser wars over and crystalizes Chromium as the Web's browser engine it's reassuring it's in the hands of the company with

Whilst this basically declares the Browser wars over and crystalizes Chromium as the Web's browser engine it's reassuring it's in the hands of the company with infinite resources, talent and a vested interest in seeing the web platform succeed with Google benefiting when more people spend more time on the Web (essentially the business case in starting Chrome to push the web forward, quicker). The only rendering engine that stands a chance at competing against Chrome is Safari/WebKit (thanks to iOS) and Apple would rather see native iOS Apps succeed to re-enforce their walled garden they have complete control over. So whilst it's a dark day for browser engine diversity, I don't see it as a blow against the Web overall (i.e. as a popular platform to develop for) as Google/Chrome is the driving force behind making Chromium more powerful to close the experience vs native Apps with initiatives like PWAs of which a side-effect is we'll be able to use new APIs sooner and increase web developer velocity by having 1 less browser engine we need to test against. A lot of people see browser wars as a gauge for the health of the Web but I consider the biggest threat to the "open web" is native mobile Apps which needs to become more capable in order to be able to deliver the same integrated experiences. In that light I don't see the competition of more browser engines making the Web better. Chrome wasn't created in reaction to competition, it was created because there was none left with MS leaving IE6 (and the main interface into the Web) to wither and die. IMO competing browser engines are holding the Web back with not being able to use new APIs as they're available, needing to cater for the lowest common denominator and having to test and support against a matrix of different browser engines and versions. It would be a different story if I thought Google would pull back investment in Chrome after they achieve total dominance, but I don't see that, their current strategy is winning where they benefit in a faster, stronger more popular Web and have been lifting the state of the art browser development since Chrome/V8's inception. Of course we now have to worry about Google thwarting the direction of Chromium to their benefit to the detriment of their users, the best way to minimize that is to have multiple collaborators committing to the Chromium project like MS Announces suggests they're doing. IMO it would be in Firefox's best interest to also switch to and collaborate on Chromium as well. Their market share is fading into irrelevance and after Edge/Chromium I see less developers investing their time to test on FF. I believe their efforts would be best spent on innovating on the browser's UI and function as I don't see how maintaining an alternative browser engine is a competitive advantage, IMO it's one of the reasons for their decline in market share. They should still be able to achieve their objectives the same way Vivaldi and Brave are doing with their added privacy protections in their Blink forks.