> If chrome tries to pull the same tricks today, people > will just build chromium without it and compete. I doubt that. As ootachi mentions, this isn't a pu

> If chrome tries to pull the same tricks today, people > will just build chromium without it and compete. I doubt that. As ootachi mentions, this isn't a purely technological race. Far from it. Chrome succeeds for multiple reasons, one of them of course being Chromium's engineering; however, without Google backing the browser heavily, it'd die. You make developing and maintaining a viable Chromium-fork sound like a trivial thing, but it isn't. (Plus, this fully ignores community inertia -- shit would have to hit the fan before people "just build chromium without it." The community took Dart and NaCl in stride!) So in the end, open source doesn't give you much immediate protection from IE5-ification. Look at how long it took to make Mozilla/Firefox competitive.