We have one internet, but it's made up of many privately owned networks. We have one electric grid, but electricity is generated by a number of companies. Your

We have one internet, but it's made up of many privately owned networks. We have one electric grid, but electricity is generated by a number of companies. Your examples show that having a single standard is good, not necessarily that a single product is good. A single browser is a bad idea for several reasons. Firstly, there would be an inclination toward being very conservative. If you make a breaking change, you break every site on the web. If you implement a new feature, you'd better be sure it's the right feature, or be stuck with it for a good many years to come. If you have a bug, fixing it could break sites that rely on that bug for rendering. Conversely, if you have several browsers in the market, each can afford to try out different things. Opera has done a lot with SVG; Safari has added a lot of custom CSS effects; Firefox is doing some interesting work with inline videos and faster Javascript. Secondly, different browsers fit different niches that aren't necessarily compatible. Do you make your uberbrowser fast and lean? Or plug in a lot of extensions? Add a mail client? A bittorrent client? Should you have a smart address bar? Something that integrates well with a particular OS? Something that can be run on a phone? Or a console? Or a PC? Or a netbook? Third, I'm not aware of any software product that has been written in a competition-free enviroment and has turned out to be any good. Fourth, the state of standard support in browsers generally isn't that bad. If your site works in Firefox, it probably works in Safari and Opera as well. I have very little problems when it comes to cross-browser support... except when it comes to IE. I don't presume to speak for everyone here, but 99% of all my browser headaches in the last few years can be laid squarely at the door of Microsoft. In other words, the root of most browser woes is due to IE, which web developers support because it has a majority market share, a market share maintained by Microsoft's rather anti-competitive practise of bundling it's browser with its OS. We didn't get into this mess by having too much competition; we got into it by having too little.