What is stopping someone; say the FSF or some other group championing libre software from coming up with their own web engine completely different from the incumbent engines?
Seems you’re not aware of stuff like Servo, which some said was supposed to be the replacement of Gecko, and it’s being written in Rust. But Mozilla ditched it and gave it to the Linux Foundation where its development is reeeaaally sloooooooow.
Afaik The Linux Foundation gives next-to-nothing, if not nothing, to its development. But despite of all of that it seems it has increased its pace (compared to the time it was just given to TLF) and has got donations and stuff.
But a browser engine is an absurdly huge piece of software and it will be a miracle if projects like Rust (or Ladybird, which I just learned it’s targeting its first alpha for… 2026!) get backed by big corporations and their pace gets quicker.
Call me stupid or whatever (seeing the Reddit toxicity that has got into Lemmy I’d be surprised if this has no downvotes!) but I do think Servo has the potential to be a serious contender to the hegemony of Chrome/Chromium in the long haul. The Linux Foundation seems to have enough resources to propel its development and reach that goal, but they just choose not to nor seem to care at all. So yes, unless a miracle happens we normies can only choose between Chrome/Chromium, Firefox or something Webkit. Maybe even going absolutely radical and using Konqueror with its KHTML engine, if you can.
I mean, that’s great, no? You don’t have to use an account and on top of that you don’t get that ai bs.