While I'm with you on the variety side, lest not forget that Chromium is at least open source, permitting other vendors to do a move like this instead of being left in the cold (and in this way probably committing back to the project). The flip side here is that building a fully featured browser engine from scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible task in 2018. Browsers went from graphic tools to browse the Internet to a full blown Operating System with sandboxed arbitrary code execution, intricate cross-origin rules, staged caching, full vector graphics animation systems and whatnot.
Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
> building a fully featured browser engine from
> scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80%
> of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible
> task in 2018.
Absolutely!
> I think we're already well off with two fully
> featured and completely open source browser engines.
Well, that's the problem. The death of Edge brings us one step closer to a browser monoculture.
Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.