> but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.

Sure. To use, participate in, and build upon this "open standard", you (or your team) just have to keep up with some of the most well-paid (presumably for a reason) programmers in the world, and then hope they see Chromium as an open standard worthy of pull requests as well.

Technology monopolies are bad since one critical vulnerability means everybody is impacted. Having a standard that people conform to is fine, but the monopoly on an implementation is bad.

I think the concern here is that, as a practical matter, vendors wouldn't be free to make arbitrary changes within their own forks; some parts of the system would have to remain interoperable. And technical decisions regarding what those parts should do and how they should work would still have to be made somehow, and it's not clear that "open source project" type governance would be better than the W3C process that we have today, especially when it comes to interfacing with governments. Good blog post about this: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only

I somewhat agree with the rest but:

> In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

Does it? I haven't ever been negatively affected or even affected at all as far as I can tell, I happen not to use Apple products or interact with the Apple ecosystem much.

What would these effects be?

>Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.

That's a different interface, not just a separate implementation

And some nice added features. I use Edge over chrome for 2 reasons only:

- It has vertical tab support out of the box (is this even possible in chrome? I know Firefox can do it with extensions) - it has very flexible support for automatically sleeping and closing unused tabs. I sleep tabs after an hour except for a couple sites I’ve whitelisted.

Both of these are features other browsers either don’t have or require opening up a potential security whole to a 3rd party through extensions.

And Chrome is just Chromium with Google adware. I'd prefer people were using something else, but I would rather have them split between Google and Microsoft adware than all on Google's.

The problem is that even Microsoft with their infinite resources has to play catch up.

They have to devote developer hours to removing Google-advantaging features instead of adding their own custom goodies.

And even if said goodies take off, they're going to have a hard time getting them merged back to "root Blink" and into the rest of the browser ecosystem.

I know Microsoft has earned back a lot of goodwill especially from nerds like us due to some of the stuff they've done with VS Code, GitHub, and gaming, but I trust Google way more to not be a scumbag company. Of all the companies to hoard data, Google is in my view the most trustworthy and the most incentivized to be good stewards of said data.

> With Chrome, you can sync your history with your Google account, it pushes you to use Google services, sends analytics to Google etc.

Yeah that's why I like using it