Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (opens in new tab)

I'm not as worried independent implementations become impossible as much as nobody wants to do them. Smaller backed projects like Ladybird and Flow get plenty far already for me to feel confident independent implementations are possible but, at the same time, Edge and Opera being moved to a Chromium base show it's very hard for independent implementations to align justification out of more than principle.

This would be less of a problem if there was more even control on the Chromium side. Right now the vast majority goes the way Google wants it to go, with minor control of what happens via e.g. Microsoft or other developers. If it were more shared it wouldn't be as big a concern that this one giant complicated machine grows ever more. I mean that's basically the reality of Linux in a lot of markets.

Yup. You can’t effectively fight an enemy by his rules.

Instead of writing new browsers - and getting them easily broken by Google again - we need to focus on stuff like providing an open YouTube mirror, or helping users jam AdSense with fictional data, or flooding YouTube with autogenerated videos… Lots of possibilities really.

Speaking as a person who hopes to contribute a non-trivial amount of code to a little known web browser sometime in the coming year...yes.

Worried? No, I think we hit that point a decade ago.

>while it was actually used internally by Microsoft itself

Do you have any evidence that this was used internally? Microsoft detractors and the like are the main people using this phrase.

I know another one: "Don't be evil!" wink-wink!

Yes but the audience is wholly different each time.