The Shrinking Browser Landscape and What It Means for the Web
For front-end developers, the browser is the delivery vehicle for everything we build, so its health and variety directly affect our daily work. Recent shifts have reduced the field considerably. This month, for instance, Microsoft Edge began auto-updating users to its Chromium-based build — a symbolic moment in a longer trend of consolidation around fewer rendering engines.
This isn't a new concern. A few years ago, Rachel Nabors compared the situation to a biological ecosystem, arguing that diversity is essential for resilience:
If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.
And it's not likely to be replaced.
The loss of Microsoft's proprietary engines has prompted a more nuanced take, however. Brian Kardell points out that what remains may actually be healthier than before, precisely because the surviving engines are open source:
In important ways, we are a more diverse, efficient and healthier ecosystem with the three multi-os, open-source engines we have left (Blink, Gecko, and WebKit) than when we had had more and were dominated by projects that weren't that at all.
Stuart Langridge has pushed the conversation further, suggesting that engine count alone misses the point. The real metric, he argues, is who holds decision-making power over the web's direction:
What's really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?
With that in mind, the current state is arguably less dire than some feared when Microsoft exited the engine race. The remaining trio is cross-platform and open, which keeps the door open for forking and innovation. Still, the margin for error is thin. Every additional loss — and Firefox's struggles make that a real possibility — would reduce both the number of engines and the variety of voices shaping web standards. A future with fewer options is one where the web's evolution depends on an increasingly narrow set of influences.
