Android is open source. Yet Amazon's fork is the only thriving one.

Open source isn't a magic solution to Google's kind of monopoly. It's a herculean task to match Google with its free + convenience + monopoly + open source + strong brand recognition offering.

Chrome is already past IE's level of dominance without our realising it - market share percentages just obscures reality.

Google's next card is obvious from their android play book.

They'll soon rip off vital parts of chromium - make em proprietary or google cloud dependent.

Short of using their services to render web pages, or run JavaScript server side, what could they possibly rip out and make dependent now? There’s always going to be vendor proprietary stuff (like the voice search binary blob), even Firefox has Pocket who h is still entirely closed source iirc.

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted either. I'd prefer multiple options as well, but you are fundamentally right that this is quite a bit different.

Each Chromium fork is bound to implement its own features to some extent or another. Granted, there is still some monocultrure elements at its core, but this is far from the sheer stagnation that came along with the overreliance on IE6.