The way things are going if it wasn't for Safari, we would already all be ChromeOS developers anyway.

I dunno, if it wasn't for Safari we'd all be Progressive Web App developers, but they're years behind on implementing common sense standards.

Depends on the target market, Apple devices aren't that significant everywhere and most companies aren't multinationals.

Safari, the great underdog, the equalizer.

Alas Firefox has been rather joining up on the axis of "we refuse to implement basic stuff" bandwagon.

Oh and meanwhile Microsoft is doing really good & helpful work to improve the web platform. In seemingly very very altruistic ways. (Which is how I feel Google is 98% of the time operating too!)

A lot of the time Firefox’s reticence to implement things is because they don’t think it’s the right thing to implement.

HTML Imports, for example, were something that everyone wanted, but Firefox developers looked carefully at it and pointed out some very serious problems that weren’t immediately obvious, where implementing HTML Imports would cause a lot of trouble down the track, limiting future extension possibilities. So they said, “let’s hold off on this, wait until we get ECMAScript modules and related loading stuff sorted out, then we can look into redesigning this”. They convinced the Chromium developers, and so they steadily removed it before it could grow too many roots to remove.

This is quite different from Safari’s implementation lethargy, which is typically just opaque.

> at least two implementers must be interested

Are Chromium-based implementations considered independent implementations if they were developed independently? Like, if both Microsoft and Google work on it for Chromium in secret...

no, because that would have meant that IE6 would have been able to "standardize" anything due to the number of "browsers" that were ie wrappers. Alternatively you could look at the numerous browsers on osx and iOS that are essentially wrappers for a basic [NS|WK]WebView - that would allow any of those to count as an alternate implementation.

So if Mozilla decides maintaining gecko isn't worth it, and switches to blink too, then it's basically just Safari and Chrome, and both would have to agree on standardization?

It’s kind of already the case.

Functionally mobile safari is the only thing stopping google having complete control of the web platform, just as MS did in the days of IE4-6.

There are a bunch of standards that google has proposed that are horrific for user privacy, and I would fully expect all google properties to become dependent on them if they didn’t have to care about mobile safari.

I think it's worth distinguishing between "shell" browsers that simply wrap an encapsulated rendering engine (such as those IE6/MSHTML-based browsers from decades ago) and other browsers like Chromium/Edge/Opera which have a different level of integration with the rendering engine - because those browsers are able to tweak and extend - or disable - the engine's features on a granular scale.

It's better to compare Chrome/Edge/Opera as "distributions and customizations" of Chromium/Blink instead of mere as wrappers - the same way that Linux distributions aren't reduced to just "GNU/Linux kernel wrappers".

No, from the point of view of the engine there is no meaningful difference between the engines.

Maybe they change some of the defaults, but none of those various wrappers are shipping engines that are different.

That’s not how open-source collaboration works. If it’s a web platform feature (like in this case), development happens in the open. Everything else would be a scandal.