Well we're already effectively at monoculture. The only other rendering engine that has any meaningful market share is Apple's fork of Webkit.

I disagree that with the proposition that a single open source project with broad industry representation would hinder evolution.

Companies like Google and Microsoft don't compete on their ability to support the various web specs, but on quality of the web applications they can deliver to customers. Competition in this space will continue to drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering engine.

It would, however, limit the ability of a company like Apple to hobble their only-supported browser such that web apps can't compete with native ones.

> market share

If there is at least one alternative that is significant, then by definition it's not "effectively a monoculture".

In any case, market share is the least important factor here. As long as we have an intolerant minority (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262240) that does not want be subject to Chromium as the only open source project, we will be fine.

Mozilla is screwing up badly, and I switched to Brave mostly because I believe that they are building a stronger artillery to fight surveillance capitalism (as in, Mozilla gives you wishy-washy feel-good words, Brave gives you money), but this does not mean that Mozilla needs to go away. Quite the opposite: I still hope that we see a "Next acquires Apple for negative $400 million" story. If Firefox builds integration with Brave's network and also adopts BAT, I would go back to it in a heartbeat.

> I disagree that (...) would hinder evolution. Competition in this space will continue to drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering engine.

God, no! The worrying thing is not that the development of the web specs would stagnate. The problem is that the development would only happen in the direction that benefits them and that they would be completely unchecked.

> Evolution only happens when there is divergence and competition.

Not when we can a have a logic stable and well made standard. Like the metric system. I am pretty sure that I would have a problem with any alternative to the metric system. The more we are to use it the better it become.

Evolution can and thrive through cooperation and mutual aid. I would be fine with having one standard implementation of a browser engine if it was not rule by a greedy corporate like Google, Apple or Microsoft.

The problem there is that metric basically equates to math at the end of the day, I don't think those are directly comparable. It would be very strange (and new) to have one and only one implementation of an entire class of software, instead of a technical standard with multiple different implementations.