I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.

An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business afterwards are low.

So I think we can cross that off the list as well and conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.

I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.

I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.

Consider that KHTML, the grandfather of just about every modern engine that isn't Gecko, was a fairly small open source project. Ladybird is open source and surprisingly usable for its youth and single developer.

Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.

You're forgetting Dillo, lynx, elinks and NetSurf.

Dillo and elinks don't count due to not supporting modern HTML, but yes to lynx and NetSurf.

Safari may also be facing the same issues; even before this, the rules about browsers in iOS were (to my non-lawyer eyes) suspiciously similar in market impact to Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows 95, for which they got in trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

But Edge will not be the only alternative; Firefox does still exist, and the Chromium project has forked into several other browsers besides Edge.