With how digital and web-based our lives are, and will continue to be, it should send a chill down your spine when you think about how EVERY web browser out there is developed by a mega corporation, and same megacorps decide on the direction for the entire platform.
Firefox is on life support, by same megacorps. There are some smaller projects, but it's hard to keep them sustainable. Especially when they are built from scratch, like Ladybird.
Never heard of ladybird, maybe rather than developing a host of alternative browsers, the developers should get together and just build one. I know there is waterfox, brave and several others, I can't keep up and no one has ever heard of most of them.
So perhaps we need to raise awareness of these projects more.
But yeah, I agree with your point there about convergence.
@zleap I disagree that convergence is the solution. It's stagnation and lack of meaningful innovation. It's like every game studio killing its own capable engines in favor of Unreal. Helps only Unreal, as new, alternative ideas are smothered of talent.
Ladybird is a pretty interesting project, btw. Its progress is open and you can watch how much does it take to make a complete browser engine from scratch these days. No legacy outside of spec, but also no old foundation to stand on.