If firefox dies, there'll be nothing to take its' place. Instead of ie6 we'll have chrome. And it is not feasible for a new fully featured browser to appear because of all the crap in the browser nowadays - development is going to be hell. So... yep, the internet is fucked.
Since the entire Servo team was laid off, I can image the c-suites planning a future move to Chromium. If Mozilla doesn't clean up its act, in a few years from now all browsers will be Chrome in different packaging (except Safari).
Safari isn't even all that different from Chrome in terms of its rendering engine; after all, Blink is just a further development of WebKit.
That said, there is a bright side of a browser engine monoculture: JavaScript will finally meet its very long-overdue demise. Google could implement Dart or an evolution of that language (they tried this around 2010, but Blink wasn't on 95% of [desktop] computers back then) and kill off JS overnight, since if every browser supports it by default, there's no reason not to use it over JS.
The massive downside, of course, is that Google also has the ability to design its browser so that extensions that perform adblocking can't run, and that'll be everywhere too- though I suspect that the number of people who would pay the price of a VPN connection a month for a modern browser with guaranteed ad-blocking support is quite large provided there's no other choice.
I agree, but I’m slightly more hopeful that someone could still take KHTML (again) and take it into the mainstream (again). At the end of the day, there isn’t that much extra functionality in browsers these days, most features are in the core engines (html and js). If anything, browsers have actually lost functionality (with fewer skinning and extensibility options, less emphasis on integrated services like bittorrent or ftp, no desktop integration, etc).
So yeah, we wouldn’t get a new browser engine, but I think a new “fully featured” browser imho is possible. Vivaldi for example, while built on Chromium, is substantially different in terms of features.
The browser is pretty entrenched in the way we access and consume content online but it's also a dated paradigm that is ripe for disruption. It's impossible to predict when this will happen or what form it will take but the longer the situation goes on, the more the browser becomes an innovation bottleneck ready to be broken.
These are very sad news. The browser market is getting more and more dominated by Chrome. The good old days of Opera & Firefox are gone.
I have been using Vivaldi Browser for the past four years. It's the most feature-rich browser I found and the team behind it is trustworthy. Their privacy policy specifically says they do not track me or collect information on my navigation history.
But although I've not used Firefox in years, I still don't want to see it die.
