IE was too long in the tooth, Microsoft was behind by several trends at that point, mobile being one of them. Don’t think the situation with Safari and WebKit is comparable.
As a small correction that somewhat matters to this hypothetical, Microsoft had already moved away from Internet Explorer/Trident to Microsoft Edge/EdgeHTML. It was quite competitive and modern already.
So, they did not "move away from IE to catch up". They "dropped the Edge engine in favour of Blink (Chromium)". It feels very much like Microsoft just did not want to compete on the engine (run-to-stand-still) but rather just on the feature set. Who can blame them?
If you think about why Microsoft really switched, I think it is a fair question why Apple would not just do the same thing. I mean, as long as WebKit is the only engine allowed on iOS, it makes sense for them to control it. But as regulators force them to open that up, and perhaps put an end to the Google gravy-train, I think it is a fair question why Apple would spend that much money on a web engine when they do not have to.
You cannot fall behind the competition using Chromium as a base, because they are all using it too! It is the ultimate in safe corporate options.
While the Apple-Google rivalry seems to have waned compared to a decade ago, I just don’t see Apple completely capitulating their platform/browser engine like Microsoft did.
Not to mention even if Apple switched to Chromium, they’d just end up taking over that engine, even forking it later down the road:
> We can only imagine what would have happened if Chrome kept using WebKit. We probably ended up with a WebKit-monoculture. Trident is dead, and so is EdgeHTML. Presto is long gone. Only Gecko is left, and frankly speaking, I will be surprised to see it regain its former glory.
But Chrome did fork, and today, we can also see similar things happen in Chromium. I don’t expect somebody to fork Chromium, but it could happen.
We’ve seen Edge adding some privacy enhancements to Chromium pioneered by Safari. Edge shipped those, but Chrome did not. And as more browsers start using Chromium and large companies will work on improving Chromium, more of these disagreements will happen. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Just because a browser is based on Chromium, that does not mean it is identical to Chrome and that Google is in control. Even if the unthinkable happens and Apple is forced to adopt Chromium, that will only ensure that Google is not the only one having a say about Chromium and the future of the web.
And that is what is crucial here. The choice between rendering engines isn’t about code. It isn’t about the rendering engine itself and the features it supports or its bugs. Everything is about who controls the web.
There are plenty of scenarios which can be discussed in detail which have no possibility of coming to pass. Zombie apocalypse fiction, for instance.
I never had any beef against Ladybird. To bring this conversation to full circle, I merely clarified there are at least a few other promising new indie browsers that don’t use Chromium. In the event that Apple does abandon WebKit- which wouldn’t mean the termination of the project anyway!- I would simply use one of those alternative browsers.
Edit: while we are on the subject of wild hypotheticals, there’s also the DOJ suggesting Google split off Chrome into its own company for antitrust.
Safari is now the browser that is lagging the most behind. And it has not gotten better recently either.
Apple even got into "AI", so I would not put it beyond them to kill a browser team.
As per my reply to the sibling comment, I don’t think Apple is anywhere near to the capitulation that Microsoft was when it came to abandoning their browser engine.
