A "little indie developer" hasn't been able to write a web browser in several decades. An implementation of 2005-era CSS and JS would be a complex task surely requiring a fairly sizable team to implement.
The fact is, all three major browser implementations are open-source and that has allowed any company to come in and release or embed their own browser with minimal effort. Chrome/Blink is dominant but that is not due to technical barriers that make it difficult for other companies to ship their own browsers. In fact it is now easier than ever to do so.
> A "little indie developer" hasn't been able to write a web browser in several decades.
IMO that's a major problem.
> The fact is, all three major browser implementations are open-source and that has allowed any company to come in and release or embed their own browser with minimal effort.
And they're all beholden to Google's decisions, for example to wreck the web browser extension API. Of course you can fork the code, but forks become increasingly difficult to maintain as they diverge significantly from the original code. Google can make things extremely difficult for forks.
The fact is, all three major browser implementations are open-source and that has allowed any company to come in and release or embed their own browser with minimal effort. Chrome/Blink is dominant but that is not due to technical barriers that make it difficult for other companies to ship their own browsers. In fact it is now easier than ever to do so.