Can you provide more detail and info and on why having less browser engines is bad?
The beauty of the internet is its open nature and cross-platform ubiquity. No single corporation or developer controls it. If that were to happen it could threaten the future of the open internet. Having viable competition in the browser space is important to prevent this from happening.
The internet specifications are supposed to be open but at the end of the day web developers are typically going to be working against actual browser implementations rather than the official specs themselves. As a consequence of this the browser developers with the greatest market share end up with the most power in implementing web standards. Back in the day this was the concern with Internet Explorer and Microsoft's infamous
"Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" tactics. The threat was that if MS got their way the internet would no longer be the standard, Internet Explorer would be, and MS could effectively dictate the future of the internet. At its peak in the early 2000s
Internet Explorer had ~94% market share but thanks to the development of Firefox and Apple's Safari and pushback from web developers and internet advocates, MS control of the internet ultimately never came to pass and Internet Explorer's market share gradually eroded. It's debatable whether there's ever been any truly healthy level of competition between browsers but at least in the later 2000s and earlier 2010s there were more independent viable options: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and later Chrome.
However with the decline of Internet Explorer came the rise of Chrome. Utilizing some impressive technological advancements along with some very aggressive marketing Google was able to rapidly gain position in the browser space. This has resulted in Chrome starting to gain IE-like dominance. And the dominance of Chrome is already
leading to anti-competitive behaviours. Google has admitted they frequently no longer even bother testing on browsers other than Chrome and Safari,
they redesigned YouTube based on a non-standard spec only implemented in Chrome so it runs like crap on other browsers,
Hangouts for months didn't work in non-Chrome browsers as Google's WebRTC implementation didn't properly follow the spec, and there are many other examples. Google is even currently trying to create
a game streaming service that only runs in Chrome. If Chrome market share continues to rise expect this kind of behaviour to become more and more common.
The modern internet has become so complex that it's become extremely difficult to create a new browser engine from scratch. Doing so takes years of work and tons of resources which at this point limits it to companies and organizations with lots of experience and sufficiently deep pockets. Once a browser engine is abandoned it becomes very difficult to ever resume development in any meaningful capacity. Now that Microsoft has largely ceded control of Edge's engine to Google it will be extremely difficult for them to regain independence in the future. Sure they can fork the code but if the issue is that developers ignored them in favour of Google then they're just back to square one.
Overall the main issue to me is the longer term threat. What happens to the internet if Google effectively dictates its future? Do anti-tracking measures still exist? Does ad blocking? Does more invasive DRM become the standard? Do developers write cross-platform web content or do they develop exclusively for Chrome? Is any new internet competitor immediately snuffed out? Are new internet standards designed to benefit the user or are they made to benefit Google's bottom line? I feel like a lot is at stake here and this topic frequently isn't given the attention it deserves.