> which is very likely how G wants them to be perceived

One of the authors of the book is Chris, who leads the Blink rendering team at G :)

> I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat!

The moat isn't caused by a lack of non-chrome browser engines, it's because so few people use a non-chrome browser engine. Firefox already exists - it's just that ~no-one uses it and for websites that don't work with it those users have learnt to just open up chrome.

I'd love for the moat to be broken, and contributing to a browser engine like ladybird would be fun - but it doesn't contribute to breaking the moat. I'd love to know what would.

I'm one of the book's two authors (the other is the head of Blink Rendering!) and I've talked to a number of people on the Chrome team. None of them have struck me as trying to keep browsers mysterious! On the contrary, folks who work on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Ladybird all seem incredibly excited to talk browsers and discuss how they work. The world of browser development is surprisingly small, the engineers often move between companies, and I think it'd be tough to keep a "conspiracy" going.

But I do think there's a real lack of teaching material (why I wrote the book) and even "common vocabulary" to discuss browser internals, especially for the core phases like layout and raster, which is something Chris and I are hoping to create with the book.