A quarter century of Mozilla

Even at the browser "engine" level, there are basically only three:

1. Blink ( everything Chrome derived -- almost everything )

2. Gecko ( Firefox )

3. WebKit ( basically just Safari at this point )

Opera stopped making Presto and went for Blink. Microsoft adopted Blink and stopped making Trident and even EdgeHTML.

Blink is actually a fork of WebKit which itself started as a fork of KHTML which was the KDE web browser engine ( for Konqueror ) browser. Ironically, Konqueror is really just an old version of Blink these days. Google used to use WebKit until they forked it to Blink in 2013 or so. People site things like GNOME Web ( Epiphany ) as independent browser projects but it is based on WebKit ( like Midori ) as is WebPositive ( Haiku ).

Gecko is the modern day descendent of the Netscape Navigator web engine which started life as NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical browser ). So, Firefox is sort of the "original" web browser, really the only alternative implementation out there, and currently the best hope for the open web. Pretty sad given the market share that it has ( almost none ) and what it used to have ( more than half ).

What else is there? Even the likes of Dillo have not produced a release in close to a decade ( close enough to dead for me ).

It is a bit of a wild card but I personally have some hope that these guys will eventually succeed and provide us a true Open Source and non-corporate alternative:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

Ladybird is a web browser based on LibWeb and LibJS which were created for the SerenityOS project. They have a long, long way to go but they have a real dedication to writing everything themselves from scratch and building all their own expertise in-house. The community they are building around LibWeb and SerenityOS just might get there someday. The founder of the SerenityOS project used to work on WebKit ( Safari ) at Apple and so he certainly knows what he is getting himself into by making a "browser from scratch" part of his OS project. The number two man in Serenity leads the LibWeb and LibJS effort while Ladybird ( the cross-platform expression of their web engine ) is a personal project of the SerenityOS founder. It has all the attributes of a project that will eventually succeed though, again, they certainly have a long, long way to go. In the meantime, the videos they release detailing their progress ( including live coding sessions to add specific features ) are very educational and entertaining.