You can’t build your own engine outside of the EU, but you can still build on top of the existing Safari engine. What you’re describing is technically possible.

However, why would a company build something just for a handful of people?

I guess if you are Epic games, and you do not want to be blocked or controlled by App Stores, or pay 30% paycut. maybe you would build and support independent (from google/apple monopoly) interenet stack.

or if you are EU/China and do not want google DNS and networkign layer owning entire EU/China

in all cases they would still want centralized control by each state/company.

how to align incentives of someone who can actually pull this off and still keep it decentralized is a big question.

so the only way to make this happen is independent SWEs build their own browser. AND significant portion of users will start use it exclusively AND it survives and crashes competition from OS controlled browsers (Chrome/Safari) AND OS does not block/remove them from OS controlled app stores (which they can and regularly do, just look at "Hey" or "Brave").

you got to go full own hardware stack. now only China can reallistically pull this off.

China has own hardward stack. (actually entirety of all hardware stacks. it is all build there). China has own playstores or higly regulated versions of Apple/Google play stores.

China has mini-apps ecosystem which is more resilient to App Store whims.

and pretty much China is only place that can reallistically negotiate and push back to Google/Apple.

nobody else can stand a chance.

so free web is only possible in China pretty much. and future of free web is there.

if it was up to corporate monopolies (MSFT, Google, Apple) they would shut down whole web and remove other browsers from OS they control, and be gatekeepers of entire internet unless govenrment threaten them break them up or block them.. oh wait.

exactly.