Michael Kay writes angrily after the W3C TPAC meeting:

What we saw yesterday is that control is now in the hands of a cabal of four or five browser vendors who between them are going to decide the experience that billions of people will get from the web. They are the style police, they decide what's cool: they decide what kind of typographical effects we can see, what kind of music we can listen to, what kind of programming language we can write in.

Although I agree with Michael's sentiment that web standards are dominated by a few players, it's worth remembering that two of those browsers are open source and available for forking. Also, one of those browsers itself only exists because an individual became so frustrated with the sluggishness of his favoured browser that he forked the code and created a faster alternative.

We have the right to fork these browsers and if we care enough about being led by a cabal then we should take up that right and build the browsers we want.