In the announcement, Ryan Dahl, who created Node.js and started Deno in 2018, also explains that development of the Deno runtime will stop after one year. That leaves the web with two major general-purpose runtimes, the OpenJS Foundation's Node.js and Anthropic's Bun, alongside Cloudflare's runtime, workerd, which is built primarily for its own Workers platform.
As someone who studies web dev tools, this concerns me. Microsoft released it in 2001; it won roughly nine in ten browser users, and then MS largely stopped working on it.
With no serious rival, there was no reason to improve and so, for about five years, developers were forced to write for one browser's quirks rather than for open standards, and "best viewed in Internet Explorer" badges were everywhere. When this situation became intolerable the market responded with alternatives.
Mozilla's Firefox grew out of the wreckage of Netscape, and Apple built Safari on an open-source engine called WebKit. Then Google's Chrome arrived in 2008.
