Why do most browser companies opt for a Chromium/Blink base instead of a Firefox/Gecko one?
I mean, I like Firefox, but I'd love to see Vivaldi based on Firefox/Gecko. There's Floorp, which is similar in some ways but it's more like an Edge built on Firefox than Vivaldi.
This is a genuine question, asked by someone willing to learn.
Why does it give control to Google to use Chromium? It’s open source? Are all the decision makers Google employees? Wouldn’t one assume that forks would occur if a decision was taken as chromium level that was detrimental to, say, Microsoft’s Edge?
There are forks of chromium already like Vivaldi. You can still use them. Unfortunately using them is not a guarantee that Google can't use their usage numbers as leverage while politicing or advertising bad behaviour to other parties like social media.
Worse yet, maintaining a fork is a huge undertaking for a project in the size of chromium. This means in time the fork may struggle to keep up. Or upstream may introduce functions that depends on the bad behaviours and the fork be forced to either adopt both, or adopt none.