Microsoft Edge and Chromium Open Source: Our Intent

I really think the alarm about Edge adopting Chromium is silly. Microsoft is more than capable of forking the project, so using it does not give Google more control over the web.

What exactly do people think is going to happen? If Google starts doing strange things thinking they can because "everyone uses Chromium", then downstream just won't adopt those changes, and then there will be two Chromiums. All the panic about a Google "monopoly" of the web is absurd. Google lost the ability to do anything like that the moment they open sourced the project.

Presumably Microsoft have only one motivation at all for even having a web browser, and that is to control the default search engine. This seems like a commercially sensible move.

The thing that surprises me the most about this statement is how strongly it emphasizes open source (which is mentioned 19 times) as motivation for the switch to Chromium.

“open source” is the new “developers”.

> For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

https://www.justice.gov/atr/file/705216/download