I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.
> WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.
If Firefox needs "help" from a big boy like Microsoft, it is probably the worse starting point. If WebKit is a good starting point, why is Blink worse? Chromium is more than Blink, and means that the moment Microsoft started with Chromium, they were already close to done. Whereas with WebKit, they would still have to build and test a shell.
It doesn't suck.
Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?
Alternatively, has MS has given up? Perhaps they are content to rebrand Chrome and collect the bing.com seignorage from new Windows installs.
Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.
I mean, "influencing the web" or otherwise, they accept heaps and heaps of patches that aren't about their core business. The Chromium project is really healthy.
> Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.
They can fork, but they probably won't need to. Even if they wanted to maintain an entirely separate shell, it is basically trivial to link such a thing in to Chromium.