Of course it wouldn't. The number of people capable of managing and developing a full-blown browser is minuscule. Even Microsoft gave up and went with Chrome in the end.
Case in point: how many people picked up Servo? Hell, even Firefox?
But last I checked Firefox is still very much maintained by Mozilla.
Why doesn't community pick other browsers in a flash?
Yes, irrelevant products that no one uses eventually die. At present, Chromium is not one of those, and is installed on billions of devices and used every single day on mobile and on desktop. Entire businesses and derivative ecosystems have been built on top of Chromium (Edge, Brave, Node.js and all of its dependencies, Electron, etc.). If there's an economic incentive to keep an open source product going, it will keep going. Anyway, here's the repo if you're interested in contributing: https://github.com/chromium/chromium
We have plenty of examples of open source databases, operating systems, libraries and languages leaving the major companies they were created at and being scooped up by a foundation or consortium to maintain.
WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs.
But there's plenty of other examples in the open source world. Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base. There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned.
We have just as many left to die. We just don't know or don't talk about them anymore.
> WebOS is a great example. Created by Palm as a mobile OS before they sold it to HP, who open sourced it. Now the primary contributor is LG, who uses it in smart tvs.
Ah. So the mythical "community" that will scoop in and continue developing is a compani with a 60-billion yearly revenue. Got it.
> Chromium is far too important, and there's already thousands of eyeballs on that code base.
Eyeballs rarely, if ever, translate into understanding the codebase, or being able to do anything about it.
> There would be a Chromium Foundation established very quickly if Google abandoned.
Can I interest you in Apache Foundation where great amazing projects no longer supported by their original company go to slowly slide into oblivion?
Browser development is prohibitively expensive. Even Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, gave up on developing their browser. What makes you think that some magical community will just pick up the development of Chrome?
Yes it really is how it works. You see, Chromium is used by numerous teams and products already. Developers from these projects already contribute support and patches to Chromium on the regular. That's exactly how open source development works.
> Browser development is prohibitively expensive. Even Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, gave up on developing their browser. What makes you think that some magical community will just pick up the development of Chrome?
Microsoft (especially Ballmer era MS) sucks at a number of things. That internet explorer was a bloated piece of trash beyond all repair is hardly an indication that browser development is beyond the capabilities of an open source community. It wasn't that it was "too expensive" for Microsoft to maintain IE. It's just that IE could not possibly compete with Chromium, because they were saddled with too much technical debt from years of bad decisions.
Entire operating systems and databases are maintained by open source foundations. Have you ever heard of Linux? MS cannot compete with Linux at the server game. They waved the white flag on that battle a long time ago as well.
Besides, when you fork a project, you don't have to instantly rebuild everything from scratch. A foundation would kick things off by prioritizing bug patches, security fixes, etc. The RFC process for deciding new web features is already handled by a consortium: https://www.w3.org/
With Firefox there is even a viable alternative that isn't controlled by Google in any form. I'd agree on many projects that would be the case. For Chrome, no.
What Google is doing isn't much different from the MS from the 90's, except that they didn't stop improving their browser. At least yet.
Source: https://archive.is/tgIH9