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For-profit customizations (via an extension) may want to fork to avoid competitive situations such as e.g. the multi-year struggle between uBlock Origin extension and Google:

- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-Google-Chrome's...

Not for-profit may fare better, tolerating and pivoting as corporate owners attempt to strategically vendor-lock-in new markets, presented to e.g. Google by the innovators of the extension.

Putting your brand name on the primary application users interact with on a computer is probably a few billion times more valuable than an extension in a thing under someone else's brand.

Yeah, but it's the same reason why Cursor forked VS-Code instead of being an extension

Controlling the full browser gives you a lot more freedom for any future additions.