I don’t really get this. Edge was only available to Windows users. This is only a loss to those users. On the other hand Chrome and Firefox are available on all major (for some subset of all) platforms. (Yes, I’m aware iPhone Firefox is hobbled bc of Apple policies).
If you want to push competition and choice, encourage everyone to use Firefox (or Safari if they only use macOS).
MS could have chosen to base their platform on Firefox, but they chose to go with Chromium.
We can lament the passing of Edge, but I wonder how people would have felt if instead of Edge they just had this announcement as the replacement for IE. Would we have cared? No one seems to miss IE.
> MS could have chosen to base their platform on Firefox...
There actually might have been an outcry over this. I'm not aware of any Firefox forks, for example, that aren't focused on privacy. MS would have been the first to fork FF and undo lots of the privacy features in the browser (engine).
With Chrome/Chromium, there's a reluctant acceptance of data-harvesting and (unethical) tracking.
I wonder if MS gave the above scenario some thought...
The article says the MSFT will be a significant contributor to Chromium. If anything, this means that Google will have _less_ control, as a second major internet player will be involved.
Who is the current Chromium project lead? What's the decision making process? How can MS employees participate? How can MS employees in the future go against the wishes of Google with regards to Chromium? Will we see revert wars?
There is no single project lead; there are OWNERS in various directories who make decisions collectively. I would be thrilled to see more non-Google OWNERS.
The decision-making process varies based on where in the codebase you are. Blink has a lot of details on this, because it's what impacts the web platform and where we've needed to work with the most external input; you can read the various process summaries on https://www.chromium.org/blink . Things are less well-specified as you move up the stack because there's been less need to specify them. Perhaps that will change going forward.
Employee participation is the same as for Opera, Intel, Samsung, Yandex, etc. today: review and commit code, be an OWNER, participate on the mailing lists. Chromium tries to be a true open-source project.
As for disagreements about direction, I think the existing web platform discussions among all vendors provide an example of how disparate companies can come together and try to agree directionally. People from Brave, Opera, etc. already participate in those forums despite basing their browsers on the Chromium core. Blink sets a high bar for shipping features that have interop risks, so it's already true that the goal is consensus rather than a fractured web. And I'm sure Microsoft would not be keen to use Chromium if they didn't feel like they would have significant directional input where desirable.
Most of the concerns expressed in these comments seem reasonable on their face but also sound like the people expressing them haven't actually contributed to Chromium/Blink. I encourage people to chip in changes and even express opinions on our mailing lists. We try to welcome such contributions :)
From my position sitting at the crossroads of Clang/LLVM and Chrome (the team I work on developed clang-cl), all the interactions I've seen with MSFT are positive.
If you want to push competition and choice, encourage everyone to use Firefox (or Safari if they only use macOS).