It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.
I think the issue is that Google still has full control over the source. Maybe we just need to pull an io.js on chromium, though Microsoft would need to be on board.
I wish someone from Mozilla or MS would comment on this, to be honest. Were they even considered?
Historically, I've heard from various sources that Mozilla may not work at the same pace as some of the large corporations do in upstreaming patches and releases to the code base. This has (according to what I have heard, which may simply rest on rumor/speculation/heresey, mind you) kept a lot of large entities from getting on board.
I've also heard that in building Quantum this is less of an issue, but their code base is a mess, and chromium's is incredibly well documented and clean by comparison.
Anecdotally, I would be inclined to agree with my second statement up front, after just browsing the two, but please compare for yourself
microsoft switched to chromium because they want better control/integration with electron apps and the windows store. firefox wasn't on the table for them.
I really don't think this is it, if I'm being completely frank, because they already have an enormous amount of up front work done with making Windows PWA friend:
I also am willing to surmise that they are going to put in alot of work re-working all their APIs that are exposed as Edge based interfaces into whatever engine they and up with here (namely chromium), so I don't think it would have been beyond them to put in the work to do something like they did with node and chakra core:
This is kind of weird, because if there is anything Microsoft doesn't like, they can patch it and make it work differently. Just like Apple did with KHTML and Google did with Webkit.
I don't really get why people judge source code by politics rather than "stealing" (forking) from the best.
Writing and maintaining a modern webbrowser isn't cheap or easy; exactly why MS switched to Chromium as an engine.
Google is the main power behind all Chromium development and there have already been plenty of examples of the devs going "our way or the highway" with noone forking the browser engine. Upcoming is the new change to block adblockers from working properly in chrome. I see nobody willing to fork chromium over that.
Microsoft is largely in the PaaS business. Amazon is, too. It helps these companies to grow usage of outsourced hosting for third-party applications, much of which are web-based applications. They're often web-based not just at the user interface level but at the API and data handling levels. Web standards are actually good for business when you're charging all comers for processor hours at your data center.
More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of resources and leads to a better output.